The Box with the Sunflower Clasp

Uncovering a Jewish Family's Flight to Wartime Shanghai

Rachel Meller

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2023
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781785789830
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Rachel Meller was never close to her aunt Lisbeth, a cool, unemotional woman with a drawling Viennese-Californian accent, a cigarette in her hand. But when Lisbeth died, she left Rachel an intricately carved Chinese box with a sunflower clasp. Inside the box were photographs, letters and documents that led Rachel to uncover a story she had never known: that of a passionate Jewish teenager growing up in elegant Vienna, who was caught up by war, and forced to flee to Shanghai. Far from home, in a strange city, Lisbeth and her parents build a new life - a life of small joys and great hardship, surrounded by many others who, like them, have fled Hitler and the Nazis. 1930s Shanghai is a metropolis where the old rules do not apply - a city of fabulous wealth and crushing poverty, where disease is rife, and gangsters rub shoulders with rich emigrés; where summer brings unspeakable heat, and winter is bitterly cold; and where European refugees build community and, maybe, a young woman can find love. Set against a backdrop of the war in the Far East, The Box with the Sunflower Clasp is a sweeping family memoir that tells the hidden history of the Jews of Shanghai. Rachel Meller writes with elegance and insight as she examines what it means to survive, and what the legacy of displacement and war might mean for the generation that comes afterwards.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Abbreviated Family Trees
• Map
• Author’s Note
• Prologue: Sisters and Silence
• Chapter 1 Vienna, June 1937: Thwarted Ambition
• Chapter 2 Vienna, March 1938: A World Falls Apart
• Chapter 3 Vienna and Prague, May to August 1938: A Flippant Remark
• Chapter 4 Berlin, June 1938: An Unheeded Warning
• Chapter 5 Vienna, November 1938 to May 1939: Fire and Compassion
• Chapter 6 Buchenwald, June 1938 to July 1939: ‘Only the Birds are Singing’
• Chapter 7 Vienna, July 1939 to January 1940: A Miraculous Phone Call
• Chapter 8 Bruno the ‘bookman’
• Chapter 9 February 1940: Exotic Harbours and Flying Fish
• Chapter 10 8 March 1940: A Shocking Reunion
• Chapter 11 The mid-1930s: Shanghai Millionaire
• Chapter 12 8 March 1940: The Journey to Weihaiwei Road
• Chapter 13 Shanghai 1940: The Bookshop on Bubbling Well Road
• Chapter 14 March 1940: A Couch for a Bed
• Chapter 15 Spring 1940: Lingerie Shops and Corpses
• Chapter 16 Little Vienna’s Ingenuity: Soap, Bratwurst and Strudel
• Chapter 17 Summer 1940: The Black and Gold Marbled Lobby
• Chapter 18 Autumn 1940: Looking for Apricots
• Chapter 19 Winter 1940: The Destroyer of Dreams
• Chapter 20 Spring 1941: Coffee at Yang Terrace
• Chapter 21 8 December 1941: The World Shifts Overnight
• Chapter 22 16 December 1941: A Birthday in Darkness
• Chapter 23 February 1942: Bread with Burnt-Sugar Caramel
• Chapter 24 February 1943: The Ghetto
• Chapter 25 Summer 1943: A Body in the Yangtze
• Chapter 26 ‘The King of the Jews’
• Chapter 27 Spring 1944: A Lifeline Split Twice
• Chapter 28 August 1944: Birds, Flowers and Good Luck Symbols
• Chapter 29 Autumn to Winter 1944: Cake, Coffee and Air Raids
• Chapter 30 December 1944: A Cruel Winter
• Chapter 31 Spring 1945: ‘Mein Bruder, Mein Bruder!’
• Chapter 32 17 July 1945: The Animals Sensed it First
• Chapter 33 August 1945: ‘Hiroshima Melted’
• Chapter 34 September 1945: A New World Order
• Chapter 35 Winter 1947: A Ticket to Freedom
• Chapter 36 1948 to 1956: San Francisco and London: The New Lion Bookshop
• Chapter 37 Love, Art and Family: Here, There, Then and Now
• Epilogue: Shedding Tears in Shanghai
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements