Word: ristaino
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...Marcia Reynders Ristaino's aptly named book, Port of Last Resort (Stanford University Press; 380 pages) traces the story of two of the communities?the White Russians and Jews?that gave the city its reputation. The decadence of old Shanghai has attracted many writers, but Ristaino's argument is that most have concentrated on the Western ?lites, or the Chinese communities they ruled, overlooking the rich contribution made by the waves of refugees who pitched up on its hostile shores. No visa or passport was required to enter Shanghai and that fact above all others gave the city its character...
...none of this did much to give the community back its sense of pride and Ristaino paints a moving and, on the whole, sad picture of their lives. Many never got over the loss of social status and the trauma of exile and eventually succumbed to alcoholism, drug addiction and debt. Wives and daughters of once secure professionals and army officers drifted into the twilight world of the city's nightlife as tea dancers and hostesses. The situation was so bad it even attracted the attention of the League of Nations. A report compiled by its officials estimated that...
...Ristaino's portrait of the city's Jewish diaspora is less bleak. The first refugees from Germany arrived on the S.S. Conte Verge in late 1933. Facing terrible persecution back home, the Jews of Central Europe were prepared to look to any port in a storm and Shanghai was one of the very few available. What must have gone through their minds as they arrived on the Bund and confronted Shanghai's sweaty summers and teeming waterfront can only be guessed at, but they did have one central advantage; Jewish ?migr?s had been trickling in for years and there were...
...these two large refugee communities didn't have a great deal in common and Ristaino doesn't pretend they did. Her point is that there is something uniquely awful about the experience of having to begin all over again and the way in which the various individuals and communities coped with the challenge played a key part in shaping Shanghai's foreign enclaves. For all its faults, the city's polyglot culture created a kind of tolerance; Germans of all political persuasions, she says, liked to spend an afternoon in the war years wandering through the Jewish ghetto, because...
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