GOODBYE SHANGHAI
A Memoir
by Sam Moshinsky
Mind Publishing, 219pp.
Reviewed: 17 July, 2010
It can be refreshing for a reader to step back from grand themes and to spend a few hours in the microcosm of an unpretentious personal memoir.
Sam Moshinsky is a member of a small community of Jews whose family histories over the 20th Century took them from pre-revolutionary Russia, to the Russian Far East, to China, and finally to Australia.
Sam was born in 1934 in Shanghai, and this memoir is his recollections to the point that his family settled in Melbourne in the early 1950s. Sam went on to a successful business and family life, and dedicates this memoir to numerous grandchildren. One of his half-brothers is Elijah Moshinsky, the theatre and opera director.
Sam’s perspective on Shanghai is both intimate and somewhat detached. The family was dominated by his grandparents. Sam’s parents divorced soon after his birth, for reasons never explained. Sam recalls only a few visits from his mother, overshadowed by hostile comments from his grandmother, before the mother fades altogether from his life. Sam shows no self-pity, and becomes strongly loyal to his stepmother Eva, mother of his two younger brothers.
The family’s social life was almost exclusively within the Jewish community of Shanghai, which included synagogue, an active and prosperous Jewish Club (later the Shanghai Conservatorium), school, and even a militantly Zionist youth association, the Betar, where Sam dressed in paramilitary uniform and practised martial arts for the prospective war to create an exclusively Jewish Israel.
The Ashkenazy Jews, mostly from Odessa and other parts of Russia, were initially at arms’ length from the Sephardic Jews, from India and the Middle East, who had followed the British into Shanghai many decades earlier. The Sephardis included some fabulously wealthy business dynasties, such as the Sassoons and Hartoons, whose buildings still feature in the Shanghai Bund waterfront.
Yet Sam, while deeply committed to his Jewish identity and family, seems to have been keen fit in wherever he found himself. His best friend for life was Alex Vinogradov, a childhood Shanghai neighbour whose family were of the traditionally anti-Semitic White Russian community. At the Marist Brothers St Francis Xavier’s College young Sam, the only Jew in the school, topped his final year in Catholic Catechism (to his parents’ bemusement).
The Moshinskys had an unusually easy time in Shanghai during the Second World War. Because they had never taken up Soviet citizenship they were officially stateless. Shanghai was one of the few places stateless persons were welcome. Neither the Allies nor the occupying Japanese identified them as enemy aliens. Their family business, the Shanghai Cardboard Box Factory, just kept on supplying their ice-cream containers to Chinese, Japanese or American customers as control of Shanghai alternated during and following the War.
Life continued without major interruption until the Communist takeover. In due course, communist officials visited the factory and politely imposed a retrospective “income tax” to cover all the years that the factory had operated, during which there had never been any income tax in Shanghai. The bill of course far exceeded the value of the business and various other property held by the family. They could not get exit visas until the entirety of the family property had been signed over to “the people” in payment of this fictional tax debt.
By Sam’s account, the family had fed and accommodated key staff and their families in a row of cottages behind the factory. On Communist takeover, their loyal foreman was installed as factory manager, since no foreigner was now permitted to be the boss of any Chinese person.
Sam does not mention himself, or any member of his family, having Chinese friends during their decades in Shanghai, although they would socialize with their staff (and families) on festival occasions. Young Sam could speak Shanghainese dialect, but his childhood nursemaid was also a Russian. Yet he often refers to the misery experienced by the local Chinese population, and remembers stepping over the frozen bodies of dead babies on the footpath on his way to school. He approves of the social welfare improvements achieved by the communists.
On his first trip back to Shanghai, in 1986, Sam was able to visit childhood haunts including the Cardboard Box Factory. He found it still operating after 40 years as a “people’s collective”, with exactly the same machinery they had left behind, and even his father’s managerial desk in exactly the same position.
It’s pretty clear that this book is primarily Sam’s gift to his large family. It is illustrated with many family snaps and some stock photos of Shanghai, and published by a family company with high production values. But this reviewer, an Australian WASP, found it a warm and intriguing peep into the background of one of Australia’s many communities, and a gentle child’s eye view of the endlessly fascinating Shanghai.
Richard Thwaites has followed developments in China since the 1960s.