From 1938 to the early 1940s, nearly 17,000 German and Austrian Jews fled to Shanghai, China. Until August 1938, no visas were required to enter Shanghai. Proof of ship’s passage out of Germany was enough to escape – even from a concentration camp. Author Daniel Kalla has set his historical novel, The Far Side of the Sky, in this extraordinary time and place. The book is the first of a trilogy that includes Rising Sun, Falling Shadow and Nightfall over Shanghai.
The story is told from two perspectives. Surgeon and professor Franz Adler, who was given two weeks to leave Vienna or be sent to Dachau, is a new arrival to Shanghai with his widowed sister-in-law Esther, mildly disabled daughter Hannah and family friend artist Ernst Muhler.
Mah Soon Yi (Sunny) is the daughter of an American Methodist missionary, the late Ida Hudson Mah, and a Chinese doctor, Mah Kun Li (Kingsley). Sunny always planned to go to medical school but either because of her half-caste status or her gender was denied access. Her father continues to drill her on symptoms, diagnostics and treatments.
Franz and Sunny each divide their time between the poorly supplied and equipped refugee hospital mainly serving Jewish refugees and the Country Hospital, where people with means get health care. Over time and despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles, the respect Franz and Sunny share grows into love.
Kala, who is director of emergency medicine at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver, British Columbia, excels at writing about the medical situations Franz and Sunny face, whether it is a cholera epidemic, professional politics or the ethical struggle of deciding whether to provide care to an enemy.
If you enjoy romantic historical sagas, you’ll probably enjoy The Far Side of the Sky and its sequels, which carry the story through the 1943 relocation of the Jews of Shanghai into a ghetto less than one square mile in size to the 1945 ending of the war and looming expulsion of foreigners from Mao’s Communist China. The characters’ need to design a future leaves the door wide open for another sequel although none has been discussed by Kalla.
Kalla has stated that all but one event and most of the minor characters are real. That said, the book is more novel than history.
It inspired me to do more research into the Jews of Shanghai. Iraqi-British Jewish families such as the Sassoons and Hardoons transformed the backwater port of 1850s Shanghai into the “Paris of Asia.” Their generosity helped the Jewish refugees survive until the Japanese forced foreigners with passports to leave Shanghai in 1941.
Kalla doesn’t mention the roles of Chinese diplomat Ho Feng Shan in Vienna and Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara in Lithuania who, against the wishes of their superiors, respectively issued transit visas to 3,000 and 6,000 Jews allowing them escape to Shanghai. Both men have been recognized by Israel as being among the Righteous Among the Nations.
Had there not been the escape that Shanghai’s open door offered, the world would not have benefitted from the gifts of people such as pop artist Peter Max, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury W. Michael Blumenthal, entertainment executive Michael Medavoy or Canadian violinist and electronic music composer Otto Joachim. They and many others of note were either born in Shanghai during the war or survived the Holocaust because their families fled to Shanghai.
About the Author: Daniel Kala
Daniel Kalla's first five novels were medical thrillers that focused on themes that lie at the heart of his professional life, delving into topics as diverse as superbugs, pandemics, addiction, DNA evidence and patient abuse.
His seventh, eighth and ninth novels -- The Far Side Of The Sky, Rising Sun, Falling Shadow andNightfall Over Shanghai -- are historical novels set against a startling, yet little known, chapter of World War II, when 18,000 Jews fled Germany to find shelter in Shanghai.
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