Shanghai Daily news

Australian author Thomas Kenneally visits the Ohel Moshe Synagogue in what used to be the Jewish Quarter in Hongkou District.

An internationally acclaimed author recalls the days before World War II when Shanghai's reputation as a safe refuge saved the lives of thousands of persecuted Europeans. Zhao Feifei talks with Australian writer Thomas Kenneally.
Award-winning novelist Thomas Kenneally first came to Shanghai 25 years ago just to have a look around. But on his current visit he is on a mission — to pay homage and to stop to ponder. He is also in the city to take part in the Second Shanghai Literary Festival which began last Saturday and runs through March 19. But first, the 70- year-old Australian author of the celebrated book “Schindler’s Ark” visited the Ohel Moshe Synagogue in what used to be the Jewish Quarter in Hongkou District.
He met and talked with 86-year-old Wang Faliang, a local resident who befriended his Jewish neighbors in the 1930s and who now works in the synagogue as doorkeeper and tour guide.
“It’s fascinating that one can see what happened here in Shanghai — the fact that the Jews had such a full and rich life living here,” Kenneally says. “There were so many cafes and they gave them very European names like ‘Little Vienna.’
“Great human cataclysms such as World War II produced strange bedfellows. I’m aware that a lot of people went to Australia via Shanghai who were Russian refugees. There seems to have been a connection between Australia and Shanghai throughout the past century. The present Consul General (of Australia in Shanghai) Sam Gerovich was born in Shanghai.
“And I also did know that many Jews found refuge in Shanghai. It’s interesting that Jews were better treated here than they were in Europe. From Baruch Spinoza to Albert Einstein, they contributed so much to European civilization, yet Europe decided they were too dangerous to be allowed to go on breathing — but some of them found breath in Shanghai.
So I think it’s an interesting and appropriate place to visit during the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.”
A prolific writer, Kenneally has penned more than 40 books of fiction and non-fiction. He won the Man Booker Prize for
“Schindler’s Ark” which was adapted to become Steven Spielberg’s Oscar-winning film, “Schindler’s List.” When it comes to talking about his writing or discussing history, Kenneally has always been articulate, expansive and occasionally fills the room with great bursts of joyous laughter. He talks with such complete passion that his audience can not help but be swept away — an entirely apt quality in a novelist.
“It’s a teasing thought that on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, that is not the only issue that fascinates writers,” he says. “There are some 50 million refugees around the planet. They are going to remain scattered all over the world because there are no real international efforts to deal with the problem, apart from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Some governments would rather posture locally on the issue than join together and bring about an international solution.
“It’s said we’re pretty immune to history. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. In fact, a lot of people who know their history repeat it nonetheless. Our immunity to history, even on the part of those who know it, is breathtaking.
All the problems we are having in Iraq the moment are the problems the British had when the state was rather artificially formed. They haven’t learned anything from World War I, let alone from the Holocaust.”
Spielberg bought the rights of Kenneally’s award-winning book the year after it was published and the movie took 10 years to make.
“Steven was very anxious to make the film quickly,” says Kenneally. “Having decided in 1983 to acquire the film rights of the work, he then took another nine years before it was ready to go. One of the reasons was that I took (the whole year of) 1985 trying to produce a screenplay that he’d like. Then he started to think that even if he made some serious films the critics would still all wait to sneer at him like they did at his ‘Empire of the Sun.’
“In the end, he had four writers including myself. And in 1992, he caught influenza in Guangdong Province. That’s why it took so long."
The story was born in 1980 when Kenneally walked into a shop in California to buy an attache case and purchased it from one of the Schindler survivors who told him the story.
“As a matter of fact, in Sydney a few years ago I spoke with Michael Ondaatje, the author of ‘The English Patient’,” says Kenneally. “He was happy with his film and I am with mine. It was a great story and I didn’t make it up — I could only mess it up, if anything. It’s like watching your football team — you can criticize the coach’s decisions but when the score is good at the end of the game, you are happy.”
When Spielberg’s heartwrenching picture made Kenneally an overnight sensation, it also posed some “benign challenges” to him. He is afraid that readers will only be interested in one of his considerable body of works.
“I always feel that some of my neglected ‘children’ are the best ones,” the jovial writer says.
Kenneally’s latest work is “The Tyrant’s Novel,” inspired by the former Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein. In this  novelwithin-a-novel, Kenneally returns to the political themes which won him prizes like “The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith” and “Schindler’s Ark.”
It takes place in an unnamed oil-rich country in the Middle East ruled by a tyrant who calls himself “Great Uncle.” A reviewer says the novel centers on a short-story writer named Alan Sheriff who is given one month to write an "autobiographical novel” for which Great Uncle will take full credit.
Sheriff tells his story to a Western journalist in a detention camp in an unnamed Arab country where he has languished for three years.
“I wanted to write about the sort of factors that turn people into refugees,” Kenneally says.
He is now working on the final draft of another book entitled “The Sydney Experiment,” which tells the story of convicts, slaves, Originals, women, Jews and the Irish.