Farewell, Shanghai By Angel Wagenstein Translated by Elizabeth Frank and Deliana Simeonova Handsel Books, New York 2007, $24.95, pp. 382

Shanghaied in Shanghai

Thanks to one of Hollywood’s best movies, nearly everyone knows of Casablanca, but perhaps Farewell, Shanghai, a sprawling, kaleidoscopic novel by the Bulgarian novelist and screenwriter, Angel Wagenstein will bring attention to Shanghai’s largely forgotten but fascinating history. Like Casablanca during World War II, Shanghai was “a nexus of economic, political, and military interests, diplomatic intrigues, and personal ambitions–a meeting place for the criminal world, international adventurers, spies, and profiteers, people uprooted and hunted, and those in search of strong sensations or easy money.” In the late 1930s, when Nazi anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria was reaching unbearable, dangerous heights, most countries closed their doors or imposed tight restrictions on immigration. But Shanghai, unlike any other destination, including the United States, was an open city that required no visa, no affidavit of guaranteed support, no health or police certificate, no work permit. There were no quotas. For many persecuted and desperate Jews, it was the port of last resort.

A teeming city at the mouth of the Yangtze River, Shanghai was home to millions of destitute Chinese. Occupied by the Japanese after 1937, the city also held foreign concessions or settlements: England, France, Germany and other European countries had, in the 19th century, staked colonial claims within the city limits and exercised extraterritorial rights that were not subject to local law. More than goods passed through the docks of Shanghai, where almost anything or anyone could be bought or sold.

By mid-1939, almost 20,000 middle-class German and Austrian Jews who had been stripped of almost all their possessions by the Nazis had found a haven in Shanghai. There they joined long-established and wealthy Iraqi Jews, poor Russian refugees who had fled the 1905 pogroms and White Russian nobility driven out by the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. (Not surprisingly, there was little group solidarity among these exiles, who viewed each other with suspicion.) As seen in the 2005 Merchant-Ivory film, The White Countess, set in the 1930s, Shanghai was famous for its beautiful, aristocratic Russian women, once wealthy and trained in classical ballet, who now worked as taxi dancers or prostitutes.

Farewell, Shanghai captures this political and cultural maelstrom during World War II. Vividly written, paced like a thriller and rich with cinematic detail, the reader can practically smell the fetid, swampy air of the city. Wagenstein’s smoothly translated and fluid narrative has a sardonic edge, which helps temper the omniscient tone he uses to foreshadow future events. Some characters are fictional and some are composites of real people; they all mingle with historical figures and take part in actual events. Wagenstein sorts some of this out in a useful afterword; he has benefited from recently opened Soviet files on the Far East during the war.

The novel opens in Europe in November 1938 with an ingenious musical flourish, a performance of Haydn’s “Farewell” Symphony No. 45, in which each performer traditionally leaves the stage as his part in the ensemble ends. Theodore Weissberg, luftmensch and virtuoso violinist, and Simon Zinner, flutist, are plucked from the wings of the stage of the Dresden Philharmonic on Kristallnacht by the Gestapo and sent to Dachau. There they are befriended and protected by Shlomo Finkelstein, street hustler and petty thief. Weissberg is married to a non-Jew, Elisabeth Müller-Weissberg, a world-famous mezzo-soprano who trades her jewels and her body to liberate Theodore from the concentration camp and buy passage to Shanghai. Using this material, Wagenstein has created a broad panorama of people and events.

Hilde Braun, nee Rachel Braunfeld, is a minor film actress in Berlin whose blond hair and blue eyes catch the attention of Leni Riefenstahl, film director to the Führer. Hilde is sent to Paris for a magazine photo shoot—for Der Stürmer (Julius Streicher’s weekly Nazi newspaper), no less. There she has an affair with a mysterious Czech who quickly disappears (just for a while; every character eventually turns up in Shanghai). A Japanese doctor in Paris becomes infatuated with Hilde and gives her an expensive pearl necklace, which she sells for two first class tickets for herself and a Hungarian pianist on a boat to Shanghai. On board, Hilde meets Baroness von Dammbach, wife of the German representative in Shanghai, who, unaware she is a Jew, offers her a job as the Baron’s secretary in the German Embassy.

The crowded, colorful canvas of Farewell, Shanghai also includes a group of Carmelite nuns who greet the immigrants at the dock with a rendition of “The Blue Danube Waltz”; a rabbi who holds services in a burned-out Buddhist pagoda and sells rice rolls in the market, where the ever resourceful Shlomo Finkelstein sells stolen live dogs in the meat market; rich Baghdadi Jews who consort with Nazis and employ the Weissbergs as tutor and gardener. Deftly inserted among these characters are real people: Captain Saneioshi, head of the Japanese police in Shanghai, who, under pressure from the Germans, creates a ghetto for the Jews in a section of Shanghai, and Mr. Go, the notorious German-speaking Japanese “King of the Jews,” the commissioner in charge of the ghetto.

Thrown into this spicy mix is a nest of spies for the Soviet Union, including the mysterious “Czech,” now posing as a Swiss journalist, who have connections with a spy network in Tokyo, the Ramsay Group, headed by the famous Richard Sorge. (The Ramsay Group warned Stalin of Hitler’s imminent attack on Moscow, but Stalin dismissed the information.) For extra color Wagenstein throws in some espionage paraphernalia, sadistic and wily Gestapo agents, three melodramatic suicides and, finally, devastating bombing raids on Shanghai by the Americans.

Somehow, despite the convoluted plot, it all works. There is enough action and intrigue in Farewell, Shanghai for half a dozen movies. In living color. The riveting story of the Jews in Shanghai in the 1930s and ’40s might seem hardly credible, but as Wagenstein archly says, “Is there anything more implausible than History?”

Lore Dickstein is a writer and critic based in New York City.