NYPL Blogs: Posts from the Slavic and East European Collections

The Jews of Shanghai: Uncovering the Archives and Stories

Raymond Pun, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, General Research Division — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 10:27:50 -0400

"Life was difficult in Shanghai, but infinitely better than anything they had left behind. From lower-middle-class comfort, the Tobias family was reduced to poverty but not to starvation. There was always food, always something to eat, always shelter even when the Jewish community was ghettoized shortly after Pearl Harbor. Thus even under terribly difficult conditions Moses Tobias was able to take care of his family but under the Nazis the conditions of the Jews were far worse than merely 'terribly difficult.'

"Shanghai was a multiethnic city and the Japanese controlled the city's Chinese populations. There were elite Sephardic Jews from Iraq, Syria and other parts of the Middle East who had long lived and prospered in Shanghai, as well as the new immigrants from Germany. They were later to be joined by Jews from Lithuania and Poland. The British ruled the International Settlement. The more comfortable Jews had built a community in Shanghai replete with synagogues and schools ..." From p. xvi —Strange Haven: A Jewish Childhood in Wartime Shanghai by Sigmund Tobias

The anecdote above is one of many harrowing yet hopeful tales of the Jewish people living in Shanghai during World War II. Many of their stories remain to be told. As the Nazi Empire sent shock waves to the Jewish community in Germany, many abandoned their belongings and fled to China for safety since Shanghai was an open port: no visas or passports were required.

From the 1930s, approximately 20,000 refugees escaped the destruction wrought by the Nazis while leaving behind their memories of life, traumas and experiences of war. However, as history reveals itself, Shanghai was suddenly under attack and occupation by the Japanese. The Japanese forces relocated Jews to live in their own ghettos known as the Restricted Sector for Stateless Refugees (or Shanghai Ghetto) where many were cramped into tiny living spaces, and starved but not deprived of food. In this setting, the Japanese permitted a bit more flexibility for the Jewish communities compared to the Nazis. However, both were still ruthless empires of the 20th century.

The cultural and social histories of Jews living in Shanghai are remarkable: schools were established, theater plays were produced and newspapers were published. The Jewish community also built their own synagogues and many are still around in Shanghai today.

Once the war ended in 1945, the ghettos were officially liberated; a few stayed in Shanghai while a majority migrated to the newly established state called Israel in 1948.

Luckily for researchers, at NYPL we have several interesting oral histories documenting the lives of Jewish refugees living in Shanghai. Susan Stamberg, an American radio journalist who is currently a Special Correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR) interviewed several Jewish people who lived in Shanghai during that time.

This special collection is part of the The New York Public Library: American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection which contains over "156,000 pages of transcripts, 6,000 hours of taped interviews, 2,250 informants: this incomparable repository of unique and unpublished primary source material is for the study of what is often called 'the American Jewish experience in the 20th century,' is the mother of all American Jewish oral histories and one of American Jewish culture's most substantial monuments." See here for more information.

Listening to some of the interviews was deeply fascinating and transformed my sense of reality into the past, envisioning how they lived in Shanghai: their thoughts about Germany, China and Japan; their social lives; what they were eating, thinking and feeling in Shanghai when it was a developing and poor city. Today Shanghai is a major cosmopolitan city and now part of an international economic hub.

To find this oral history collection, it is highly recommended to contact The NYPL's Dorot Jewish Division in The Stephen A. Schwarzman Building since they require an appointment.

Selected Bibliography

Exodus to Shanghai: Stories of Escape from the Third Reich / Steve Hochstadt
Catalogue of the Exhibition, Jewish life in Shanghai, September 1948-January 1949 [microform] / [Translated from Yiddish]
Voices from Shanghai : Jewish Exiles in Wartime China / edited, translated, & with an introduction by Irene Eber
Anya's War / Andrea Alban
Shanghai Diary: A Young Girl's Journey from Hitler's Hate to War-Torn China / Ursula Bacon.
The Far Side of the Sky: A Novel of Love and Death in Shanghai / Daniel Kalla
Israel's Messenger: Official Organ of the Shanghai Zionist Association and The Jewish National Fund Commission for China
Shanghai Passage / by Gregory Patent; illustrations by Ted Lewin
More on the History of Jewish Community in China and Jews in Shanghai during World War II

Additional Resources

Center Revives Shanghai's Jewish History by NPR's Louisa Lim (2006)
Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum in Shanghai, China (上海犹太难民纪念馆)
The Jewish Community of China
Destination Shanghai: The Jewish Community of Shanghai, 1936-1949 at The Leo Baeck Institute in NYC
Chinese Judaic Studies Association

Short-Term Research Fellows: A Closer Look at Tatar-Language Pamphlets

Gary Guadagnolo, Short-Term Research Fellow — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 07:51:47 -0400

Russia — what does it make you think of? Cold winters, fur hats, vast forests, and perhaps some vodka and caviar? As a Russian historian in training, I want to help people understand that Russia is much more complex than these simple images suggest, as accurate as they may be. To offer just one example, over 185 ethnic groups live in Russia, each with its own linguistic, cultural, and religious traditions. By exploring their stories, we can learn more about the role of disenfranchised and underrepresented groups in an expansive, diverse place like Russia. Listening to many different voices from the past can provide a new, valuable perspective on the land of tsars and commissars.

I am currently a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and I am writing my dissertation on the history of the largest minority group in Russia, the Volga Tatars, during the twentieth century. Interaction between Tatars and Russians stretches back at least 500 years to 1552, when Ivan the Terrible conquered the Kazan Khanate, the historical home of the Tatars. From Kazan, located in a strategic position on the Volga River, Tatars presided over valuable trade routes into Central Asia. The Russian conquest of Kazan brought the Tatars, as well as their commercial networks, under the authority of Moscow. Since then, Tatars and Russians have been learning how to live alongside one another. While periods of both peace and violence mark their relationship, Tatars and Russians have continued to influence each other at every step of their shared history.

A Treasure Trove in New York

For three weeks this summer, I conducted dissertation research at the New York Public Library with the support of a Short-Term Research Fellowship, which allows scholars from outside the New York area to travel to the city to utilize the library’s resources. I was fortunate enough to receive a grant to explore a rare collection of material published in the Tatar language in the 1920s and 1930s. I first found out about this collection while chasing down a footnote in an old history book. I was directed to a January 1927 edition of The Bulletin of the New York Public Library, in which Avrahm Yarmolinsky, the head of the Slavonic Division, described a peculiar acquisition consisting of hundreds of titles in 27 languages, primarily those of the Soviet Union’s eastern nationalities. Over time this collection continued to grow, with the Tatar-language section alone eventually amounting to over 700 books, pamphlets, journals, and newspapers.

When I first enquired about the collection, NYPL librarians could tell me very little. Given the lack of Tatar-language speakers, no one had ever fully indexed the material; just one entry existed in the entire catalogue: (http://catalog.nypl.org/record=b12334730~S1).

The librarians nonetheless encouraged me to try for a short-term fellowship, and soon after learning that my application was successful, I arrived in New York eager to work. In one of the first volumes of documents I opened, I found a transcript of an important conference in 1926 in which participants debated the future of the Tatar language. Those who opposed reform and modernization soon met an untimely end in Stalinist purges. At that moment, my initial suspicions were affirmed: the collection at the NYPL was one-of-a-kind. Nothing else like it exists in America, and almost certainly not in the rest of the world. Sitting in the quiet reading room, I found it difficult to contain my excitement. Most surprising, these texts were not in the distant archives and libraries of Russia — which I had already spent a year combing through — but rather in New York, just a short flight from home.

Language, Culture, and Cows

With the helpful supervision and support of NYPL librarians, I made my way through the 70 bound volumes and 10 loose-leaf folios of the Tatar-language collection. I had to handle the material very carefully; some of the documents threatened to fall apart in my hands. I discovered documents on almost every theme imaginable. Some were translations of Vladimir Lenin (“Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism,” “On the National Question,” “State and Revolution”), Joseph Stalin (“Trotskyism or Leninism,” “Party Work in the Village”), and other Communist Party leaders. Translations of Jack London, Emile Zola, and Lord Byron surfaced. I also found some less relevant, although entertaining, titles such as “On Choosing the Best Milk Cow at the Market” and “How to Train Your Husky.” In total, about half of the publications dealt with economics, agriculture, education, and politics in the Soviet Union. These documents predominantly came from Moscow’s Central Publishing House of the Peoples of the USSR.

The remainder of the collection consisted of publications from Kazan that reflected regional issues among Tatars. I discovered poems, plays, and novels written by the most prominent members of the Tatar intelligentsia, such as Karim Tinchurin (“Misfortune”), Galimdzhan Ibragimov (“The Tale of the Red Flowers”, “The Kazak Girl”), Hadi Taktash (“After the Storm”), Shaikhzade Babich (“Verse Collection”), and Gadel Kutui (“Hot Days”). These important writers remain largely unknown outside of the region. Most significant for my research, however, were the journals, newspapers, brochures, textbooks, and primers that recounted decisive changes to the Tatar language in the 1920s and 1930s. Beginning in 1927, Tatars abandoned their language’s Arabic script for a more “modern” Latin script. This controversial move did not endure long, though; in the late 1930s, the Tatar script changed again, this time to a Cyrillic alphabet similar to Russian. The collections at the New York Public Library revealed the many cultural, political, and religious aspects of this linguistic revolution, particularly how the Communist Party envisioned the Latin script initiating a new era of modernity for the Tatars.

Research at the NYPL

As I conducted my research, I met people sitting next to me in the library’s reading rooms studying Jewish immigration into America, the commercial interests of the United States in India, and Ukrainian aspects of the Holocaust. The New York Public Library is one of America’s premiere research establishments and has supported learning among scholars and laypeople alike for over one hundred years; its vast collections of primary sources shed light on all kinds of questions. Apart from the Tatar-language material I used, I noticed that the library has separate collections of publications from the Soviet Union in Uzbek, Yakut, Kazakh, Crimean Tatar, Bashkir, and other languages. I encountered some of these texts while working with the Tatar documents. I cannot read these languages, so they remain as they have for decades, waiting for someone to use them. Given the growing interest in the many different ethnolinguistic groups in Russia, I anticipate, and hope, that this will happen sooner rather than later.

The Short-Term Research Fellowship provided me with the opportunity to utilize the library’s one-of-a-kind collections. The material I read will help me to characterize the 1920s and 1930s as a time of dramatic change for the Tatars as they transitioned to a new era under Bolshevik rule. And many of the questions that these documents raised — the relationship between Russians and minority populations, the role of Islam in Russia, and the future for minority-language education — remain just as pertinent in Russia today. I hope that my research will help frame contemporary approaches to these issues in light of past experiences. I found invaluable material for my dissertation at the New York Public Library. What will you find?

The New York Public Library's Short-Term Research Fellowships [www.nypl.org/short-term] support scholars from outside the New York metropolitan area engaged in graduate-level, post-doctoral, or independent research with a demonstrated need to conduct research in the Library’s archival and special collections. The fellowships support research in the humanities including but not limited to art history, cultural studies, history, literature, performing arts and photography.

Islam in Europe: A Resource Guide at NYPL

Raymond Pun, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, General Research Division — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 05:08:03 -0500

According to the BBC News, "Islam is widely considered Europe's fastest growing religion, with immigration and above average birth rates leading to a rapid increase in the Muslim population." There are currently over 15 million Muslims (Sunni and Shiite) living in Europe and Islam is currently the second largest religion in the world after Christianity.

This blog post will focus on NYPL’s rich collection on the history of Islam in Europe: past and present; the historical, political, cultural, and economic relationships between the states of Europe and the Middle East concerning multiculturalism, integration, segregation, gender and democracy.

The Islamic faith arrived in the European continent from the Arabian Peninsula as early as the 12th century through religious migrations and trades from the Silk Road, an ancient route that connected to Asia.

During the Middle Ages, European-Christian armies and Muslims waged a series of religious warfare against each other. Known as the "Crusades," these holy wars were fought throughout Europe and the Middle East to liberate Jerusalem from Muslim rule. Some countries such as Spain and Malta were also ruled by Muslims. From the 7th to the 13th century, this period was also known as the "Golden Age" because of the scientific advancements, cultural achievements and literary contributions that greatly shaped the history and civilization of Spain and beyond.

In 15th century Spain, some people, particularly Jewish people spoke a unique Sephardic language called "Ladino" - a mix of Hebrew, Spanish and Arabic. During this time, the Spanish Inquisition under the order of Ferdinand II and Isabella I took place; this national policy forced Muslims and Jews to leave Spain or covert to Catholicism.

During the late 19th century, the Ottoman Empire slowly lost influence and power in the Middle East; it had dominated the region for five centuries. As a result of the decline, the European powers took the opportunity to access these territories. By the end of World War I, the empire dissolved (1923) and the British and French forces took over the Middle East. This caused further political strife which inevitably created and formed new (and revived old) nation states from the shackles of imperialism such as present-day Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Palestine, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, (north) Yemen, Qatar, and Turkey.

Today as the political conflicts and revolutions in the Middle East emerge, scholars, journalists and politicians have been discussing these external concerns affecting the world. As many Africans and Middle Easterners are migrating to Europe, the issues of immigration and discrimination, multiculturalism, and gender and religious rights in Europe are being also discussed and analyzed. From Turkey's attempt to be part of the European Union to the Chechen communities in Eastern Europe and Russia, the NYPL has an extensive research collection to get you started.

To find basic resources at NYPL, search the Library's catalog under keyword for "Islam and Europe" or type in a specific country: "Islam and France" and this should narrow down your search results. For a more advanced search, switch keyword to subject and type in "Islam -- (Country of your Choice)." This may give you other sources not listed in the keyword search. You can also narrow down your search by format, location, language or time period. For a brief bibliography, check the list below.

In May 2009, for one week, LIVE from The NYPL hosted a series of academic and cultural discussions entitled, "Islam in Europe: Insult: Fractured States?" on the impact of Islam in Europe in the 21st century. Notable speakers included the Her Majesty Queen Noor of Jordan as well as prominent journalists, politicians and scholars; subjects of discussions included immigration, religion and society, religious, civil and women’s rights.

Selected Primary Sources at NYPL

al-Sharq al-Awsat: "The international daily newspaper of the Arabs" published in London in Arabic.
PressDisplay: Provides access to current newspapers from around the world in full-color, full-page format. Includes over 1,000 U.S. and international titles. Read this NYPL blog entry for details about this resourceful database. (Also available from home).
British Newspapers: 1600-1900: Offers researchers with the most comprehensive collection of national and regional newspapers of Victorian Britain. For those conducting research on the British Empire or Victorian culture, they will find this database to be useful.
Historical International Newspapers from Europe and the Middle East available in the Microform Reading Room: for a list, check this page. (Please note that most historical international newspapers must be requested in advance, see here.)
To read current international newspapers such as The Independent (U.K.), The Times (England), Le Monde (France), El Pais (Spain), Frankfurter Allgemeine (Germany), Corriere Della Sera (Italy), please go to the DeWitt Wallace Periodicals Reading Room in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.
For more digital newspapers from Europe or the Middle East, check out this list. To learn more about researching historical newspapers, read this NYPL blog entry.
Le Monde des Religions is a French bimonthly periodical that focuses on religious traditions and spiritualities in the European continent.
Arab Historian Crusades / selected and translated from the Arabic sources by Francesco Gabrieli; translated from the italian by E.J. Costello - offers the perspectives and accounts of Arab historians viewing and documenting the Crusades.
Napoleon in Egypt chronicles the French invasion in Egypt through the eyes of a French officer and an Arab historian.
For maps, prints and images of Europe and the Middle East, check out NYPL's Digital Gallery and also check out the Map Division.
Learn more about the Islamic faith through NYPL's Three Faiths Online Exhibition>>

Selected Secondary Sources at NYPL

Why the French don't like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space by John Bowen examines the controversy behind the French government's banning of the veil and other religious symbols in public schools as it infringes on religious freedom.
Politics of The Veil by Joan Wallach Scott - Similar to Bowen's work, Scott explores "the long history of racism behind the law as well as the ideological barriers thrown up against Muslim assimilation in France."
What I Believe by Tariq Ramadan - Ramadan is "among the leading Islamic thinkers in the West, with a large following around world. In this work, he calls on Western Muslims to escape the mental, social, cultural, and religious ghettos they have created for themselves and become full partners in the democratic societies in which they live. At the same time, he calls for the rest to recognize our Muslim neighbors as citizens with rights and responsibilities the same as ours ..."
White Teeth by Zadie Smith - a novel that explores the issues of multiculturalism in London through the lens of two families. Smith also spoke at LIVE from the NYPL on Speaking in Tongues.
Muslims in the West: From Sojourners to Citizens edited by Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad is a collection of essays that "studies the impact of the growing Muslim population on Western societies, and how Muslims are adapting to life in the West."
Heretic and Hero: Muhammad and the Victorians by Phillip C. Almond examines the Victorian impressions and images of the Prophet Muhammad.
For more on Islamic Spain >>
For more on the Ottoman Empire>>
For more on Medieval Europe >>
For a more in-depth list of academic titles on this subject >>
For a current index of scholarly articles on Islam in World History, consider Index Islamicus>>
For scholarly articles on the contemporary and historical research on Islam and Europe, check out the following databases: JSTOR, Project Muse, ATLA Religion and Academic Search Premier. For more databases>>

Sneak Preview: Special Collections in Progress

Katerina Dimitriadou-Shuster, Special Formats Processing — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 12:52:44 -0500

I might be old school, but my favorite way of picking what to read, watch, listen, or even do research on, is by browsing. Letting inspiration be a part of what I learn next. Unfortunately, browsing is out of the question when one deals with closed stacks, offsite storage, and of course special collections.

As a Specialist in the Library’s Special Formats Processing department, what my colleagues and I mostly work on making available to the public is exactly the kinds of materials one cannot find on the open shelves.

Recently, Special Formats staff at the Library Services Center were asked to pull out highlights from some of the collections we are currently working on, for a little show-and-tell. It turned out a great opportunity to share with you what should be coming up next, give you the chance to browse through some of the Library’s special collections. And even though I am not unaware of the Library collections’ extent and diversity, I couldn’t help being impressed to see miniature children’s books, theatrical costume designs and scripts, Russian newspapers, comic books, original caricatures, Tibetan Buddhist pothi format books, musical scores, scrapbooks, letters and photographs, and audio-visual material, all next to one another.

As soon as these collections are fully processed and cataloged, they will appear in our Catalog, and will be available at the divisions they belong to. These include the Billy Rose Theatre Division, the The Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs,the Music Division, the Rare Book Division, and Slavic and Asian holdings.

The Reader's Den: "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" by Leo Tolstoy Wrap-up

Jessica Cline, Mid-Manhattan Library, Art and Picture Collections — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 08:19:19 -0500

Thank you for joining us in reading The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy this month. Even though we are wrapping up our posts on this novella, please continue to leave comments, ask questions, or start a discussion on Tolstoy at this post.

If you are looking for classic stories similar in subject matter to The Death of Ivan Ilyich you might also enjoy these titles:

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
The Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway
The Trial by Franz Kafka

Please join the Reader's Den in March to read and discuss Brava, Valentine, the latest title from author Adriana Trigiani.