My grandmother was born in Shanghai, China, around the turn of the twentieth century. She died before I ever got to meet her, choking on a fishbone in the middle of a dinner party in Oahu.
Everyone’s jaws drop when I mention the countries that have hosted my fair-skinned, almond-eyed family: Mexico?! China?!
They stare at my porcelain skin and try to put it all together. But we Jews are a diasporas people. My relatives on both sides fled Czarist Russia hoping to get as close to the United States as they could. The lips of the U.S. borders opened and closed like a clamshell, and that’s how so many of my relatives ended up being born in Mexico City and Shanghai. My Dad’s a busy man, and smart, and he hasn’t had much time to piece our story together. And maybe story-telling is my department anyway.
Now there’s a feeling lodged in my throat, a disconnect to choke on as I try to consume my own family’s history that shrinks everyday as the generations age.
My dad’s mother, Becky, who would pass away only days before his youngest sister’s wedding, was born in Shanghai, the child of the first wave of refugees to Shanghai at the turn of the century. Thirty years later, more Jews would come from Europe fleeing the Nazis.
But at the turn of the century, when my great-grandparents came, Shanghai was a cross between James Bond’s Monte Carlo and San Francisco’s Barbary Coast: a colonially partitioned city belonging to everyone and no one, fluid borders requiring no papers, and wealthy Jewish families from Baghdad charting high society. This is what my grandmother was born into, and this is what I was hoping to glimpse in Shanghai, apart from the awesome, superfast MagLev train.
I knew that I could never trace my own family roots by myself through Shanghai’s deafening urban heart, so a little Internet searching yielded a juicy result—a man named Dvir Bar-Gal. I booked myself, if you can believe that this really exists, on a Jewish Tour of Shanghai. The tour, as luck would have it, began in the lobby of my hotel, the Peace Hotel, which sits grandly on the Bund and Nanjing Road.
There were a few others on the tour, from England and Australia, also seeking Hebraic signs of history amid the spectacular chaos of kanji. Dvir himself, when not leading tours of Jewish Shanghai, is also trying to piece together history, literally. His Shanghai Jewish Memorial project keeps a keen eye on international antique dealers, hoping to unearth the Jewish tombstones (or fragments thereof) lost during the Culture Revolution when all four of Shanghai’s Jewish cemeteries were demolished, the graves and headstones lost.
