by Israel Kipen
The hospital was run by a board of honorary members. Its Chairman was Isak Kirilovich Kagan, originally from Riga, who lived in a modern block of flats opposite overlooking the hospital. He was the undisputed boss of the entire enterprise who made sure that noone forgot the fact. He would appear at the hospital each morning on his way to work and attend to whatever matters required attention, letting no detail escape his eye. He had an office downtown. His only son was headmaster of a Jewish day-school which stood in the International Concession close to the Sephardi Synagogue.
The Vice-Chairman of the board was Semion Liberman, a man with a blander personality and younger than Kagan. His even temper contrasted with Kagan’s impetuosity. He was an accountant by profession and owner of a noted cafe in Nanking Road, close to the corner of Chusan Road. His son was an active leader of the Zionist-Revisionist Youth Movement in Shanghai who later went to Israel and played an international role on behalf of Herut. Semion Liberman left Shanghai after the war for Japan and became the director of the Jewish Club in Tokyo. The board treasurer was a Mr Citrin who was refined and pedantic. His wife, a grey-haired lady of commanding presence was the chairperson of the ladies’ committee of the hospital with particular responsibility for the running of the kitchen and house management. One member of the Citrin family was later associated in an honorary capacity representing Israel in Hong Kong.
The hospital’s medical superintendent was a Dr Steinman, an energetic Jewish doctor from Poland who had a fine sense of humour, was approachable, and would conduct ward rounds twice each day, issuing orders often on the run in a quick-fire staccato manner. Working there, too, was a resident doctor by the name of Dr Klinger who, with his wife, wished only to return to Germany after the war – which I believe he did at the first opportunity. The other senior person on the medical staff was the matron, Vera Alexandrovna, who hailed from Siberia via Harbin. She was a short, wiry, greying woman who held an iron grip on her nursing staff. The other top personnel consisted of a young woman called Nina who tended to financial matters and was to marry Shmuel Iwry and later settle in Baltimore, U.S.A., and Kuba Kronenberg who served as accountant. Kuba and his wife had been on the same boat as I on the journey from Vladivostok to Japan and were in time to leave Shanghai together as well. As Kuba Kronhill, he later became an identity in Melbourne. It is interesting to note that the senior three persons connected with the general non-medical administration of the hospital – Nina, Kuba Kronenberg and myself – were all refugees from Poland.
The doctors who used the hospital for their patients represented a microcosm of European settlement in Shanghai. A number of outstanding German Jewish surgeons operated there. The name of Dr Marcuse comes readily to mind. He was a short man, always in good humour and forever whistling a tune from the classics. Being a musician of note and an orchestral conductor, he gave the impression that music was his first love while surgery served as a means of making a living. Another excellent surgeon was Dr Heilborn, tall, thin, taciturn and withdrawn. He never spoke above a whisper but he had the staff hanging on to his every word and responding to every twitch of a muscle. Further, two rather picturesque doctors, a brother and sister called Blumenthal, both long-standing residents of Shanghai, came often. They were unmarried. While the brother tended towards reserve, the sister, an obstetrician, was more jovial, not particular about her appearance, always dressing in Chinese garb, and frequently joked about certain aspects of her specialty. The radiology department was run by a Russian Jewish radiologist and the pharmacy by a German Jewish pharmacist, assisted by a younger man called Blatt, a Polish refugee who later came to Melbourne. A number of Russian non-Jewish doctors also worked regularly at the hospital.
My integration into the hospital administration went without a hitch. As the factotum involved in some way in all aspects of house management and in constant contact with the medical staff, my hands were always full. In addition, I had to manage the public relations aspects of the hospital at two levels, with both the board and the ladies’ committee. I kept my own books, controlled stock, co-ordinated the duties of the Chinese staff through their supervisor, and worked with a tough Russian Jewish lady who managed the kitchen and might have minced meat but not her words. The place was always buzzing with gossip, this affecting all of us working there, but also adding spice to the performance of daily chores. Patients’ meals were issued under the keen-eyed vigilance of the matron. By then, the nurses had eaten and were able to assist in feeding the patients. Matron and I were the last to eat. We were treated with deference by the kitchen staff and ate well and in style. Overall, however, my relations with the individual members of the board and ladies’ committee were of a business nature, such relations not spilling over, as they had earlier, in the refugee kitchen, into the social domain. The nature of my hospital work, the constancy of responsibilities and the magnitude of the whole enterprise rendered personal involvements with these persons rather marginal. On the other hand, the large staff afforded extensive interaction within the organisation. With the majority of acquaintances living in Hong-Kew, a number of us who worked at the hospital created our own small social nucleus, although after a long day’s work there was neither much time nor energy for socialising. On occasions, time permitting, one could snatch a short respite on a bench in the gardens around, delighting in the weather or the colours all around, chatting to convalescing patients, and putting, if only momentarily, the harder reality out of mind.
My room was in a detached two-storey building which housed the chef and his assistant on the ground floor, and the operation-theatre sister, Nina the office secretary, the manageress of the linen department and myself on the upper floor. Another couple who lived within the compound consisted of a middle-aged Russian Jew, a handyman called Brodsky, and his wife. Brodsky would wait to be called upon and, when in fact called, would respond to any call that came by first making it clearly understood that were it not for him the whole institution would grind to a halt. He would then stride with tool-box in hand through the hospital and surrounds with an air of indispensability, quite convinced that he commanded obeisance from all, from the superintendent down. In his eyes, he was not simply an odd-jobs man; he was at least the equal of the surgeon, who was dependent on him for the functioning of the hospital steriliser which, being very primitive, was in constant need of repair. A kind word would make him climb mountains to please, while the least suggestion of disrespect would bring down the wrath of the gods on the offending person. Watching him made me muse that there may be a suppressed Brodsky in all of us.
Considering that Shanghais Russian Jews numbered some 4000 souls, the establishment and maintenance of a Jewish hospital was a major credit to the communal spirit and enterprise of those people.
Admittedly, there were telling reasons why it should have been established in the first place. For one, the general Shanghai Hospital was far from the French Concession where the Jews lived. The difference in standards of living between Europeans and Chinese was another factor. In addition, a considerable number of Jewish families could not afford medical or hospital care; consequently, a hospital was needed which could waive fees for the indigent. At bottom, perhaps, was the whole concept of communal self-help that gave impetus to those who brought the hospital and other service institutions into being.
The Jewish High Holy Days in Shanghai left me with a number of memories. Among the Polish refugees was the cantor of the Bialystok Choral Synagogue, Mr Podrabinek, who was engaged by the Russian Jewish community to lead prayers that year. In that community so remote from the more familiar world, his presence was billed as an extraordinary event. I particularly recall Kol Nidrei night of that year. The synagogue was packed; Cantor Podrabinek’s magnificent voice and masterly renditions of the prayers thrilled the congregation, some of whom had never had the opportunity to savour such an experience. At the end of the service, the people’s excitement was unmistakable. One woman likened the cantor’s performance to opera rather than to a r
eligious service, so strong was the impact made on her. For me, too, it was a far cry from the kind of service with which I had been familiar back home. In Bialystok, Orthodox Jews wore white rubber-soled shoes to the synagogue on Kol Nidrei night; there, they had walked to the synagogue while, here, the worshippers arrived in cars; and the very atmosphere pervading the place was different.
Polish Jews contributed to Shanghai Jewry in a number of other ways also. One particular personality among the refugees who made his mark in Shanghai, as he was later to do in Melbourne, was the Yiddish writer, critic and essayist Yehoshua Rappoport who had, like myself, also hailed from Bialystok. Being fluent in Russian, he fitted well into the community, contributed to the Russian-language Jewish weekly edited by Rabinovich, and at times delivered public lectures before audiences at the Jewish Club. There was one lecture in particular that I vividly recall. In the course of talking of the peculiarities of historic Jewish experience, he said: “Look at me. I’m a Jewish writer who uses Yiddish, the language of the Jewish masses, as my medium. And yet, here I am among my own brethren who would like to read my writings but for whom, to make them accessible, I must translate them from Yiddish into a foreign language. This is one aspect of the tragedy that besets Jewish dispersion and cultural assimilation.” His words stuck in my mind, even though their deeper validity and significance did not fully strike home until much later in Australia.
With regard to my contacts with my scattered family, I kept up a desperate correspondence with Mother. I wrote in Russian in order to facilitate the passage of my postcards past the censors. In the light of the widespread disruptions of mail and other services by the war, I did not hold out much hope that my letters would actually get to her; however, I did not wholly rule out the chance possibility of them doing so. While my spoken Russian was reasonably fluent, my command of its written form was quite a different proposition; the letters must certainly have amused the censors as well as Mother and my brothers and sister when, as I learnt from replies that came some eight or nine months later, they did eventually receive them. Some of the questions I asked them in my letters clearly betrayed my naiveté and inability to conceive their lot at the time. For instance, one such question about how they were managing with kosher meat evoked laughter and tears. Little did I understand or suspect the poverty in which they found themselves, living in a dug-out cavity that served as a dwelling, subsisting on a diet of potatoes and little else, and themselves having to grow whatever they ate, survival in such conditions being contingent on one’s personal ingenuity – all this, in an alien environment with a harsh climate. Against this background, my question concerning kosher meat was nothing short of absurd and wholly disingenuous.
It must have been in that year, 1943, that I learnt that Father had been reunited with the family in Kazakhstan. I rejoiced at the news, for, with his arrival, all had a better chance of survival, the family’s bread-winner having joined them. But I had no inkling of his state of health on arriving there. This, I learnt about only well after the war, in Melbourne, my informant, a certain Lazar Kagan, having been a fellow prisoner of Father’s. Father had, from the outset in the Russian prison, been uncompromising. The first, most obvious issue was that of non-kosher food. Once a day, the prisoners were fed some hot mostly watery gruel containing some vegetable and fatty substance which he would not touch. Despite his fellow inmates’ importunings and the insistence of the prison authorities, he refused to eat it. To overcome the problem, he would exchange his soup for another’s potato or bread, remaining unbending against all admonitions that he would never survive on bread or potato and water alone. So much for day to day existence. But a still more threatening time for him was Passover. Not only did he refuse the daily soup for the eight days of the festival, but he also declined all bread. He therefore subsisted almost solely on potatoes bartered for his own rations. According to Kagan, such strength of will gave all his fellow inmates the added resources to cope with their situation and endure their deprivations and periods of despair. By the time his sentence came to an end, Father was quite literally skin and bones, his sole motivation towards survival being the possession of Mother’s address in Kazakhstan. My brother, Lazar, was later to tell me of Father’s return. Early one morning, on his way to work, Lazar noticed someone approaching him through a mist. As they approached each other, Lazar thought he recognised Father’s gait, even as he considered the possibility unlikely. But it was Father. He had reached his family on the last stage of travel by foot. He had arrived emaciated with the very last of his physical reserves, rendering his efforts all the more incredible and superhuman. Gradually, Father regained his strength and turned to vegetable growing on a small allotment of land some considerable distance from their home. Summers were short; the winters long. Hence, Father would work from daybreak to sunset with little food, aiming to accumulate a harvest ample enough to tide the family through the winter. It took a year before their lot improved. They had harvested sufficient crop to be able to sell a portion of it as well, and with the profits bought themselves a cow. Now they had milk and milk products to supplement their meagre diet and improve their general nutrition.
Mother and Father in Khazachstan 1944.
By early 1944, having been with the hospital for over a year, I became restless on several counts. In particular, did the news reaching us about the more favourable progress of the war buoy our spirits, while the knowledge that my parents and brothers and sister were re-united evoked in me a recovered sense of responsibility for them. For, had it not been precisely because Father had vested his hopes on one member of the family – me – to restore, in time, the family’s existence in more favourable circumstances that he had given his blessing to my initial departure? These and other considerations made me restless and dampened my earlier enthusiasm, a natural consequence, in any case, of working overlong in the same position. In the event, I relinquished my post. However, the hospital board continued to consider me formally as a member of staff and permitted me the use for sleep of a room at a day clinic which the hospital managed in the centre of the French Concession.
By then, I had enough money to live on and was able to supplement this with some other business activity I undertook at the time. A sought-after commodity among the Jewish furriers in Avenue Joffre was brown lining for the fur coats they produced. To obtain this, I went to the Chinese parts of town, made contact with reliable suppliers, and began to gather stock which I kept in my provisional room at the clinic. As I became more involved in business, new lines developed and these brought added opportunities. I came to consolidate my connections within the Russian Jewish community, and, as long as I could evade the restrictions imposed by the Japanese authorities and retain my freedom of movement, I was able, too, to earn a living.
In the meantime, the oppressive activities of the Japanese office for refugees worsened. As the earlier Japanese military successes turned into disasters, the hatred and barbarity of the sadistic official in that office mounted. The number of people sent to jail increased as did the number of deaths. It fell to me on one occasion to deliver a eulogy for one of the victims, this being my first experience of speaking beside an open grave. Feelings were running high, words had to be used with care, and personal emotions had to be kept under check. The loss of life was so senseless and wholly regrettable as there was no case for sending people to jail in the first place. As for Europe, the news emerging from there in relation to the fate of the Jews was still rather scanty. Rumours circulated that ghettos were being forcefully evacuated; but no-one was prepared to give credence to the stories, noone permitted the horrors inherent in them to take hold of their minds. Life in the Russian Jewish community continued normally. Its club continued to function as the social centre it was intended to be; dinners, card parties and other activities were the on-going order of the day. People could afford it. Money came easily to the business establishment; speculation thrived; money-changers had never had it so good. Gold and currency fluct
uations set the adrenaline flowing with ever-renewed vigour in these money-dealers every day as they worked in a feverish excitement I never tired of watching. As Shanghai was to all intents and purposes for us a closed city, the market forces and influences worked from within. The offices of the people I knew may have been busy with commerce, but the real sources of the boom were in the labyrinthine alleyways of Chinatown. There, in what seemed to the European eye to be a lifestyle both backward and poor was the true mainspring of commercial wealth and power. Here and there, I would, on my forays into this part of town, see an elderly Chinese walk with a self-effacing downward-gazing dignity, his hands tucked into the wide sleeves of his long silken fur-lined coat and wearing his traditional round cap on his head. His was the mien of comfortable, but unostentatious, ease coupled with a deep sense of the richness and depth of his culture. People of his kind had long predated the new surge of wealth which came in the wake of the war. They were the ones, possessing status and connections, who, barely seen by the outside world and detached from the hustle and bustle of daily commercial dramas, more truly regulated the pulse of Shanghai’s wartime economic activity. This detachment, so authentic a part of these upper echelons of Chinese society, held a magnetic attraction for me, all the more so as I became aware of an inner vitality that drove these people even as it remained concealed behind a seeming serenity. In contrast with the West, wealth, here, was hidden and there was none of the Western ostentation so commonly associated with the possession of it. To me, this modesty and restraint added lustre to my impressions of Chinese culture at its most traditional, and yet I could not but feel that what I was observing was the sunset of a culture increasingly confronted by new imperatives in a changing modern world. I did not know at the time of the political transformations that China at large was undergoing – this would come later – but, intuitively, I sensed myself privileged to be witnessing a world on the eve of extinction. If I had to explain that intuition, it stemmed from my belief that in the wake of the war that we were living through, the inevitable changes that would ensue would not by-pass even China. Perhaps the fact that I myself belonged to an ancient culture sensitised me to the ever-recurring contests between old and new, resulting in inevitable changes in their wake.