MY OLD SHANGHAI HOME

In his second article on revisiting China after an absence of 40 years, The Post''s Sasson Jacoby tells how his family wound up there from Baghdad at the beginning of this century, and of his search for roots in Shanghai, with other Jews who also had grown up on the banks of the Whangpoo River.

IT WAS A STRANGE set of circumstances that culminated in my birth and those of five brothers and sisters in a place so far from the land of our forefathers and in an environment so different and alien to them. The end result was that we were all grateful that our parents'' peregrinations wound up in Shanghai, and our upbringing in its cosmopolitan atmosphere left its beneficial and indelible mark on us.

For it was here that, in addition to leading a way of life among both the native Chinese and the myriad other foreign peoples there, we were able to preserve our Jewishness in the full sense of the word, in a flourishing atmosphere free of the calamities that beset so many Jews elsewhere.

My father, who ended his career in Shanghai as rabbi of the Ohel Rachel synagogue after the end of World War II when he departed for California, was a young man who had undergone rabbinical training and had just married when he hastily left Baghdad with some young relatives just a jump ahead of the Ottoman army''s press gangs. The Turks at the time were mobilizing young men from various parts of their empire in preparation for one of their interminable wars in the Balkans - and Jews knew that few, if any, ever returned from them.

Making their way to Basra, they boarded a British ship for Karachi, then in British India, and began a year of wandering from one Jewish community to another in India, Burma, Singapore and even in Batavia, today Jakarta in Indonesia. Eventually they reached Hongkong; and it was here that their first son was born a couple of months before the October l911 Chinese Republican Revolution that overthrew the imperial Ching dynasty.

NOT LONG AFTER, they moved to Shanghai, which had then become the pacemaker of Jewish life in China. My father had no great love for the English but admired their skill in administration, and their sense of order and discipline. So he determined that all his children should receive an education in English schools and not at the Jewish School which he regarded as inferior. He would tell us: "You can get all the Jewish education you need at home."

Needless to say, this aroused much antagonism among the community leaders; but my father was adamant. Tuition fees were far from cheap, but he met this challenge even at the cost of living in inferior housing in mixed foreign-Chinese quarters. This had the advantage - as I realized later - of having closer contact with our Chinese neighbours, most of whom were middle-class, and with whom we had excellent relations. Another advantage was that we were forced to have non-English-speaking servants as they cost cheaper, with the result that all of us learned to speak the Shanghai dialect fairly fluently, especially my father.

In addition, trying to make sure we would not indulge in the culinary delights of non-kosher Chinese cuisine outside the home, he had our Cantonese cook prepare "good" Chinese food every now and again. To this day, I cannot remember when and how I learned to use chopsticks, an art which I have passed on - satisfactorily enough - to my sabra wife and son.

LAST MONTH''S RETURN to Shanghai with the "Passover Reunion Group" of former residents, naturally enough, displayed the city to us with a changed face. Several of our group recognized the layout of the streets even though the facades of houses and shop fronts had changed. By a happy chance, we obtained replicas of an old map of Shanghai plus a list of streets with their new names. It proved to be of help to some of us in tracing landmarks and the homes of several members of our group.

There was no difficulty in identifying the city''s main thoroughfare, Nanking Road, which I found swamped with even larger crowds than before, when I quit the group to walk some five kilometres down to the Whangpoo River. I was told later that a million people daily go through that stretch of the road, where the huge department stores and other shops still operate as they did four decades ago. Swarms of people were shopping, and barricades on each side of the street gave extra sidewalk space for bicycles and pedestrians to flow through easier.

I easily found two of my family''s former homes in the International Settlement, as well as the site of the Ohel Rachel synagogue and the Jewish School, both built by the Baghdadi Jewish community. Talking to various Jewish visitors we met later, we were told that their Shanghai guides had informed them that the synagogue no longer existed. True, but the synagogue, a magnificent structure built in 1921, and the school, built in 1929, now serve as offices of the Shanghai education bureau.

I led a group to the site and the Chinese officials there were extremely helpful and allowed us in. The synagogue itself is now an auditorium. The fine oakwood seats were gone; so were the bama and the ironwork railing of the marble-floored platform in front of the aron kodesh. The peeling walls showed that they had never been painted; unchanged were the lighting appliances as well as the electric fans which hung low from the high ceiling; the mosaic floor of the foyer was intact, though muddy because of the drizzle outside.

Curious to see what happened to the aron kodesh, which I remembered had a Hebrew inscription above it, we found it was covered by a large movie screen attached with rope netting above and below. It was here the Chinese became even more helpful, bringing in an electric cord and lamps, and helped some of us crawl underneath. Excited shouts in Hebrew then were heard, and someone started reading the Hebrew inscription: Da'' lifnei mi ata omed, lifne melech malchei hamelachim hakadosh baruch hu ("Know before whom you stand, before the King of Kings, the Holy Name blessed be He").

Apparently, when the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution swept through the country wiping out all foreign vestiges of the "wicked" old days, this had escaped their attention because of the movie screen. The bemused Chinese there smiled at each other at our excitement, unable to understand what it was all about despite all our explanations.

THE FIRST OF my two former homes was near the junction of Seymour Road (now Shansi, a name change which was obligatory because Seymour happened to be the British admiral who wiped out the Chinese navy in the Opium War) and the oddly-named Bubbling Well Road. It was in a narrow lane then named Tsongchow Road, the first house there - once an imposing three-storey structure of dark red brick but now reduced to a dirt-grimed indeterminate colour. We lived there from 1932 to 1935 and the present tenants came there in 1938. One of the women spoke to me in the rundown hallway which once had a gleaming parquet floor with a fine stairway with a beautifully-carved bannister, now chipped and pitted. She spoke some English which she said she remembered from "the old days" - another sign of the changed times in China.

The last home where we lived was just 30 metres across Sinza Road (name unchanged) from the corner of the Jewish School-synagogue complex. We had moved there when it was newly built in 1937, partly because it was modern with central heating and up-to-date bathrooms, and because it was so close to the synagogue.

The only change in the original three-storey house was the addition of a fourth floor. We asked to enter and were received by a white-bearded man who said he was the head of the house and that one family lived there. This was odd, seeing that my old home contained eight rooms, plus three bathrooms, a pantry and kitchen - but apparently several branches of one extended family lived there.

Going up the stairs to my old room, the old man became excited when told I had lived there. Hesitant to talk at first, he was reassured when our Chinese escort told him he could speak freely. (I understood that, as my Shanghai dialect began slowly to return to me). He related that he lived there from 1948 after the foreign residents had sold the home to an agent.

It was obvious he had seen better days, for he said he had been a banker and produced an album showing me pictures of him dressed in a business suit, standing in front of what appeared to be an office. Before parting, he asked for my visiting card and as an added precaution (a carryover from Maoist days, apparently) asked our Chinese escort to countersign it.

A REUNION of a different sort took place a few minutes later. Our small group there included Tat-Aluf (res.) Yehuda Halevy, former president of Israel Bonds, who was born in Shanghai but left it at the age of 12 for Israel. He was astonished earlier when I informed him that I remembered when he was born 52 years ago, that my father had circumcised him, and that his family had lived one street away in Wuting Road. He remembered the name but couldn''t pinpoint his former home.

We now began a complicated piece of detective work. Walking a block to Wuting Road, we began questioning through our obliging Chinese escort and my contribution of what I remembered of the Shanghai dialect, Chinese passers-by at the street corner. One old man who said he lived there for 50 years didn''t remember any foreign families living there. We persisted and in typical Chinese fashion we soon became surrounded by an audience of fascinated Chinese, all eager to find out what was going on.

Finally, a woman in her forties suddenly exclaimed that she had heard of a Jewish family who once lived there at "No. 10" and then led us, followed by a horde of curious passers-by all jostling for the best view of the proceedings, to a lane about 50 metres up the street. Our energetic woman guide stopped at a house and finally dragged out a toothless crone who said that a Jewish family headed by "Oosif" (Halevy''s late father was named Yosef) had lived there.

As more neighbours came out, the story was confirmed; and when Halevy announced that he was the youngest son, there was a general round of applause. Another old woman said she remembered his sisters, one named "Katie" who would knock on the door and cry out, "Mummy, open the door." She said this in English. One man then came forward, saying he was 53 years old, and pointing to Halevy said, "Maybe you don''t remember, but we used to play marbles here, and I always used to win."

We were led inside the house, now jammed with one family in each room, all bare-floored, crudely furnished but reasonably clean and all with the obligatory small TV set and radio. Halevy identified one corner of his room which had contained his bed and a small desk - he was surprised to see an identical layout there for the family''s teenager son.

Outside, the neighbours and the horde of kibitzers started clapping when told that Halevy left as a young boy but had now returned as a general.

ANOTHER PERSONAL experience in Shanghai was that of Russian-born Boris Katz, another member of our group. Katz is now a civil engineer employed by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He came to Shanghai in 1931 at the age of five. He said his parents were probably the last Jews to have left the Soviet Union, moving to Harbin in northern Manchuria which at the time had a large Jewish community.

ALSO TELLING his story was Curt Pollack, a representative of the German Jewish community which took refuge in China in the late 1930s. He was a young refugee from Frankfurt who found a safe haven from Nazi persecution in Shanghai. Now a businessman in Los Angeles, Pollack also publishes and edits the Hongkew Chronicle, a periodical with is instrumental in keeping up contacts among the European Jews who had escaped from Germany, Austria and Poland.

In effect, with the 27,000 European refugees, the 7,000 or so Russian Jews and about 1,000 Baghdadi Jews of various nationalities, there were at this period about 35,000 Jews living in Shanghai. A not inconsiderable number was held in internment camps by the Japanese during the war as "enemy nationals."

In this connection, my family represented a mixed bag. The children born in Shanghai were stateless and we, like others of our kind, were not restricted at all and were completely free. However, my parents were both Iraqi subjects possessing Iraqi passports. They were free to move around like us, but had to wear distinctive red armbands because the Japanese - with an unconscious sense of the bizarre, which was the cause of much hilarity among local people - termed them "friendly enemies."

With the war''s end came the swift disintegration of the Jewish community in China''s greatest city after the Communist takeover, with the last vestige disappearing by 1959 - ending more than a century of organized Jewish life there.

Jerusalem Post – May 19, 1989