This unusual variation on Holocaust literature finds the author's parents fleeing to Shanghai as the lives of Jews in Vienna are increasingly endangered in 1939. Feeling alien in China but determined to make new lives for themselves, Nini and Poldi must cope with poverty and other pressures--and, eventually, the awful knowledge of the fate of their families back in Europe. When the Communists invade Shanghai after the war, the family flees once again, to Canada, where the author grew up. Vivian Jeanette Kaplan writes her story in the voice of her mother, as a poignant and fascinating semi-fictionalized memoir that is nonetheless true to the facts of her family's history.
