PUBLISHED WORKS

Witness to History

From Vienna To Shanghai:

A Memoir of Escape, Survival and Resilience

On the dark, rainy afternoon of November 28, 1938, a slight 18-year-old Austrian man took in his first impressions of Shanghai. Paul Hoffmann had left his family and all that was familiar to him in Vienna and was now among a forlorn stream of thousands of Jewish refugees into China to escape Nazism. For the next thirteen years, Shanghai would be his home, and he made the most of the last years of the foreign-dominated world of old Shanghai. Witness to History is the moving memoir of a man caught up in the tides of history, who witnessed and experienced the Nazi revolution in Europe, the Japanese invasion of China and the Communist victory in China in 1949 and emerged from the challenges all the wiser. In Shanghai, he taught mathematics, lived the high life, and worked for an American lawyer, Norwood Allman, who was also secretly the US spy chief in China before and after the Communist takeover.

Review for Witness to History From Vienna to Shanghai: A Memoir of Escape, Survival and Resilience

"I was amazed at the detail of Paul's memories and what they went through, especially given my lack of knowledge of that community. I am thankful for his story and the work of his daughter to bring his story to light." -Neil Plain

shalama: MY 96 seasons in china

Shalama is a Russian Jewish girl, born in 1928 in the Chinese city of Harbin, whose life tracks one of the great rescues and rebirths of the 20th century — the move of Jewish people from Europe to Harbin, then on to Shanghai and eventually the United States. Harbin was a remote town close to the Russian border which in a few years had changed from a fishing village into a sophisticated European city thanks to an influx of Jews escaping pogroms and White Russians fleeing the Bolsheviks. Many thousands, including Shalama’s parents, crowded into the city and many of them prospered. But the Japanese occupied Harbin in the 1930s, and at twelve years old, Shalama and her family moved southwards to the international port city of Shanghai. There, Shalama went to the Shanghai Jewish School, became a typist, changed her name to Shirley, met and married an Austrian Jew named Paul Hoffmann and remade her life.

Told in story form by Shirley’s daughter, Shalama is a moving epic that captures the feel of those dangerous times when the world had lost its moorings. After the family’s escape from Shanghai, after the Communist takeover, Paul and Shirley moved to the United States, but towards the end of her life, an unexpected turn of events brought both enlightenment and closure to questions that had remained a mystery throughout her lifetime.

Reviews for Shalama: My 96 Seasons in China

"Jean Hoffmann Lewanda gives us a vivid picture of what it was like to be a White Russian Jew in Harbin and Shanghai in the first half of the last century: stateless, struggling to make a life in an alien world while preserving an ancient culture...Pick up Shalama and see and live it at eye level." -Martin Peterson

"Complex, entertaining, and creatively told, Lewanda’s prose and vibrant descriptions really bring Harbin to life and explore the complex multicultural society that her mother and extended family helped develop." -Lily