Customer Reviews

Ten Green Bottles: The True Story of One Family's Journey from War-torn Austria to the Ghettos of Shanghai

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Ten Green Bottles is one of the most powerful, emotional, fascinating and beautifully written books I have ever read. Where has this author been?

The story begins in the early 1920s in Vienna where a five year old Jewish girl, called Nini, begins to experience what it is to be the youngest of three sisters. It is written in Nini's voice and throughout the book you seem to live every moment of her life as if you were in her skin. You laugh, cry, feel and experience everything that happens to her as if it were happening to you, yet the book is non-fiction.

The story tells of her life in a growing family and the hardships of her mother in raising her children and carrying on their business after her father's death. As Nini grows into her teenage years, your senses are filled with the excitement of Vienna and the thrill of skiing in the mountains nearby. Then the Nazis come and everything changes.

As Jews are now considered vermin, they must flee the city or they will surely die. With the help of a gentile lawyer they are able to leave Vienna for Shanghai. On arriving in this no-man's land with almost no money, they find themselves in the middle of another war between China and Japan. Living in squalor and trying to survive, their life is made even more miserable. Japan, an ally of Germany, forces them and about 20,000 other Jews into a small ghetto with over 100,000 of the poorest Chinese. The story tells of their life and the life of the Jewish community as they try to make it through to the end of the war under the most deplorable conditions imaginable. They are eventually liberated by the Americans and stay until the Communist takeover in the late 1940s when they leave. The story ends with their exceptionally well written arrival in the white winter of Canada where they do not have to fear anymore.

I read a lot and to me this book was a literary masterpiece. I also learned about a very interesting part of the Holocaust that I had not known.

This story about the experiences of a Viennese Jewish family in Shanghai perfectly fulfills two raison d'etre of books - on the one hand it allows the reader to enter a time-warp machine and be transplanted to another time and another place and vicariously live through the emotional upheavals, the smells, sights, sounds and most importantly the feelings of fear, frustration, Angst and yes, fortunately also joy, of the main characters. Vivian Kaplan is a master of setting the scene and allowing the reader to slip into the protagonist's skin. I have lived and worked in Vienna and also in Northern China (albeit at a much later time) and Vivian's writing rings true. The chapters in the book are like 3-D images conjured up for the reader (and would make a very gripping screenplay). The other raison d'etre of books is to preserve and hand down important happenings and narrate them in a gripping and thought-provoking manner. The manner in which the Jews in Austria and elsewhere were treated by an Austrian madman who managed to come to power in Germany should never be forgotten. More importantly, we all need to be vigilant that such events happen less and less frequently in the history of humankind. Although familiar with the story of displaced Jews from German-speaking countries as I (like the author) am offspring, I was unable to put down the book. What Nini Karpel's mother had to experience in one short lifetime is more than most people should have to live through. The book also helped me understand the initial inertia of many Jews in Vienna to the anti-Semitic flare-up in the 1920s and 30s. "Oh, we've seen this many times, let's just lie low and wait for it to blow over". Writing in the present tense made the story more immediate. However, despite the fact that the book had its share of gruesome scenes, overall the manner in which Nini viewed the world seemed overly rosy-colored and syrupy sweet. The naive tone that permeates the book distracts from the serious situation in which these refugees find themselves. Even a five-year old would know better than to state 'we are awed by the changes in the baby within his first year. Every day he seems to learn some new word...' p.5. Should the book get reprinted, I suggest a German-speaking editor correct some of the German words. The great Ferris wheel in Vienna is no 'Reisenrad' p.77 and the 'Fuhrer' should be spelled 'Fuehrer'. But overall we are better off for having another story capture the senseless suffering human beings will inflict upon one another.

An interesting change from the Western refugee tales. The author writes in her her mother's voice, which is risky, but it rings fairly true. By starting her story well before the war the author creates a relationship with her characters in advance of the events leading to their emigration. Her mother is a fan of Gone With The Wind, and Ten Green Bottles reads like a 1930's epic film. You can see all the 30's/40's actors in the roles of her family.

Very engaging style and very informative - I learned things I had not known and considered things I knew differently. I'm off to find other biography dealing with Chinese bound European refugees.

I thoroughly enjoyed "Ten Green Bottles". Unlike other books on Shanghai of that period, I particularly relished the intimate glimpse of the extreme wealth and decadence that was ongoing alongside the abject poverty of the immigrants that fled Europe. Much is written here of how people of many nations with unimaginable wealth made Shanghai their "sumptuous playground" between the stench and filth of the city.

In particular, the author's description of the Bolero Club through the eyes of Nini, who worked as a hostess there, was so exciting and so descriptive and so alive that I was sure I was in the room with some of the most powerful men and glamorous women of the time. Her detailed description of the opium den next door, a "grand salon" established exclusively for the very rich, is breathtaking.

This book is a must read for anyone who wants to live the Shanghai of World War II from its lows to its highs.

This book is a riviting account of a family's struggle to survive in a war-torn Europe in the late 1930's. It is a true story, written with love and empathy by the heroine's daughter. This is a story not to be missed. It is definitely the best book I have read in a long while.

this is a different story of jewish people in the world war, quite interesting, well writtten.

thisbook this book was very enlightening! I did not realize thatJews lived in Shang Hai in the 1940's, I highly reccommend it!

The account of a Jewish familys' descent in Vienna through the Nazi hell to the foreign shores of Shanghai is interesting from an historical perspective. The writing is amateurish with the point of view jumping around and the verb tenses as well. It could have used a good editor.

The story of the blind hatred and inhumanity whipped up by the Nazis needs to be told - and told often. But it deserves a more nuanced telling than this single-dimensional presentation. This account is all bright colors (first quarter) and darkness (remainder), with little in between.
What is particularly striking is that the narrator makes no effort to relate to the suffering of Shanghai's indigenous Chinese population. Her flat and parenthetical references to the pervasive poverty, disease and oppression reveal little or no interest in the historical or social context that created such dreadful conditions, not to mention any empathy with the people so afflicted. Its detachment is disturbing. Could it be that one's humanity is so degraded by abuse that one cannot see beyond one's own suffering? Perhaps, but without any attempt at explanation it comes across as heartless indifference.
As a tribute by a daughter to a mother and a family who endured hideous persecution the book is a worthy effort. But in providing any real insights it falls sadly short.

Any fan of China and Shanghai would grab for this book, as I did, only to be disappointed that the reactions of the main character, one Nini Karpel from Vienna, seem to be weak. Perhaps I was a bit slow in realizing that in fact, it is the daughter, Vivian Jeannette Kaplan, who is writing it in the mother's first-person voice, so that the authentic feeling is missing. I even wondered if the writer had been to China, for her knowledge of its people is so skimpy, so dismissive, as to be either total arrogance, or the indifference of the ignorant.

Other Westerners have certainly lived in China and written about for years. "Oil for the Lamps of CHina" by Alice Tisdale Hobart, written by the wife of a Standard Oil executive in Nanking, tells in great detail of the life with the Chinese, the business dealings, the superstitions, sanitation, clothing, housing, the filth, the women's bound feet and so on.

For this writer, China might as well have been Africa or any other hellhole where her parents unfortunately had to go when they, as European Jews, were unwelcome throughout the Western world. The book focuses on the immigrants from Russia and the thousands of GERman, Austrian and other Jews pouring into Shanghai, their daily struggles when they arrive with no money, but the scant attention given to the realities of the squalor, stench, and other overpowering and offending parts of Chinese life seem to be reported as if in a WHO document. The author coolly states that 25-30,000 dead bodies are taken off the streets of Shanghai alone by the Chinese Benevolent Society, since there is no official governmental agency to deal with it. Somehow, this small bit of data is part of a report, rather than the real life encountered by the author, if she had gone through these slums as reported.

All this being said, and the turgid style left aside, the author does provide an interesting account of a very prosperous Jewish family, who owned three department stores in Vienna before being kicked out. Some say comfortably well-off, but any Austrian would tell you that the family was just plain rich. The life that the young Nini Karpel experiences, of dances, parties, dresses, skiing, cafe life and so on, was a life only to be dreamed of by the Austrian masses in Vienna during the 1920's and 30's, with widespread unemployment, thousands of idle men (like young Adolf Hitler) sleeping in men's hostels on the edge of the city. Nini's enthusiastic view of Austrian life, walking the streets of the city, must surely have been dampened by some awareness of the distress the population was in. Both Berlin and Vienna were places of desperation for unemployed masses, with soup kitchens and tent cities all around the cities. Ah well, rich girl didn't notice.

I think that if the author herself had written it, rather than her daughter doing it as research, the real facts of life would come through much more strongly. Nini's family also considered themselves real Jews, not secular Jews, so they would have felt themselves apart from most Austrians on a daily basis, while with their wealth, a separate and rarified air for themselves. Many Jews by then had no interest in their religious roots and would not have fought so hard to defend themselves from the kind Belgian nuns who gave them shelter in the Shanghai convent.

THere is a scene in the book of a Belgian nun showing Nini a full larder in the back of the convent, packed with meats, cheeses, sausauges, chocolates and all the Belgian delights. The nun tells her that if she converts, she can have all this kind of food, not such a hard life. Nini and her family have been eating a very poor convent diet of rice and vegetables and bread.

Anyone ever deal with the nuns and think that this scene would happen? Would a nun even try to convert a woman who's so adamant about her faith? Something doesn't ring true here.

The report-writing style makes the book more third-person than first-person, but still, if this does not irritate, a lot of information can be gleaned about how the displaced Jews used their wits and trickery to keep a head above water in the foul ghettoes of Shanghai.

Ten years later, without having learned more than a few words of Chinese, the family leaves for Canada, with visas obtained by relatives in Toronto. A fondness for China, its people and its culture does not come through anywhere in the book, but the author (daughter) wants us to believe that they loved China.

Well! A reader can look elsewhere for some real information! This is just entertainment!

SHANGHAI DIARY is an excellent account of a similar refuguee, a woman who'd come from wealth, arriving penniless, and surviving through her wits. She writes of the real life amongst Chinese.