There are no Jews living in Harbin, a barren area “north of North Korea”. There are, however, many Jewish heritage sites that confirm Jews once flourished in Harbin, a bitterly cold place in Northern China with temperatures dipping below 35º Centigrade. One of these Jews was Abram Froloff. Escaping conscription into the Red Army, stateless after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Froloff joins other Jewish refugees fleeing antisemitism in Europe. Harbin becomes a shtetel with over 20,000 “Harbiners” until the Japanese invade. Avram takes his wife and three children to Shanghai, a paradise –and then the Chinese Communists take control.

Shalama is the story of a Jewish girl born in 1928 to Papa Avram and Fanya Froloff raised amid the burgeoning Jewish community in Harbin, the capital of Manchuria. Now a grandmother, at 75, Shalama shares her 12 years in Harbin a city “built by Jews“ who organized the development of the Trans-Siberian Railroad that choochoos from Moscow to Vladivostok.” Author Jean Hoffmann Lewanda, Shalama’s daughter, chronicles her mother’s fascinating life as it intersects with history. ”There’s much to tell”.

Though surrounded by an alien culture and a foreign environment the Russian Froloffs maintained religious and Zionist traditions. Shalama never learned to speak Chinese. Russian was her lingua franca and Judaism her way of life. For Papa, an intense Zionist, China was a “temporary home… a stopover ” hoping one day to emigrate to Israel —in 1930s under restrictive British Mandatory rule. Insecure in Harbin, after the Japanese occupation, Papa took his family on a 1,400-mile trek, to Shanghai. There he worked for his brother-in-law at Kamchatka Furs making “warm and luxurious coats of sable and fancy hats for the freezing climate”.

 

Though under Japanese occupation since 1937, unlike Harbin, Shanghai was an international city with settlements by the British, French, Dutch, American and Baghdadis – notably the Sassoon and Kadoorie families. Shalama enjoyed a privileged life with servants, chauffeurs, an English tutor. She attended Jewish School and frequented Shpunt Deli for creamed herring and black bread and Tkachenko Bakery for babka-- all Russian staples. The family worshipped at Ohel Rachel one of seven synagogues and entranced with the breathtaking walks along the “Bund” waterfront. When Shalama married Paul Hoffmann, a Viennese refugee, a lawyer working for an American legal firm, the family celebrated with nearly three hundred Jewish and Chinese friends. The unexpected Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 ended the “heady days”.

 

Shalama remembers the brutal treatment by the Japanese occupiers toward the Chinese and the pitiful conditions in the Japanese-controlled Hongkew Ghetto where Jews, fleeing the Holocaust, mercifully found refuge but thereafter endured harrowing deprivation. She recalls the overwhelming joy when, in September 1945, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender. In 1950, Papa and Fanya finally realized their dream to settle in the new state –Israel. But Shalama and Paul remained in Shanghai finding themselves trapped under Chairman Mao Zedong’s brutal Communist regime, anxiously awaiting sparse exit visas.

Incidentally, Ehud Olmert’s grandfather was born in Harbin.