Citation:
Date Published:
9 Jan, 2021Abstract:
From 1938 to 1945, Shanghai was a temporary haven to more than 20,000 Jews originally from Europe. Most of the Jewish refugees in Shanghai survived to see the end of WWII. However, the Jewish settlement in Shanghai during WWII remains a little-known chapter of the history of the Holocaust. Recent decades have witnessed significant changes in this regard. In addition to historical studies, memoirs, and popular culture, the Shanghai experience of European Jews also found its way into literary fiction. Drawing on theories of cultural memory and media studies and based on readings of two novels—Marion Cuba’s Shanghai Legacy (2005) and Beila’s The Cursed Piano (2007, English edition 2017), this article argues that literary fiction contributes, albeit belatedly, to the collective efforts to preserve this important legacy, and may do so in a more compelling way than other media, through special perspectives, engaging storytelling, and broader accessibility.
October 2020: Junsong Chen is Associate Professor at the Department of English, East China Normal University. His areas of research include contemporary American literature, cultural memory studies, narratology, and comparative literature. Junsong Chen received his Ph.D. from Shanghai International Studies University (2010), and completed his postdoctoral research at Fudan University (2015-2018). He was a Fulbright visiting research scholar at Harvard University (2018-2019). Over the past decade, his work has been engaged primarily with issues concerning the interaction among literature, history, and politics. He is the author of Political Engagement in Contemporary American Historiographic Metafiction (2013), Cultural Memory of Post-War America in the Fiction of Don DeLillo (forthcoming), and the translator of Chinese editions of Don DeLillo’s The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories and Samuel Beckett’s Proust. His papers have appeared in such journals as Foreign Literature, Foreign Literature Studies, Contemporary Foreign Literature, etc. Currently he is working on a book examining contemporary American literature through the lens of cultural memory, tentatively titled Reconstructing Postwar America: History, Literature, and the Politics of Memory.