From Publishers Weekly
This evocative memoir, steeped in sensory detail, recreates the ambience of the author's North China home rather than giving a straightforward account of her 18 years there. The child of Jewish refugees from the Russian Revolution, Maynard may have been born in China, but she never for a moment considered herself Chinese. Like other Europeans in the bustling trading city, she didn't learn the language and never spoke to the Chinese servants except to issue instructions. She spent her youth in one of the "concessions" carved out by the various European communities, completely cut off from the desperately poor Chinese part of the town. There the sheltered, dreamy child took piano lessons, wrote in her diary, shared her home with relatives and displaced Jews and participated in her parents' denial of unpleasantness. The Jewish populace endured the Japanese occupation, but ran from the oncoming Communists. The author's intimate and powerful voice offers an absorbing glimpse into the consciousness of a young girl as well as into one of the many insulated, self-sufficient Jewish communities that existed around the world.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
From Library Journal
Maynard's memories of her youth in Tientsin, a port city on the North China Sea, unfold in a series of vignettes that reveal a little-known and seldom researched aspect of Jewish emigre culture: Jewish communities in Asia. Maynard, a writer, oral historian, and retired social worker, was born in Tientsin in 1929. As a child, she seldom set foot outside the area where her family lived among other Jewish refugees from Russia; she never learned Chinese and never knew her maid's name. While she describes her life, home, family, and friends with childlike clarity, she sheds little light on Japan's treatment of Jews during World War II in her brief chapters about that period. However, the drama of her family's journey to the United States after the war personalizes the postwar plight of displaced Jews. An affecting memoir, this is nevertheless a secondary purchase for academic and larger public libraries with Jewish studies collections.
Katharine L. Kan, Hawaii State Lib., Honolulu
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Katharine L. Kan, Hawaii State Lib., Honolulu
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
