Available:*
Library | Call Number | Material Type | Home Location | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Central Library | DS135.C5 T63 1999 | Adult Non-Fiction | Central Closed Stacks | Searching... |
On Order
Summary
Summary
In the wake of Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938, Sigmund Tobias and his parents left their home in Berlin and made plans to flee a Germany that was becoming increasingly dangerous for them. Like many European Jews, they faced the impossibility of obtaining visas to enter any other country in Europe or almost anywhere else in the world.
Reviews 1
Booklist Review
The history in this memoir is astonishing. Driven from Germany by the Nazis, Tobias was six years old in 1938 when he and his family found refuge with 17,000 other European Jews in a part of Shanghai under Japanese occupation. His quiet personal recollection describes how they got there and what their daily life was like during the next nine years, until at the age of 15, he left for the U.S. Most bizarre is the account of being a religious yeshiva seminary student, no different from if he were living in a Polish shtetl. Without being cute, Tobias (now an eminent professor of educational pyschology) stays true to the refugee child's experience. The Chinese are just background color--ill-treated by the Japanese but in a world apart. There are no heroics. What's important is Tobias' bar mitzvah. Daily prayers and rituals and scholarly discussion order his life--until the news of the Holocaust reaches Shanghai, and he has a crisis of faith. An affecting memoir of rescue and survival. --Hazel Rochman