The Box with the Sunflower Clasp (eBook)

Uncovering a Jewish Family's Flight to Wartime Shanghai

Rachel Meller (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
256 Seiten
Icon Books Ltd (Verlag)
978-1-78578-983-0 (ISBN)

Infos

Rachel Meller was never close to her aunt Lisbeth, a cool, unemotional woman with a drawling Viennese-Californian accent, a cigarette in her hand. But when Lisbeth died, she left Rachel an intricately carved Chinese box with a sunflower clasp. Inside the box were photographs, letters and documents that led Rachel to uncover a story she had never known: that of a passionate Jewish teenager growing up in elegant Vienna, who was caught up by war, and forced to flee to Shanghai. Far from home, in a strange city, Lisbeth and her parents build a new life - a life of small joys and great hardship, surrounded by many others who, like them, have fled Hitler and the Nazis. 1930s Shanghai is a metropolis where the old rules do not apply - a city of fabulous wealth and crushing poverty, where disease is rife, and gangsters rub shoulders with rich emigrés; where summer brings unspeakable heat, and winter is bitterly cold; and where European refugees build community and, maybe, a young woman can find love. Set against a backdrop of the war in the Far East, The Box with the Sunflower Clasp is a sweeping family memoir that tells the hidden history of the Jews of Shanghai. Rachel Meller writes with elegance and insight as she examines what it means to survive, and what the legacy of displacement and war might mean for the generation that comes afterwards.

Rachel Meller grew up near London, the middle daughter of Austrian Jewish refugees. After studying neurobiology at Sussex, and research into hormones and behaviour at Cambridge, she became a writer in a communication consultancy. The Box with the Sunflower Clasp is her first book.

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 18.5.2023
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► 1918 bis 1945
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Militärgeschichte
• Schlagworte: a delayed life dita kraus inge's war svenja o'donnell lilia linda ganzini • endless flight keiron pim • hare with amber eyes edmund de waal renia's diary renia spiegel • the choice edith eger
• ISBN-10: 1-78578-983-X / 178578983X
• ISBN-13: 978-1-78578-983-0 / 9781785789830