Customer Reviews

SHANGHAI LEGACY

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Author Cuba takes a little-known chapter in Jewish history and writes a very worthy novel. The device is a diary; Maya finds the diary of her mysterious mother Hannah after Hannah dies. Now some of the mystery of Hannah's life unfolds for Maya, and she learns of her mother's struggles, bravery and difficulties while she examines her own life through new eyes. Hannah escaped Germany and went to Shanghai and ultimately ended up in America. The story of her flight and her struggles is the backdrop for the novel, and as the mystery of Hannah unfolds, Maya learns a lot about her own life and her own attitudes.

The diary is the most fascinating part of the book--the refugees in China mourn the loss of their comfortable life in German and they live in squalor in Japanese-occupied China. Shanghai is dirty and cold. Diseases are rampant, yet the Jewish refugees hear stories of Treblinka and realize that though life is hard, it is far more horrible in Germany. And the survivor guilt sets in, for the victims of the Holocaust, for those left behind when Hannah goes to America.

This is a very good novel; the interleaving of Maya's life is typical of novels today that twine two lives together and show their relationship and contrasts. But for me, the diary was so poignant and real, it almost overshadowed Maya's story. However, alone it is almost too much to read and together with Maya's tale, you can almost walk her part and with her, begin to untangle the lives that affected you from the past, lives with struggles that we can hardly know.

A terrific book. Recommended.

Cuba does a sensitive job depicting the complicated life of Hannah, a German Jewish teenager in World War II era Shanghai. This gripping page turner is as exciting in its flash-forward story of her adult daughter years later in Manhattan as it is of the highly perilous years of Hannah's youth in China. I only regret that I cannot read it again for the first time.