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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 visionary Jewish poet who survived the Holocaust but not its aftermath
Paul Celan: A Life
By Anna Arno
Translated by Soren Gauger
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 416 pages, $35
During a 1969 poetry reading in Israel, Paul Celan’s audience requested “Deathfugue,” his most famous poem. With its hypnotic images of death as “a master from Deutschland,” prisoners drinking the “black milk of dawn” and smoke rising to “a grave in the clouds,” it remains one of the most powerful artifacts of the Holocaust.
But like a rock star weary of endlessly repeating his greatest hits, Celan declined. Instead, he offered other poems, scorned by some commentators as “hermetic, esoteric, divorced from reality.”
So we learn from Anna Arno’s intelligent, intricate biography, Paul Celan: A Life, ably translated from the Polish by Soren Gauger. Interweaving literary criticism with Celan’s life story, Arno quotes liberally from Pierre Joris’ English translations. Even so, she can’t quite do the work justice. In translation and wrenched from their poetic context, Celan’s innovative verses, credited with a radical remaking of the German language, come across as cryptic and impenetrable.
Arno covers Celan’s schooling, wartime experiences, work history, travels, friendships, psychiatric ordeals and overlapping romantic interests, at times departing from strict chronology. Though defensible, the narrative strategy renders the book somewhat convoluted.
One thread is Celan’s intermittent, decadeslong involvement with the accomplished Austrian poet and novelist Ingeborg Bachmann. That relationship, more passionate and enduring for Bachmann, preceded his mostly happy marriage to the French artist Gisèle Lestrange and continued during it. In an odd twist, Bachmann and Lestrange, bonded by both their love for Celan and their anxiety about his well-being, developed “a kind of impossible sisterly friendship.”
Despite Celan’s devotion to his wife, “other women,” Arno writes, “were always drifting through his life.” A chapter toward the end of the biography details some of Celan’s most important romantic relationships. Other chapters focus on his inventiveness as a translator and his worsening mental illness.
Celan was born Paul Antschel in 1920 in Czernowitz, Romania (officially Cernăuți, and now Chernivtsi, Ukraine) on the fringes of the recently defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. The French-sounding Celan is a pen name, an anagram of Ancel, a Romanian version of Antschel.
Celan’s parents were German-speaking Jews, and German was Celan’s native language. But he was a polyglot, a talent that shaped his poetry and enabled his career as a translator. Along with Romanian, in which he wrote some early poems, and French, the language of his postwar life in Paris, he learned Russian (under Soviet occupation) and English. He had at least “a passive knowledge of Yiddish,” picked up enough Hebrew for his Bar Mitzvah and studied Italian, Latin and Greek. “His intellectual ease gave him a sense of superiority,” Arno writes.
World War II interrupted Celan’s medical studies in France, and back home he enrolled in Romance language courses. The Soviet occupation was brutal but, for Jews, the Romanian fascist regime that succeeded it was worse. Celan’s parents were deported and died in a Nazi labor camp. Celan, separated from them, survived forced labor, but remained “wracked with grief” over his parents’ fate. He would describe “Deathfugue,” written in 1945, as his mother’s epitaph and grave. The poem may have influenced Theodor Adorno, who famously described poetry after Auschwitz as “barbaric,” to modify his views.
After leaving a ruined Czernowitz for Bucharest, where Celan translated, wrote poetry, flirted with Surrealism and “bounced from one relationship to the next,” he traveled to Vienna. “Young, dashing, full of charm,” he eventually settled in Paris and became a naturalized French citizen. But he chose German as his poetic language, despite the emotional dissonance that entailed.
Over the years, he traveled to Germany to read his work and accept prizes. In the process, he developed relationships with leading postwar German writers, including Heinrich Böll, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Günter Grass. But the 1950s were a tricky time. “He could have crossed paths with a murderer at every step,” Arno writes.
Celan recoiled viscerally at what he saw as persistent antisemitic currents in German culture, which hadn’t yet reckoned with the magnitude of Nazi crimes. He interpreted bad reviews as instances of antisemitism, and Arno suggests that he wasn’t always wrong.
Even more traumatic were accusations of plagiarism leveled against him by Claire Goll, the widow of Yvan Goll, whose poetry he had translated. Arno describes the charges as both malicious and baseless, and “probably an act of revenge for her spurned advances.”
They nevertheless affected Celan’s reputation and threatened his health. “Claire Goll’s smear campaign was to become the main cause of the poet’s mental breakdown,” Arno asserts. It’s a strong statement. Certainly, he had endured other losses: the murder of his parents, the death of his day-old infant son, François, after a botched delivery.
On the cusp of middle age, Arno reports, Celan experienced bursts of paranoia. “He could not always separate justified precautions from obsessive mistrust, vigilance from a fit of persecution mania,” she writes. “His deeply buried despair, moral severity, and tempestuous personality all caused sudden and violent fits.”
In 1962, he had what Arno calls “his first bout of psychosis,” which included hallucinations and violent episodes. He was hospitalized and medicated and underwent psychotherapy. Insulin injections, a since-discredited treatment, damaged his motor skills. Even during his hospitalizations, he continued to write poetry. (His productivity in the throes of mental health crises calls to mind Sylvia Plath.)
Arno, noting that Celan’s medical records remain sealed and his journals unavailable, doesn’t offer a diagnosis. The hallucinations and paranoia suggest schizophrenia, but Arno also mentions mania and depression, along with numerous suicide attempts. He tried his best to stay connected to his only child, Eric. But his instability cost him many friendships and ultimately his marriage.
In 1970, the 49-year-old poet drowned himself in the Seine, joining a sad company of writers who survived the Holocaust but not its emotional aftermath. What exactly triggered Celan’s suicide is impossible to know. Arno says only: “He was no longer capable of supporting the weight of the past as it flushed to the surface.”
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‘The Naked Woman’ asks — what would Jewish Chekhov look like?
Earlier this year, a lauded revival of Anton Chekhov’s overlooked opus Ivanov occasioned the question: What if Chekhov, that great chronicler of overeducated depressives, was a bit more Jewish?
That show has a substantial Jewish subplot, with the title character’s wife subjected to antisemitic smears.
For Jewish Russians, Chekhov, like his great interpreter Stanislavsky, is a part of the culture they still claim. For that reason expat companies, like Igor Golyak’s Arlekin Players, have long been in the business of reinterpreting him. Novelist Gary Shteyngart, in his pandemic novel, Our Country Friends, took things a step further, transmuting Chekhov’s dachas into the Belleville bungalow colony where he, and many ex-Soviet Jews, would summer.
Allie Avital and Alia Azamat Ashkenazi’s The Naked Woman, now in a limited run at 154 Theater, returns this proposition to the stage with some usual markers of the Russian master: characters brought low by their own inertia, a love triangle, frustrated ambitions and failures to launch. Into the mix they add the following staples of first generation Jews: immigrant parents’ expectations and the tension between the generation that recalls the weight of repression and the rising one that has only ever known American freedom. There are obligatory references to rabbis; the word “mensch” is dropped, but this is not a Shabbat-observing crew. If you know this specific demographic, there’s no doubting the affiliation.
Misha (Ilia Volok and Roman Freud alternate the role — Freud played him my evening), a successful architect, who moved to the U.S. decades before for a better life. For the New Year, and his birthday, he has made camp at his upstate country home. Some creaky exposition — on Pili Weeber’s set of floating timber, the Empire State’s answer to birch trees — sets up the interpersonal tensions that will go off in later acts like Chekhov’s proverbial gun.
Misha’s 35-year-old daughter Dasha (MaryKate Glenn) tells him his last check for her grad school tuition bounced. She’s there with her all-American boyfriend and is secretly pregnant. His bohemian older brother Grisha (Dima Koan), ever-clad in funky sweaters and kerchiefs by costume designer Kostya Goncharuk, resents Misha for their parents’ decision to only pay for his higher education and for being dependent on him for income. Rina (Natasha Goubskaya), Misha’s long-suffering wife is quietly working to save the family from financial ruin.
With these pieces set in place, the holiday is interrupted by, as advertised, a naked woman, screaming for help. Dismissing her as a “druggie in the woods,” Misha does nothing, a choice that brings questions of insularity and assimilation to the fore.
Dasha can’t get over her father’s inaction.
Rina explains it: “This American obsession with caring about strangers It’s all words and ideas. It’s THEATER. It doesn’t mean anything.”
The play is based on a short film by Avital, an accomplished director of visually-striking music videos for the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Olivia Rodrigo and Moses Sumney. In that more abridged version, with mostly Russian dialogue, the Naked Woman stands in for the forces of mortality.
As one character in that film notes, in Russian, the word for death is “in the feminine, and therefore death is a woman. When death doesn’t hide, doesn’t wear a disguise, then it’s naked.”
Here the character is a more elusive metaphor: an avatar for Misha’s selfishness, the rift between his and Dasha’s concern for others or maybe her perception of herself as vulnerable and in need of saving. She could also be Rina’s aching feeling of neglect.
Avital and Ashkenazi’s background in film — Ashkenazi has a long resumé as a script supervisor and directed the short Esther’s Choice — is evident in the drama’s pacing. The piece doesn’t have the patience of Chekhov, who lets the action settle around the samovar and steep in subtext. This makes the show more dynamic, but more superficial in its psychology.
“I’ve always wondered why no one can truly love me, why they always leave me,” Dasha tells her father, coming off a monologue that hits the ear like a stilted translation of The Seagull’s yearning actress Nina or Vanya’s tragically dutiful Sonya. “But now I understand why. Because I’m just like you.”
It’s a tidy thesis, from creatives whose film work lives on the power of suggestion, with cinematography and movement being the major narrative force. Though Avital’s staging is capable, the script is crying out for an injection of subtlety that perhaps only a closeup can deliver.
This play is something of a proof of concept for a forthcoming feature film to be directed by Avital. If the short is any indication, its words and ideas may translate better taking a step away from the theater.
It may not be the natural medium for Chekhov, but it’s well-suited to his heirs.
Allie Avital and Alia Azamat Ashkenazi’s The Naked Woman is playing through June 14 at Theatre 154 in Manhattan. Tickets and more information can be found here.
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Iran says it has finished striking Israel, after Trump says both countries ‘must immediately stop’
(JTA) — Iran says it has completed its attack on Israel after its missile barrage on Sunday night launched the first direct exchange of hostilities since April.
Iran’s military command said the barrage, which did not do any major damage in Israel, represented its “painful response” to an Israeli attack on a Hezbollah installation in Lebanon. The statement was published in English on Iranian state media, which attributed the halt to pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump.
Trump had denounced the Iranian strike and publicly urged Israel not to respond. On Monday morning, after it did, he posted on his Truth Social account: “Israel and Iran must immediately stop ‘shooting.’”
Israel responded to the initial barrage with a large-scale airstrike against Iranian defense systems on Monday morning local time.
The Israeli military announced that the strike targeted Iran’s strategic defense systems and hit several targets in Iran’s petrochemical complex in Mahshahr in southwestern Iran. The military said the systems had been “degraded” during the February “Operation Roaring Lion” war and that “the strike led to the destruction of these systems.”
Shortly after the Israeli strike, Iran launched a second round of missiles into Israel, sending families into shelters. Schools were already canceled for Monday following Sunday night’s attacks.
According to local Israeli media, explosions were heard in Isfahan and Kermanshah, and Iranian Foreign Minister Esmaeil Baghaei blamed the United States for Israel’s response.
The Israeli response came after Trump told Axios Sunday night that he would tell Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to not respond to the attacks. “I am going to call Bibi right now,” Trump told the news site, “and tell him not to retaliate.”
He added that both countries had “had their fun. Israel had its strike, and Iran had its strike. We don’t need another one.”
In a second Truth Social post on Monday, Trump wrote that “ignorance and stupidity” were hampering the already fragile Iran-Israel ceasefire negotiations. “The Blockade will remain in place, and in full force and effect, until a “Final Deal” is reached,” he wrote.
The U.S. Navy imposed a blockade of Iranian ports on ships traveling to and from Iran on April 13. Trump made the decision after the collapse of talks aimed at permanently ending the five-week war the U.S. launched against Iran on Feb. 28 and Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz on March 2.
Meanwhile, on Monday morning the Iran-backed Houthi terror group in Yemen launched a single missile into Israel. No injuries were reported. Later, the Iranian-backed group said it would impose a complete naval blockade on Israeli ships in the Red Sea.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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