“Cohen was a real tough who spoke with a bastard Cockney-Canadian accent and became a general in the Chinese Nationalist army. “I wonder if some Jewish readers have a conflicted attitude toward individuals like Morris ‘Two-Gun’ Cohen and Trebitsch Lincoln,” says Grescoe. “I was surprised, however, at just how many of the subordinate figures - outlandish adventurers, idealistic dreamers, selfless heroes and yes, a fair share of scoundrels - turned out to be Jewish.”Įmily ‘Mickey’ Hahn, one of the two main Jewish protagonists in Shanghai Grand. “I knew from the start that two main characters in the story were Jewish,” says Grescoe, referring to Hahn and Sassoon. ‘I was surprised at how many outlandish adventurers, idealistic dreamers, selfless heroes - and yes, a fair share of scoundrels - turned out to be Jewish’ When Grescoe set out to write the book, he had little idea Jews would figure so prominently in its pages, including two of its three main protagonists. As Japan invades and occupies Shanghai, both Chinese communist revolutionary leader Mao Zedong and his nationalist rival Chiang Kai-shek fight for power, with the former prevailing with the creation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.Īt the heart of “Shanghai Grand” is an unusual three-sided love story between British real estate mogul Sir Victor Sassoon, swashbuckling American writer Emily (Mickey) Hahn and Chinese poet Zau Sinmay.
Events unfold against growing turmoil and squalor among the local Chinese as war and revolution loom large, inevitably piercing the bubble in which the expatriates live. The book abounds with intrigue, drama and colorful characters. Then, after the Soviet Revolution in 1917, Russian Jews came.ĭuring the three years following Hitler’s Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938 when the world closed its doors to Jews fleeing the Nazis, Shanghai became “the port of last resort” for 20,000 Jewish refugees escaping Europe. The Cathay Hotel, one of Sir Victor Sassoon’s main Shanghai properties and his one-time home, is a prominent setting in ‘Shanghai Grand.’ (Courtesy)Īmong those were the Sassoons, Hardoons, Ezras and Kadoories, who thrived in the opium, cotton, and eventually, the real estate business.
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He presents a compelling portrait of the city, especially its foreign-controlled International Settlement and French Concession in which people from 14 mostly Western countries enjoyed extraterritorial rights, free of Chinese law. The treaty port of Shanghai in the 1930s was a special moment in history that Grescoe evokes deftly in the book through a novel-like narrative. And he has tales to tell, all of them true, following four years of extensive research and several trips to China. In a recent conversation with Grescoe at Café Club Social near his home in Montreal’s hip Mile End quarter where he goes every morning for a dry macchiato, he speaks authoritatively about Shanghai, past and present. It was a time when it was known as the “wicked old Paris of the East,” and, as he discovered in the course of research, it was also a doomed world in which Jews had a starring role. In “Shanghai Grand,” he recreates the long-vanished glamor and opium-fed decadence of the Chinese metropolis in the 1930s. MONTREAL - Sitting in his daily perch in a café on Montreal’s east side, writer Taras Grescoe is a world away - both in place and time - from the focus of his new non-fiction book.
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