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Novel about Chinese rescuer of Jews raises questions about facts vs. fiction in Holocaust stories
TAIPEI (JTA) — Ho Feng-Shan, the Chinese diplomat stationed in Vienna who helped thousands of Jews escape from Europe during World War II, never met Adolf Eichmann.
But in “Night Angels,” a novel based on his life, Feng-Shan comes face to face with Eichmann several times — and his wife Grace’s Jewish tutor, Lola, tries to kill the architect of the Holocaust.
That detail is one of many that has spurred Ho Manli, Feng-Shan’s daughter, to speak out against “Night Angels,” the fourth novel by the Chinese-American author Weina Dai Randel. Manli says the book distorts elements of her father’s story, which was unknown before she spent decades documenting his heroic efforts to issue visas allowing Jews to escape to Shanghai.
“What I have found in doing this story is it’s very difficult to try to maintain the historical integrity of the facts,” Manli told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Countless people … want to use this for their own means, whether it be commercial like this novelist, whether it be political, or whatever. So over the two decades that I have been doggedly trying to uncover more and more, I’ve been constantly fending off these sorts of opportunistic assaults.”
The dispute is casting a shadow over the novel, released this month, and reinvigorating longstanding debates over the importance of truth in historical fiction — particularly in stories about the Holocaust.
“Night Angels” follows Feng-Shan and his wife, Grace, as they risk their lives by issuing visas that allow thousands of Jews escape Germany and Austria to Shanghai. Grace, one of the novel’s narrators and main characters, is based on Feng-Shan’s real second wife with the same name who was no longer in Vienna after the Anschluss — Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938, and the period in which the novel is set. By that time, Feng-Shan had already sent Grace away to Boston. She never witnessed Nazi rule or Feng-Shan’s efforts to save Jews, Manli writes.
Several other events in the book, including Grace’s friendship with a Jewish woman who attempts to assassinate Eichmann and her development of a morphine addiction, are fully fictional.
Manli first took aim at the book in a column last month in China Daily. The novel, she wrote, “exploits real names, real people, real events and places, in what is essentially a Holocaust-themed melodrama.”
“In online reviews, readers say that they are thrilled to learn of my father and this history — except of course, what they have learned is not really history, my father’s, or anyone else’s,” she wrote.
Randel and her publisher, Amazon Publishing, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Randel dedicated the novel to “Ho Feng-Shan, his family, and all the angels in Vienna and beyond.” The book includes a disclaimer disclosing that its contents are a work of fiction and a product of the author’s imagination.
But that’s not satisfactory to some readers, including Tina Kanagaratnam, co-founder of the heritage group Historic Shanghai, whose book group read a previous Randel story set in Shanghai.
“If you’re talking about a historical character, you have to get the history right. Otherwise, just create a fictional character,” Kanagaratnam told JTA. “This is written for people who don’t know the history, but as Manli said, that’s dangerous, because then that’s what they remember. That’s what they take away.”
Ho Monto, left, and Ho Manli stand in front of the Righteous Among the Nations wall at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, Jan. 23, 2001. (Isaac Harari/AFP via Getty Images)
“Night Angels” has accumulated thousands of positive reviews on Amazon and has been promoted by Jewish organizations across the country. On Wednesday, the Jewish Book Council, in collaboration with Tablet Magazine and the Jewish Museum in New York City, will hold an event with Randel and journalist Jonathan Freedland that will explore “fact, fiction, and the sometimes blurred line between them.”
Randel’s book adds to a long list of Holocaust stories occupying that blurry territory, dating from the genre’s early days. Many readers believed, for example, that “The Painted Bird,” the pivotal work of Holocaust fiction from the 1960s, was based on author Jerzy Koszinski’s experience during the Holocaust; it was not. Scholars and booksellers have long agonized over whether to call Elie Wiesel’s “Night” a memoir or a novel, and whether the distinction matters when it is taught in American classrooms.
The fight has extended to questions over who can tell which stories from Holocaust. In 2014, Haaretz journalist Judy Maltz filed a lawsuit against Penguin Canada and author Jenny Witterick alleging that Witterick’s novel, “My Mother’s Secret,” copied Maltz’s documentary film about her family’s rescue during World War II. The court ruled in favor of Witterick on the grounds that copyright protection does not apply to historical events.
“An author is only ever responsible to their own fiction. They have creative license. And fictionalization of other people against their will is part of the history of literature,” said Helen Finch, a professor at the University of Leeds who studies representations of the Holocaust in German literature. “But that doesn’t absolve the writer from criticism.”
Manli — a journalist who has worked for the Boston Globe and helped found the China Daily, a state-backed media outlet, in 1981 — has made it her mission to set the record straight on Feng-Shan’s story. She began researching her father after his death in 1997, while writing his obituary. One line in his memoir from 1990 that recalled “saving who knows how many Jews” piqued her interest and led to a 25-year quest to document the extent of what her father did during the war.
His story of defying both his own government and the government of Germany to write Shanghai visas for thousands of persecuted Jews had been previously unknown, even to the refugees themselves — most of whom never met Feng-Shan.
Manli’s research led to Feng-Shan’s recognition by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum and memorial authority, in 2000 as “Righteous Among the Nations,” an honor given to those who risked their own lives to help Jews during World War II. Since then, greater attention has been paid to his story, and memorials across the world, from Israel to China to Italy, bear his name today.
Manli said Randel reached out to her several times before her book was published but after it had already been written. According to Manli, Randel sought out her blessing on the book by phone and email, saying that “the Holocaust history and your father’s history is now being forgotten” and adding that she wanted to help spread that history. Manli, who is working on a book of her own about her father, said she refused to answer, “just from the tone of her letter and what she wanted.”
“I have been burned before by this,” Manli told JTA. “I knew immediately that this was not something that I wanted to participate in and certainly that I wasn’t going to endorse.”
In an email shared with JTA in response to Manli’s editorial, Randel wrote that she has “great respect for Dr. Ho Fenghan[sic] and his family. I’m surprised to hear such strong negative criticism. I’m puzzled to see my gesture of respect is viewed in such a hostile way. If Ms. Manli Ho wishes to speak to me, I’m here.”
Randel, according to a biography on her website, came to the United States from China at 24 and became “the first Asian American novelist who intertwined Chinese history with the Jewish diaspora in Shanghai during WWII.”
Her previous novel, “The Last Rose of Shanghai,” follows a Chinese woman who falls in love with a German Jewish refugee living in the Shanghai Ghetto, the restricted area in which over 20,000 displaced Jews lived during World War II, under brutal oversight by Japanese officials who occupied the area. In interviews before the book’s 2021 release, Randel recalled hearing about Jewish refugees while she was living near the district that housed the ghetto.
After moving to the United States, she married an American Jew and is raising her children with both cultures in Boston. She has said “The Last Rose of Shanghai” was inspired by her interest in the history she saw in Shanghai and a desire to pay homage to her Jewish side of the family.
“I think it’s apt to say the survival of Shanghai Jews is also a story of how we as different races and as human beings shine and triumph over war and adversity,” she said in a January 2022 interview with World Literature Today.
But other researchers and authors deeply familiar with Feng-Shan’s story and Jewish history in Shanghai told JTA that “The Last Rose of Shanghai” also contained historical inaccuracies, including misrepresentation of real people who appear as characters, such as Victor Sassoon, a Jewish businessman and member of the dynasty known as the “Rothschilds of the East,” and Laura Margolis, the first female Joint Distribution Committee representative.
The book also includes a character named Goya, described as “a shameless Jew … who somehow had won the Japanese’s trust.”
The Jewish character is based on the real Kanoh Ghoya, who was not Jewish, but a notoriously cruel Japanese officer who had dubbed himself “king of the Jews” and “was infamous for his inhumane treatment of ghetto inhabitants,” according to the USC Shoah Foundation.
According to Publisher’s Marketplace, “The Last Rose of Shanghai” was sold to Lake Union Publishing — an imprint of Amazon Publishing — in 2021 as half of a two-book deal worth between $100,000 and $250,000. It was a finalist for a Jewish National Book Award that year. (The Jewish Book Council, which confers those awards, did not respond to multiple requests for comments about the “Night Angels” event.)
Kanagaratnam said Historic Shanghai’s book group read “The Last Rose of Shanghai” in 2021 and hosted Randel for an event. The group was unsatisfied by Randel’s response when factual issues were brought to her attention, particularly the characterization of Ghoya as Jewish, Randel dismissed them, Kanagaratnam said.
Randel’s novel is only part of a growing consciousness among the general public of the Shanghai Jewish refugee story. In recent decades, especially following the normalization of Israel-China relations in 1992 and Feng-Shan’s recognition by Yad Vashem, both governments have promoted the history, sometimes distorting facts to push different narratives about their wartime past.
New books and other media adaptations about the Shanghai Jewish refugee story have proliferated, such as the musical “Shanghai Sonatas” (2022) and the novels “Someday We Will Fly” (2019),“The Lives Before Us” (2019), and “The World and All It Holds” (2023). Other films and books are forthcoming.
“The audience of people who are interested in, if you will, an ‘exotic’ Jewish story, I think has meant that we’re seeing more and more of these. Everyone’s heard the Holocaust story. But now here’s one in an exotic setting,” said Kanagaratnam. “I think authors need to take responsibility. But honestly, I also blame the publishing industry, because where are the fact-checkers? A lot of the stuff in this can be really easily googled.”
Finch said novels that are set during that period are “always a work of fiction about the present.”
“So the question is, why is this author writing this book now? What does that say about the current moment when she’s writing? And what is with Randel trying to reflect either consciously or unconsciously in contemporary politics as well?”
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The post Novel about Chinese rescuer of Jews raises questions about facts vs. fiction in Holocaust stories appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Israel Becomes World’s 7th Largest Arms Exporter
Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, on display during a visit by US President Joe Biden. Photo: Ariel Hermoni / Ministry of Defense
Israel has become the world’s seventh-largest arms exporter, steadily increasing its share of global weapons sales even amid a multi-front war and mounting international criticism, according to a new report.
On Monday, the Swedish-based Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) released its latest report on global arms exports, analyzing trends from the last five years (2021–2025) and comparing them with the previous period (2016–2020).
For the first time, Israel has surpassed Great Britain to become the world’s seventh-largest arms exporter, with its share of global weapons sales rising to 4.4 percent in 2021–2025, up from 3.1 percent in the previous period.
“Despite conducting the war in Gaza and attacks in Iran, Lebanon, Qatar, Syria, and Yemen, Israel still managed to increase its share of global arms exports,” Zain Hussain, researcher at SIPRI’s Arms Transfers Program, said in a statement.
According to the newly released report, Israel also ranked as the 14th-largest arms importer in the world, acquiring most of its weapons from the United States (68 percent) and Germany (31 percent), with a small share from Italy (1 percent), showing that arms embargoes and international criticism have done little to slow its defense trade.
Overall, the total volume of the global arms trade rose by 9.2 percent in the last five years compared to the previous period, with European nations more than tripling their weapons imports to become the world’s largest arms-importing region amid rising regional tensions with Russia and escalating conflict in the Middle East.
The US continued to be the world’s largest arms exporter in 2021–2025, holding a 42 percent share of global sales, followed by France (9.8 percent), Russia (6.8 percent), Germany (5.7 percent), China (5.6 percent), Italy (5.1 percent), and Israel.
Among Middle Eastern countries, Saudi Arabia leads as the top purchaser of American arms with 12 percent of sales, followed by Qatar and Kuwait, while Israel ranks 12th globally, receiving just 3.1 percent of all US arms exports
SIPRI’s latest report comes as the Jewish state faces growing international pressure, with European states among the most vocally critical and threatening arms embargoes over Israel’s defensive war against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza and its military campaign against Iran.
Despite these threats, Israel’s arms exports have continued to grow, solidifying its position as a leading player in the global weapons market.
For example, the UK and Germany have pressed ahead with arms purchases from Israel despite repeated threats and public warnings to suspend defense trade, signaling the limits of international pressure.
Israel now supplies 8.2 percent of British arms purchases, second only to the US, which accounts for 85 percent.
In Israel’s biggest-ever arms export deal, Germany recently acquired the Arrow missile defense system, marking the largest weapons sale in the country’s history.
According to the SIPRI report, Israel’s growth in global arms exports was driven primarily by international sales of air defense systems, even as the country faced heavy domestic demand for weapons amid a multi-front war.
Overall, Israel sold arms to 23 European countries (41 percent of its total exports), 10 Asian countries (40 percent), five in North and Latin America (8.6 percent), and seven African nations.
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I was sexually abused at my synagogue as a child. Here’s how our community can protect others from that horror
This week, I settled a lawsuit that I filed nearly five years ago against the synagogue in New Jersey where I was sexually abused in the 1990s while learning to read Torah. The settlement agreement is significant because of its restorative focus, which I designed intentionally to help make my childhood community a safer place for children. Here is my full story.
I am glad to see these developments. But it should not have taken years of litigation to force a synagogue to implement protective measures that should be part of the work of every Jewish organization that counts children as part of its community.
My experience, and the enablement of my abuser by multiple Jewish institutions, fuels my passion to advocate for change in how Jewish institutions approach child safety.
Many Jewish institutions still struggle to follow basic policies and procedures for handling these kinds of incidents when they are put to the test — although, in recent years, more have proactively adopted policies and procedures and implemented training programs that help.
But safeguarding Jewish institutions from child predators requires more than a set of rules. It requires that Jewish leaders have an informed understanding of the topic, and more importantly, have the courage to speak up and make difficult decisions. The Jewish community desperately needs more of both.
Here’s what needs to be done.
Appreciate the danger within
Combating child sex abuse starts with understanding that 93% of sex crimes committed against children are perpetrated by someone the child knows and trusts. Jewish institutions must begin to reckon more thoroughly with that fact.
On a recent visit to a Jewish day school, an administrator told me that she runs background checks on everyone who enters campus, including every vendor and contractor, without fail. When I asked if she ran a background check on me, she demurred.
I understand why. But Jewish institutions need to find a way to effuse warmth and community without shortcutting safety.
Train kids and parents, not just teachers
One way to begin this work is to bring children and parents into abuse prevention training, in which teachers are already generally required to participate. This kind of training teaches us how to recognize grooming behavior, which is prevalent in most cases of child sex abuse.
Professional training also helps parents learn how to talk to their children about sensitive topics, which reduces a predator’s ability to prey on a child’s natural curiosity. My own children’s day school recently hired ChildUSA to audit its child safety policies. Later, it conducted age-appropriate student training, followed by an abuse prevention workshop for parents. It’s an easy but highly effective example that all day schools should follow, yet few do.
Draw clearer lines
Another way that we can reduce child sex abuse is by better defining red lines, and by proactively responding to inappropriate behavior.
A few years ago, I alerted a Chabad rebbetzin that a regular congregant watched pornography on his cell phone during Rosh Hashanah services. “It only happened once,” she said, and besides, “he has dementia — where’s your compassion!” Other colleagues breathed a sigh of relief — “at least he didn’t touch anyone.”
Our instinct is to try and explain malbehavior through an innocent lense, but when it comes to sexual boundaries, we should resist that urge. Sexual predators intentionally push both physical and conversational boundaries to normalize their behavior. We need to recognize boundary-pushing and appreciate its role as a grooming tactic.
Prioritize the safety and wellbeing of survivors
Yes, our tradition teaches us to be slow to judgment and quick to compassion. It’s a wise dictate, but not one appropriately applied to convicted child abusers, especially as data shows they often reoffend. The Orthodox community in Englewood, New Jersey allowed my abuser to fully participate in communal life long after discovering he had hidden multiple convictions. Some leaders admonished their community as insufficiently compassionate for having concerns about his involvement.
Their mistake: practicing more compassion for a child abuser than for his victims.
Predators tend to find many ways to get close to their victims, and often frequent multiple communities to maximize their pool of victims and to avoid detection of their behavior. These are both textbook characteristics of how my abuser has long operated. Jewish leaders need to speak up, both within their own communities, and when they know predators have moved to new ones.
Conduct transparent investigations
When faced with a case of suspected abuse, it’s imperative that institutions conduct a transparent, independent investigation, and disclose its entire contents, redacting only information that could identify a victim.
Too often, Jewish institutions conduct internal reviews, only disclosing a summary rather than exposing the entire process to public scrutiny. Such exercises often allow an institution to maintain legal privilege over the contents of the report, thus preventing its contents from being used against it.
These investigations are, therefore, largely performative. Putting children first means Jewish institutions should commit to complete transparency to allow the public to fully understand what occurred and how it was handled, and to ensure that conflicts are properly managed.
Prioritize accountability
Holding Jewish institutional leadership accountable for their actions — and inaction — is needed to ensure that child safety is handled professionally. Accountability means articulating standards of expected conduct, and taking remedial action — like relieving bad actors of their jobs — when conduct falls below the standard.
Community members, lay leadership, and the professional organizations that provide the backbone for institutional Jewish leadership — such as the Rabbinical Assembly — need to be more proactive in holding clergy accountable.
If you sit on the board of a day school, camp or synagogue, you must ask whether your institution is doing everything possible to create a safe environment for kids.
Do you have a child safety policy? Does your board include people with a background in child safety and abuse prevention? Have you participated in abuse prevention training?
If your institution is dealing with a sensitive matter, are you working with professionals who have experience in abuse prevention? If your institution mishandled a case, have you owned up to it?
And finally, if you’re reading this and survived being sexually abused as a child, I believe you and I support you. It’s not your fault. And you have the right to speak up and be heard at the time of your choosing.
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This Jewish philosopher knows our politics are absurd — and why that’s a good thing
Should we survive the next three years, the odds are good we will look back on Donald Trump’s second presidency as the “Years of Living Absurdly.” This, at least, is the view of media outlets, ranging from the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times to The Daily Beast and The Guardian, on the dizzying variety of the president’s words and actions.
But there is the politically absurd and, well, the philosophically absurd. For the latter, a good place to start is with the contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel, who was born to German-Jewish refugees living in prewar Belgrade who then immigrated to the United States after the war’s end. Perhaps understandably, Nagel had an ironic take on the word.
In 1970, this professor of philosophy at New York University, perhaps best known for his essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, published “The Absurd,” an essay which could be thought of as “What Is It Like to Be in an Absurd World?” In a dozen sharp and snappy pages, Nagel makes the case — unusual for most professional philosophers who treat the “absurd” with either skepticism or scorn — that “absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics.”
Of course, when we hear the word “absurd,” some of us tend to think of Albert Camus. That we do so is not at all absurd. After all, when he was still an unknown 20-something, he declared that “the feeling of absurdity can strike us in the face at any street corner.” In other words, at one point or another in most of our lives, we have reason to look to the skies and ask what the reason is to our lives — and fail to receive an answer.
“The absurd is born,” Camus writes, “from this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”
The young Camus eventually found the reason in rebelling against this absurd condition, finding meaning not beyond, but in this world. Yet Nagel did not fall for this youthful and heroic response. “It seems to me,” he drily observes, “romantic and slightly self-pitying.” But he nevertheless acknowledged that Camus was on to something essential and enduring. It is simply that our absurdity “warrants neither that much distress nor that much defiance.”
Though I fell hard for Camus, I wonder if Nagel is on to something important. He suggests that we think of the absurd as a form of epistemological skepticism. By this, he means our unbreakable habit of taking the world, and everything which constitutes it, for granted. We cannot help but do so even though we can always provide excellent philosophical reasons for not doing so. You know the familiar variations on this tune. For example, how do I know that what I unthinkingly take for reality is not a dream (or nightmare)? Or, for that matter, how do I know what I unconsciously take for my embodied or physical self is not simply an electrical impulse sent to a brain floating in a vat? And so on.
Despite these skeptical doubts that reason cannot satisfactorily answer, I nevertheless experience the table where I am now sitting as very real and not a dream. And I live my life as if “I” am the white-haired figure I see in the mirror, one who also enjoys life. Nagel quotes a famous line by the Scottish skeptic, David Hume: “Since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices…I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and I am merry with friends.” As for the skeptical speculations, they are filed away for another day of philosophizing.
To think absurdly, Nagel suggests, is not unlike to think skeptically. It happens when we question not the reality of the world, but instead the seriousness with which we treat it. While I might well insist on the very real possibility that life is meaningless — a position I underscore in my existentialism class with all the gravitas an aging academic can muster — I confess that, phony that I am, I do take my life very seriously. And, moreover, this is what I wish my students would do.
When we step away, if only mentally and momentarily, from the world we take so seriously, Nagel believes we win something important — namely, the ability “to appreciate the cosmic unimportance” of our situation. By “transcending ourselves in thought,” we adopt a view from above — an ironic perspective — that provides the critical distance necessary to take our lives less seriously.
We can and must, as Camus argues, rebel against an unjust and unraveling world. The situation in which we find ourselves as a nation — one at the mercy of a merciless and monstrous ego — is existentially important. But is it not, from a certain perspective, also absurdly unimportant? This is the gift of ironic distance; by “making us spectators of our own lives,” we can smile at the spectacle in which we all have roles.
But irony, if I understand Nagel rightly, is also a burden. Our late-night comics are masters at slicing the men and women who run our country down to size, but here is the rub: While we are busy delighting in the deflation of these oversized egos, we are also delighting in the inflation of our own. We take comfort in our superior smarts and morals, but as we all discover sooner or later, this comfort proves as lasting as a May fly.
As the philosopher Alexander Nehamas has suggested, true irony, or at least the irony practiced by Plato in his dialogues, is meant not only to knock the fools in power down a peg or two, but also those who are busy laughing — e.g., you and me. In an age which pits one half of the country against the other, no lesson — one that teaches modesty and humility — seems more vital.
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