BOX WITH THE SUNFLOWER CLASP

'Uncovering a Jewish Family's Flight to Wartime Shanghai' this is a sweeping family memoir that tells the hidden history of a young Jewish woman's escape from 1930s Vienna to Shanghai. Rachel Meller was never close to her aunt Lisbeth, a cool and unemotional woman with a drawling Viennese-Californian accent, a cigarette always in her hand. But when Lisbeth died, she left Rachel an intricately carved Chinese box with a sunflower clasp and inside were photographs, letters and documents that led Rachel to uncover a story she had never known. From a privileged childhood in Vienna ('during which she throws herself down a lift shaft when her dancing teacher won't let her join in the end of term show'), to escaping the Holocaust by setting sail for Shanghai and making herself a new life in this very foreign city, Lisbeth and her parents build a new life of small joys and great hardship surrounded by many others who like them fled Hitler and the Nazis. 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 émigrés, where summer brings unspeakable heat and winter is bitterly cold, and where European refugees build a community and maybe a young woman can find love. Set against a backdrop of the war in the Far East, 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 which follows. With excellent discreet footnotes, plenty of archive images reproduced throughout the 320 pages.