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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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Trump Warns of More Strikes on Iran’s Kharg Island, Pressures Allies to Secure Oil Chokepoint
An LPG gas tanker at anchor as traffic is down in the Strait of Hormuz, amid the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Shinas, Oman, March 11, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Benoit Tessier/File Photo
US President Donald Trump threatened more strikes on Iran’s main oil export hub Kharg Island and said he was not ready for a deal with Tehran to end the war which has shut off the vital Strait of Hormuz and caused chaos in global energy markets.
With the US-Israeli war on Iran in its third week, Trump said US strikes had “totally demolished” much of the island and warned of more, telling NBC News on Saturday, “We may hit it a few more times just for fun.”
The comments marked a sharp escalation from Trump, who had previously said the US was targeting only military sites on Kharg, and dealt a blow to diplomatic efforts to end a war that has spread across the Middle East and killed more than 2,000 people, most in Iran and Lebanon.
Trump called on countries that have been impacted by the choking off of oil supplies through the Strait of Hormuz to join efforts to reopen shipping lanes. The Financial Times reported that European Union foreign ministers would discuss widening of the EU’s regional Aspides naval mission.
Washington has brushed aside attempts by Middle Eastern allies to open talks, three sources told Reuters, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said on Sunday they had fired more missiles at Israel and three US bases in the region.
Trump, who has made a series of varying demands, including a say in choosing Iran’s leader and an end to its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, told NBC News that Tehran appeared ready to make a deal to end the fighting but that “the terms aren’t good enough yet.”
In his interview with NBC, Trump raised the possibility that Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei may have been killed, but Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said Khamenei was in full health and managing the situation.
WAR, ENERGY CRISIS LOOK SET TO PERSIST
As missile and drone exchanges continued on Sunday and shipping remained blocked, US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said he expected the war to end within “the next few weeks,” bringing a swift rebound in supplies and lower prices.
But with global air transport heavily disrupted and no clear end in sight, Iran’s ability to choke off traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the conduit for a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas, has emerged with increasing urgency as a decisive threat to the global economy.
Although some Iranian vessels have continued to pass, the passage has been effectively closed for most of the world’s shipping since the United States and Israel attacked Iran on February 28 at the start of an intensive bombing campaign that has hit thousands of targets across the country.
Khamenei, who succeeded as supreme leader after his father Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed on the first day of the attacks, has said the Strait of Hormuz should remain closed.
The International Energy Agency said last week the closure of the narrow passage along Iran’s coast had triggered the largest disruption to global oil markets in history, and was expected to cut around 8% of global supplies in March.
Underlining the impact the war has had on energy infrastructure in the region, the global ship-refueling hub of Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates was closed after barrages on Saturday but resumed oil-loading operations on Sunday, a Fujairah-based industry source said.
With crude oil prices above $100 a barrel and expected to rise further next week, the issue has hung over Trump’s Republican Party, which faces a major test at midterm elections in November.
Trump himself has dismissed worries about spiking gas prices for American consumers, saying they will fall back quickly. But he has called on China, France, Japan, South Korea, Britain and others to send warships to the Strait of Hormuz to ensure shipping can pass.
“The Countries of the World that receive Oil through the Hormuz Strait must take care of that passage, and we will help – A LOT!” Trump wrote in a social media post on Saturday. “The U.S. will also coordinate with those Countries so that everything goes quickly, smoothly, and well.”
The FT said EU foreign affairs ministers holding a regular meeting on Monday would discuss potentially widening the EU Aspides naval mission that protects shipping against Houthi attacks in the Red Sea to include the Strait of Hormuz.
France has been seeking to assemble a coalition to secure the strait once the security situation stabilizes, while Britain is discussing a range of options with allies to ensure the security of shipping, officials have said.
Araqchi told his French counterpart that countries must refrain from anything that could escalate the conflict. He also said Iran would respond to any attack on its energy facilities.
ISRAEL DENIES TALKS WITH LEBANON
Araqchi denied Iran was targeting civilian or residential areas in the Middle East and said it was ready to form a committee with its neighbors to investigate the responsibility for such strikes. Gulf countries have suffered damage to energy facilities and residential areas during the two-week war.
But as the standoff continued, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said it had fired more missile and drone barrages at targets in Israel and at US military bases in the region, where Saudi Arabia said it had intercepted 10 attacks.
Israel said its jets hit more targets in western Iran, including headquarters of the Revolutionary Guards and Basij militia forces in the city of Hamadan.
A source briefed on Israel’s military strategy told Reuters that Israel had begun targeting roadblocks and bridges it believed Revolutionary Guards commanders were using. Iranian security forces detained dozens of people accused of sharing information with Israel, Iranian media reported.
Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Saar rejected claims that Israel had told the United States it was running low on interceptors and dismissed a report that it could soon hold direct talks with Lebanon, where it has resumed its campaign against the Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement.
In Iran, at least 15 people were killed when an airstrike hit a refrigerator and heater factory in the central Iranian city of Isfahan, the semi-official Fars news agency said on Saturday. The Revolutionary Guards promised further retaliation for workers killed in Iran’s industrial areas.
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IDF Says Brother of Michigan Synagogue Attacker Was Hezbollah Commander
FBI agents work on the site after the Michigan State Police reported an active shooting incident at the Temple Israel Synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan, US, March 12, 2026. Photo: Rebecca Cook via Reuters Connect
i24 News – The IDF said the brother of Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, who carried out last week’s attack on a Michigan synagogue, was a Hezbollah commander who managed weapons operations and was killed in an Israeli airstrike last week. The IDF added that the Hezbollah unit Ghazali served in had launched hundreds of rockets toward Israel.
Ghazali, 41, rammed a vehicle into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, on March 12. He later died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound during a gunfight with police, the FBI said. The agency is investigating the incident as a targeted act of violence against the Jewish community.
The FBI reported that Ghazali had large quantities of commercial-grade fireworks and several jugs of flammable liquid in his truck, which ignited during the attack. No children or staff at the synagogue and its preschool were injured. A security guard sustained injuries and was expected to recover, while police officers were treated for smoke inhalation.
Before the IDF published the confirmation of the “elimination” of the attacker’s brother, Dearborn Heights Mayor Mo Baydoun said the suspect had suffered “devastating and personal losses overseas.”
The mayor also stressed that “this is not an excuse” for the attack, adding that his actions “do not reflect our values as a city.”
Temple Israel Rabbi Jen Lader described the scene as “sheer terror” and emphasized the necessity of full-time armed security. “American Judaism is such these days that every synagogue is a target. Every synagogue is aware that we need to take precautions to keep our people safe,” she said, adding that the temple had prepared for similar incidents.
The IDF’s statement links the Michigan attack to broader Hezbollah operations and highlights the ongoing threat the group poses to Israel and Jewish communities abroad.
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After attacks, Jewish security watchdogs warn of ‘most elevated and complex threat environment’ in recent history
(JTA) — A string of recent synagogue attacks across North America and Europe has left security officials sounding the alarm bells.
“We are in the midst of the most elevated and complex threat environment the Jewish community and this country has seen in modern history,” said Kerry Sleeper, chief of threat management and information sharing for the Secure Community Network, a Jewish security organization.
Sleeper’s comment came during an SCN webinar on Friday, held in response to the previous day’s attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, where an assailant rammed into the synagogue armed with rifles and smoke bombs.
Though the attack was successfully thwarted by existing security measures, Mitchell Silber, executive director of the Community Security Initiative, said in an interview that Jewish institutions may now need additional layers of protection.
“This might be a bit of a tipping point where we’ve gone to a new level, where really what’s required to secure a Jewish institution in the U.S. starts to look like almost a Europeanization of security,” Silber said.
That would include posting multiple armed guards outside entrances and requiring increased screening before entry, he said. Many European synagogues also require attendees to go through security screening at some distance from the building, rather than at their doors.
“Unfortunately that seems to be where we are right now — the Jewish community has to up its game in terms of the external security of its locations,” he said.
Currently, a shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security since Feb. 14 is halting the review of millions of dollars in security funding for nonprofits, constraining the ability of Jewish institutions and other vulnerable groups to upgrade their security infrastructure.
The Temple Israel attack came within two weeks of attacks in Austin, Texas, and at Old Dominion University in Virginia. Those other attacks were not on Jewish institutions, but Sleeper, a former FBI assistant director, said the “various motivations of the attackers appear to be affiliated with the war between the U.S., Israel and Iran.” He added that the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Iran, and President Donald Trump’s stated desire to facilitate a regime change, have “contributed to the extremely high threat environment.”
Meanwhile, things have escalated outside the United States. Three Toronto-area synagogues were hit with gunfire over the last couple of weeks, and a synagogue in Rotterdam was targeted by an arson attack early Friday morning, allegedly by a group that has also claimed credit for an explosion at a synagogue in Belgium.
The flurry of attacks has the entire Jewish world on edge going into Shabbat — and some watchdogs say things could soon get worse.
“It is not entirely shocking to those of us who’ve watched this space for a long time,” said Mike Jacobson, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who served in the State Department’s Counterterrorism Bureau. “I would think things would continue to ratchet up again, at least in the short term.”
He pointed to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ activation of sleeper cells — their agents lying in wait until called to action to commit an attack — across the West, as a danger to vulnerable targets, which includes Jewish communities.
Another source of danger, Jacobson said, comes from copycat attacks.
“There’s also this mix that makes it really hard to sort out in the initial stages, where you’ve got people, not only who may be directly tied to Iran, but people who are so-called ‘inspired’ by this,” Jacobson said. “Those are often really hard for law enforcement to get advance notice on.”
Not always does the threat come from direct orders from Iran, he said. “It’s often difficult to tell: Is this something that is directly tied to the organization, or is this something that is more by someone inspired [by the IRGC]?”
He added, “They are trying to inflict pain in as many directions as they can.”
As security organizations encourage increased caution and awareness of suspicious activity, they are also emphasizing that those measures shouldn’t come at the expense of gathering in communal Jewish spaces.
“We’re not going to let the terrorists take away our confidence or the ability to embrace our religion,” said Michael Masters, SCN’s national director, during the Zoom webinar.
Masters’ sentiment is also shared by congregational leaders like Rabbi Adam Roffman, of Congregation Shearith Israel in Dallas.
“Sure, security is something we think a lot about, and we’ve done our best to protect ourselves,” Roffman said. “And at the same time, the life of this community goes on.”
At Temple Israel, Shabbat services are being streamed from the nearby country club that served as a reunification center for families after the attack. The synagogue wrote on Facebook: “We’re so glad you’re joining us tonight as our community comes together to welcome this much needed Sabbath.”
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