Farewell Shanghai A Novel

Elisabeth and Theodore Weissberg, famous musicians, Hilde, a young film extra, and Vladek, an Eastern European adventurer wanted by the police on political charges, flee Nazi Germany for Shanghai at the onset of World War II. A magnet for every human ambition and vice, Shanghai is a city of extremesof dazzling wealth and wretched poverty, suffering and pleasure, and, for the four refugees, exile and safety. There, they enter the world of Jewish refugees, many of them artists and intellectuals, who must either starve or eke out an impoverished and sometimes degraded living, but they are determined to live intelligently, upholding the high culture, humor, and even, insofar as they can, the elegance of their former lives. Master storyteller Angel Wagenstein crafts an intense narrative of life and death, passionate love, and profound courage against the backdrop of the war and the millions of lives caught up in it.

Angel Wagenstein is a prizewinning Bulgarian novelist. Isaac’s Torah was his first novel, and it has been translated into German, Russian, French, Czech, and now English. Farewell, Shanghai (Handsel Books, 2007), his third novel, won the Jean Monnet award in 2004.

Elizabeth Frank is Professor of Modern Languages and Literature at Bard College.

Deliana Simeonova was born in Bulgaria and studied English philology and American literature at the University of Sofia. She has worked for civil-society NGOs in Tajikistan, Serbia, Liberia, and now in her native Bulgaria.