Jewish Wayfarers in Modern China: Tragedy and Splendor

You looking to find the "Jewish Wayfarers in Modern China: Tragedy and Splendor" Good news! You can purchase Jewish Wayfarers in Modern China: Tragedy and Splendor with secure price and compare to view update price on this product. And deals on this product is available only for limited time.

   

Product Description

Jewish Wayfarers in Modern China: Tragedy and Splendor focuses on the many extraordinary contacts between East and West in China during the 20th century. Through a collection of short biographies situated in the context of Chinese and Western history, it offers a panoramic view of China as experienced by many different persons of Jewish origins during their sojourn in the Middle Kingdom.

With their Western talents, skills, desires, hopes and expectations they tried to master their individual fates. There is the iconoclastic young woman journalist who enjoys breaking taboos at home in the USA. There is the swindler, the scoundrel known from novels by Mark Twain or Charles Dickens. There is the revolutionary, the man of thought and deed who thinks he knows what the Chinese need better than the Chinese themselves. There is the poetess loyal to her lost Chinese lover, the admirer of Chinese culture. There is the artist, fascinated by the exotic surroundings, portraying them with archetypes that merge East and West. There is the doctor, anxious to help. There is the archaeologist, desiring to make a name by discovering and returning with Chinese treasures. � By showing us these characters in action, working for their own ambition or survival, employing their talents and previous experience, we find a distant mirror of our own society.

One cannot return in a time machine to the past, but literature is a sort of virtual time machine, carrying us to distant periods of the past and exotic surroundings. The present book offers such a magical journey across vast reaches of space and back through time. Our impressions of visits to China have often been biased by sensationalistic journalism, Hollywood films and literary entertainment that have distorted the reality of this vast country. In the present book, we are shown the reality of life in Twentieth Century China for many Westerners through carefully-researched biographies of a wide variety of typical and less typical Western visitors to the Middle Kingdom.

Jewish Wayfarers in Modern China: Tragedy and Splendor Review

China and the Chinese
Jewish Wayfarers is a collection of concise biographies of people whose background was Jewish and who spent time in China during the twentieth century. The choice is quite varied and shows a great range of different persons.
The book was originally written in German as a more academic text of greater length. The present book is a shorter translation. Perhaps the translation is sufficiently good that one does not notice the German source, as this fact is not mentioned in other reviews.
One of the problems for people in Central Europe is how to talk about the Jewish people after the long history of Jews in Europe, for example, the Dreyfus affair, the Zionist movement, the Holocaust, the founding of Israel, the Munich Olympics, etc. Political correctness tends to limit what people feel they can say about the Jews, and this has a certain distorting effect on understanding and discourse.
In this collection, I believe, the author makes a contribution to normalizing the Jewish people. They are not all stereotypical idealized types placed on a pedestal. They are different sorts of people of all different types. Many are very admirable for their value choices. Some are in the medical profession, and go to China to help people. Others are artists, writers, journalists, composers, or intellectuals and are interested in Chinese culture and Chinese people and wish to portray the country for Westerners. Some are businessmen, capitalists in pre-communist China. Others are committed Marxists. Some of these become disillusioned later, others are true believers and never reject communism, even though they spend years in Chinese prison. One man, Trebitsch-Lincoln is a religious impostor and rogue. Not admirable at all. So we have a wide range of different types, some we admire, some we do not. This is what we find when examining other groups, such as Christians and humanists. We treat them as individually different and capable of responsibility, and do not try to excuse the less admirable types by supposing that the whole group lacks the ability for responsibility.
This normalization of the Jewish people using the example of visitors to China is I think the "message" of the book. However, it is not so much a "message" book as an interesting panorama of different lives. I myself have never been able to read book-length biographies, so I find the format of collecting many short biographies very desirable, the author does not dwell too long on the details of any one life, but keeps the interest up by going from type to type and life to life.

Most of the consumer Reviews tell that the "Jewish Wayfarers in Modern China: Tragedy and Splendor" are high quality item. You can read each testimony from consumers to find out cons and pros from Jewish Wayfarers in Modern China: Tragedy and Splendor ...