Ten Green Bottles: The True Story of One Family's Journey From Worn-Torn Austria to the Ghettos of Shanhai
Vivian Jeanett Kaplan, 2004
St. Martin's Press
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312330545
Summary
To Nini Karpel, growing up in Vienna during the 1920s was a romantic confection. Whether schussing down ski slopes or speaking of politics in coffee houses, she cherished the city of her birth. But in the 1930s an undercurrent of conflict and hate began to seize the former imperial capital. This struggle came to a head when Hitler took possession of neighboring Germany. Anti-Semitism, which Nini and her idealistic friends believed was impossible in the socially advanced world of Vienna, became widespread and virulent.
The Karpel's Jewish identity suddenly made them foreigners in their own homeland. Tormented, disenfranchised, and with a broken heart, Nini and her family sought refuge in a land seven thousand miles across the world.
Shanghai, China, one of the few countries accepting Jewish immigrants, became their new home and refuge. Stepping off the boat, the Karpel family found themselves in a land they could never have imagined. Shanghai presented an incongruent world of immense wealth and privilege for some and poverty for the masses, with opium dens and decadent clubs as well as rampant disease and a raging war between nations.
Ten Green Bottles is the story of Nini Karpel's struggles as she told it to her daughter Vivian so many years ago. This true story depicts the fierce perseverance of one family, victims of the forces of evil, who overcame suffering of biblical proportion to survive. It was a time when ordinary people became heroes. (From the publisher.
Author Bio
• Birth—June, 17, 1946
• Where—Shanghai, Peoples' Republic of China
• Raised—Toronto, Canada
• Education—University of Toronto
• Awards—Canadian Jewish Book Award; Adei-Wizo Literary
Award (Italy)
• Currently—lives in Canada
Vivian Jeanette Kaplan was born in Shanghai, where her parents were married. As her family originated in Vienna, her mother tongue is German. When she was two years old, her parents arrived in Canada, settling in Toronto. She graduated from the University of Toronto, where she studied English, French, and Spanish. She is married and has three sons.
For a number of years the family owned and ran a lakeside lodge in Muskoka, north of Toronto. For twenty years she had her own business, Vivian Kaplan Oriental Interiors, an import-export firm with interior design showrooms specializing in decor from the Far East.
Ten Green Bottles, which tells her own true family saga, is her first book. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Her powerful, harrowing story grips the reader. In an odyssey of horrors that takes place over a decade...what shines through is the family's indomitable will to survive.
Ottawa Citizen
Kaplan's prose is simply stunning . . . Kaplan's descriptions bring wartime Shanghai, its people and smells, to life... Although nonfiction, Ten Green Bottles reads like a novel. Kaplan captures the mood and feelings of her mother experiences as if they were her own.
Canadian Jewish News
For a brief period between 1938 and 1941, roughly 20,000 Jews found refuge from the Nazis in the one place not requiring visas, police certificates or proofs of financial independence: Shanghai. In this spellbinding memoir, Kaplan recounts her family's transition from the "delight" of Vienna to "a mysterious blob on the map, China." Writing in a fictional present tense, Kaplan narrates this evocative, moving saga in the voice of her mother, Nini. The halcyon early years of cafes and skiing end as the Nazis rise to power. Still, in 1936 when Nini meets her future husband, Poldi, a Polish refugee, she is "adamant that [persecution of Jews] could never happen here." It does. By 1939, her family will make the month-long, 7,000-mile journey to Shanghai. Amid "pervasive poverty... overpowering heat... [and] strange faces," Nini and Poldi find an anxious and precarious normality, but after Pearl Harbor, they struggle terribly. With the war's end comes the shock of learning what became of family and friends left behind in Europe. Although Vienna is rebuilt and a daughter (the author) is born, Communist troops arrive, and Nini and Poldi move again, this time to Canada. Kaplan's intimate knowledge of her parents' story makes it seem as if she experienced it herself, and her remarkable achievement will make readers feel that way, too. Agent, Barry Kaplan. Although there is a ton of Holocaust literature, the China experience is not as well mined, which sets this book winner of the Canadian Jewish Book Award apart.
Publishers Weekly
One of the great, tragic epics of the last century was the odyssey of Jewish families from Hitler's Europe to relative safety in Japanese-occupied Shanghai in the late 1930s. (The Japanese were not anti-Semites, though when war broke out they were happy enough to accommodate their Fascist allies.) This beautifully composed and engrossing memoir relates the story of the author's mother, who traveled from 1920s Austria to Shanghai and eventually settled in Canada. Kaplan, winner of the Canadian Jewish Book Award in Biography/Memoir, brings the history of the period to life as she shows how the family adapted to each development. Somehow, as in The Diary of Anne Frank, the outcome of this tale is uplifting and instructive, showing us that nobility endures despite political oppression, war, poverty, disease, and human pettiness. Although the general historical facts are well known, this is a worthwhile retelling of a story that each new generation should hear. Recommended for larger public libraries. —Charles W. Hayford, Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL
Library Journal
Riveting account of a family who fled the Nazis only to endure further persecution in Shanghai. Characterizing her work-winner of the Canadian Jewish Book Award-as "a memoir in the creative non-fiction genre," the author, who was born in Shanghai and now lives in Canada, tells the story in the voice of her mother, Nini Karpel, the youngest daughter of a prosperous and patriotic Viennese department-store owner. Her father died suddenly in 1922 when Nini was six, leaving her mother responsible for the business as well as their four children. Life went on more or less as usual, but the political situation was of increasing concern. In 1936, Nini fell in love with Poldi Kosiner, the son of Polish refugees, but he could find work only in Italy, and they had to continue their romance by correspondence. When the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, the Karpels were immediately affected by the new anti-Jewish laws; their business and assets were seized, relatives were beaten, and they feared for their lives. Learning that refugees were welcome in Shanghai, Nini, acting on her own, approached a gentile lawyer, who bought their tickets for the long voyage to China. Her courageous initiative helped save her mother and siblings; with travel arrangements in place, the Karpels were able to obtain exit visas. Once in Shanghai, a place quite unlike any they had ever known, they were joined by Poldi, who came overland. Richly evoking the city's sights and smells, Nini's narrative details their struggle to find work; the arrival of the Japanese, who made Jews live in Shanghai's rundown Hongkew section; the brief interlude of peace and prosperity when the war finally ended; and then the Communist takeover that made it impossible for the family to remain in China. Kaplan closes with their 1949 arrival in Toronto. A moving and memorable portrayal of a less familiar aspect of the Jewish plight during WWII.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. In many ways Nini was a typical Austrian in her upbringing. What did she especially love about her youth in Vienna?
2. What Jewish cultural teachings impacted on her during childhood and adolescence that lay a foundation for her feelings towards her religion?
3. Nini's journey took her to self-discovery. From isolation to a world-view how did her outlook on the rest of humanity change because of the events of her life?
4. Nini attended a seder at Poldi's family's home. During the reading of the Haggadah she had a feeling of impending doom. The Passover tale is a foreshadowing of events that will take place. Consider the similarities between her life and the Exodus story. How many can you think of?
5. The book is written in a visual way. Words are used as pigments to depict the events that take place. Think of the story in terms of light and dark as a painter or film-maker might do. If light represents hope and dark is sadness what has the writer done to express the mood in descriptive terms?
6. The title "Ten Green Bottles" is enigmatic. It can be interpreted in various ways. Thinking of the actual words of the song that it is derived from, what other aspects of the title are present in the book? Think of the number ten, significant in various ways and then of the idea of broken glass. Even the color green is important. How are the words of the title evident throughout the book?
7. The book has been written as an exploration of the senses. How many can you find? Give examples of ways that the reader is invited into the pages to relive the experiences of the protagonist.
8. One aspect of the book is that of the strong female heroine. How is Nini the central figure in the survival of the family? Are there other strong women in the book? How do they take control of their destinies?
9. There are inanimate objects that play important roles in the story. What are they and what do they have to "say"?
10. Between them Nini and Poldi are hinges by which the Axis powers swung. They were involved with each of the three: Germany, Italy and Japan. How were these seemingly average people affected by the grand scheme of the waring nations? What did they do to take control of their own lives when they seemed destined to become victims?
11. Nini and Poldi looked for help to get them through the most difficult of their ordeals. How did Herr Berger, Herta Weinstein, Leon Druck, and Mother Laula influence them and change their outlook on life?
12. Nini's father wrote a poem that had eerie foreshadowing elements. How did the words that he wrote years before the Nazi takeover and the war years provide comfort and advice to Nini when she needed guidance?
(Questions issued by publisher.)