Shanghai studies have blossomed in recent years with the publication of monographs aimed at broadening our knowledge and understanding of this city's complex growth into a unique cosmopolitan metropolis and the centre of Chinese modernity between its opening as a treaty port in 1843 and the foundation of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Of the many foreign groups that sojourned and settled in the city, Jews – whether Baghdadi merchants, Russian refugees of the 1917 Revolution or Central European Jews displaced by Nazi persecution – have probably received the most attention in academic publications and in the media. Irene Eber's new book fills in one of the remaining gaps in the study of Jewish refugees in Shanghai during the Second World War by collating together poems, letters, extracts from diaries, and short stories originally composed and written in Polish, German and Yiddish. The purpose of the collection is to help readers to understand the most inner feelings of displaced people who had lost everything in their homeland and had no clue of what lay ahead in their troubled lives. This publication interestingly places itself at the intersection of Chinese history and Jewish literature, especially Yiddish studies, offering glimpses of the struggles for day-to-day survival experienced by the 20,000 refugees who went to Shanghai to escape from Nazi persecution.

After a general introduction of Shanghai's modern history, the book delves into the specific details of how Austrian, German and Polish Jews – a diverse group that ranged from the assimilated to the highly religious – took direct and indirect escape routes to Shanghai between 1938 and 1940. The majority of Austrian and German Jews travelled to the city by ship from the Italian port of Trieste, a less demanding journey compared to that undertaken by their Polish coreligionists who travelled through the Soviet Union, then stopped in the Japanese city of Kobe before reaching, often unwillingly, the port of Shanghai. Life was exceptionally hard in Shanghai, although refugees received some form of assistance through various Jewish organizations. In 1943 stateless Jews were ordered by Japanese occupying forces to live in the confines of a ghetto in the impoverished area of Hongkou. The great majority of refugees managed to survive and after the end of the war went on to start a new life, mostly in the US, Australia and the newly founded state of Israel.

The pieces presented in the book are arranged in chronological order. There is not enough space here to mention or analyse all of them and I will therefore choose, rather arbitrarily, those that I have found most engaging and touching. First of all, I would like to draw attention to the letters of Annie Witting, a German middle-class woman originally from Poland, and the diary of Shoshana Kahan (1895–1968), a Yiddish actress from Poland. Upon her arrival in 1939, Witting expresses with exceptional lucidity her first impressions of Shanghai without the slightest hint of self-pity, a remarkable trait which is even more palpable in a letter jotted down the following year when she describes her husband's ill health. Conversely, Shoshana Kahan intensely dislikes Shanghai from the moment she sets foot in the city; her diary is permeated with relentless gloominess and an inevitable sense of loss, which becomes erringly real with the death of her husband in 1945. Other writings bring to our attention a miscellanea of events, feelings and observations such as the somehow caustic portray of a Hannukah celebration written by Alfred Friedlander, the powerful sketches of Chinese life woven together by the sinologist W. Y. Tonn (1902–57); and the thoughtful comments on the perceived materialism of Shanghai's non-refugee Jewish community penned by the famous literary critic and translator Yehoshua Rapoport (1895–1971). Three authors, Meylekh Ravitch (1893–1976) – who was never a refugee –, Yosl Mlotek (1918–2000) and Jacob Fishman (1891–1965), develop the theme of destitution among the Shanghainese.

To sum up, Jewish Exiles in Wartime China Voices is aimed at students interested in Jewish studies, willing to deepen their understanding of the Holocaust and of Shanghai's modern history. The volume represents a valuable collection of literary sources on Shanghai's Jewish refugee experiences that, were it not for the efforts of Irene Eber, would have been probably been overlooked in library collections dispersed in the four corners of the world. As a final remark, I would have liked to see the poems, especially the Yiddish pieces, printed not only in translation but also in their original language.