Foreword

When a number of Jewish refugees fl ed to Shanghai, homeless and struggling to survive, the Shanghai people were also in an abyss of pain infl icted by the Japanese invasion. Many touching stories happened during that period when the people from the two countries helped each other to tide over the hard time more than 70 years ago.

In 1939, Richard Frey fled to Shanghai, joined the Eighth Route Army and successfully synthesized penicillin; the Jewish refugees in Shanghai also included great men just like Dr. Bethune; the stories like exchanging challah with six-crop cakes were numerous; and the cases of Sino-Jewish couple in love were not rare…

For over 7 decades, this land has always conveyed the complex of Jewish refugees and Shanghai people: there was an ambassadress seeking for her root; a great painter looking for his “aunty”; a Jewish girl who found her Shanghai uncle; three generations of Shanghai people preserving books, old neighbors recalling the foreign lane…

For generations and generations, people missed the land of Shanghai and cherished their connection with Hongkou where many new stories between the Jewish refugees and Shanghai took place.