Growing up in Tientsin by David Sitsky

Growing up in Tientsin 在天津长大

When I became a grandfather in 2008 I decided it was time to write a family history. I knew that unless I documented the events that occurred in Russia and China during the 19th and 20th centuries my grandchildren would never know this part of their family background. It took me five years of writing and research to get this book ready for publishing.

Growing up in Tientsin 在天津长大

Bob Sitsky

Growing Up in Tientsin Family migration from Russia to China, memories from my childhood and background information on Russian-Jewish life in Northeast China.

Dedicated to my grandchildren

Bob Sitsky

Â© Bob Sitsky Printed in Sydney, Australia, 2015

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction and Acknowledgements

1. Within the Russian Empire

2. Migration from Russia to China – Boris & Yulia Sitsky

3. Migration from Russia to China – Pavel & Sofa Toper

4. Maps of Migration Routes

5. My Father Abie Sitsky

6. My Mother Sarah Toper

7. Abie Sitsky Marries Sarah Toper

8. Larry and Bobby Arrive on the Scene

9. Foreign Concessions in Tientsin

10. My Grandparents in Tientsin

11. The Toper Furs and Skins Business

12. My Uncles and Aunts

13. Hobbies and Games in the 1940s

14. Our House in Tientsin

15. General Notes on Life in China

16. Big Brother Larry

17. The Extended Family

107

18. Chinese Servants and Tradesmen

111

19. Newspapers and Other Services in Tientsin

114

20. Family Items

118

21. Relationship with My Parents

129

22. Jewish Life in Tientsin

131

23. My Parent’s Friends

141

24. Music in Our House

143

25. What Did We Eat?

149

26. Tientsin Jewish School (T.J.S.)

153

27. The Change-over to Communism

165

28. Leaving China

167

Appendix A: Simplified Genealogical Charts

173

Appendix B: Letter from Tientsin Hebrew Association in 1946

175

Appendix C: Migration History of Family Members

176

Appendix D: Some Background Note on Tientsin/Tianjin

179

Appendix E: The Extended Family in the 21st Century

181

Appendix F: A Brief Account of the Tientsin Jewish School

184

Appendix G: Growing Up Musical in Tientsin

187

Appendix H: The Renovated Tientsin Synagogue

191

Appendix I: Qantas Passenger List Hong-Kong to Sydney

193

Appendix J: Reading List

194

Where can a person be better than in the bosom of their family. Marmontel Gretry

The excellence of Tientsin! Everywhere a land of lakes and rivers. In the East Marsh, lotus flowers blossom in masses of white, By the North River, reeds bend yellow to the sky, The ocean tide ebbs and flows far beyond the city. Early 19th century Chinese poet

Introduction and Acknowledgements I have written these notes for my grandchildren. I have called them Growing up in Tientsin but the notes also include an account of 70 years of our family life in Russia and China. I should explain why I have chosen to use ‘Tientsin’ rather than ‘Tianjin’ as the name of that city. During the whole period of my family’s life in China, it was always called Tientsin, and that included all official correspondence, maps and newspapers. After the Chinese Communists came to power in 1949, the name reverted to Tianjin. My brother Larry and I are the last links in our family to Russian-Jewish life in Northeast China. Once we are gone, it will not be possible for my grandchildren to find out from any other source what it was like for our family to have lived in China in those days. Tientsin still remains very much a part of me; I often think back to my childhood in China and about the events that shaped my early life. I hope that by writing about my family history and childhood, my grandchildren will be able to get an insight into the life of their great-greatgrandparents, great-grandparents and grandfather. This applies similarly to Larry’s grandchildren. In Tientsin we were influenced by many cultures, the main ones being British, Russian, French and Chinese. The members of the Russian-Jewish community generally lived in harmony with other ethnic groups therefore it would be fair to say we were cosmopolitan in nature. These notes will also be of interest to members of our extended family and friends who live in Australia and the United States. To accompany these notes, I have also put together a set of eighteen large ‘scrapbooks’ that covers our family’s life over a period of 100 years – from 1900 to 2000. The scrapbooks include our family’s photographs (with some explanatory notes), letters that have survived and official documentation like Birth/Death Certificates and old passports. The scrapbooks are currently located in my house in Sydney, Australia. While the period in which Russian Jews settled in China was brief in the context of the histories of the Chinese and Jewish people, it encompassed events that would dramatically change the circumstances of both people – two World Wars, the 1917 Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution of 1949. There were, of course, two other events that dramatically altered the course of the Jewish people during this period: the Holocaust and the establishment of the modern State of Israel. There have been many books written about foreigners living in China and some books about childhood in Tientsin, and I have listed some of these books in Appendix J at the end of my account. All of these books provide fascinating memoirs. The days in China from the commencement of the 19th century to the Communist changeover, were a period of a nowvanished world. Those days are only accessible through memoirs, multimedia and text. Between 1991 and 1998, Alex Auswaks (a close friend of Larry’s in China) wrote a series of articles on Russian-Jewish life in Tientsin in the 1930s and 1940s. His stories were published in the quarterly magazine called Bulletin, published by Igud Yotsei Sin (Association of Former Residents of China). I have used several quotes from Alex’s recollections.

In 2012, some Russian archives became accessible and I was able to get some historical synagogue records from Irkutsk on the Toper side of the family. Unfortunately, the archives in Harbin are still unavailable to researchers, so I have been unable to obtain any information on the marriage of my paternal grandparents. During 2013 I employed a Russian genealogist to try and find data about the Sitsky family in European Russia in the late 1800s. Unfortunately this research was unsuccessful. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the people who have helped me to put this account together. Perhaps the most important source has been my own memory of the events in China. However, as I was only eleven years old when our family left Tientsin, I have asked for assistance from people older than me â&#x20AC;&#x201C; these include my brother Larry who has clarified some details for me as well as suggesting other areas of exploration. The family photographs have also provided a huge source of material. One other person I am indebted to is Vera Toper. She gave me valuable information about my motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s side of the family in China. I also would like to acknowledge the expert help given to me by Professor Dan Ben-Canaan of Heilongjiang University in Harbin and Chair, Sino-Israel Research and Study Centre. My only regret is that I did not ask enough questions from my parents when I had the opportunity.

Bob Sitsky January 2015

1. Within the Russian Empire At the beginning of the 19th century, the Russian Empire extended from the Arctic Ocean in the North to the Black Sea in the South, from the Baltic Sea in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the East. Its government, ruled by an Emperor, was an absolute monarchy. It had the third largest population in the world at that time. The Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. My great-grandparents on both my paternal and maternal sides lived in this huge Empire. European Russia in the 1800s was a dangerous place for Jews. After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 there was a wave of pogroms in southern Russia against the Jewish communities; anti-Semitism was rampant. Tsar Alexander III engaged in policies such as tightening restrictions on where Jews could live and restricting occupations that Jews could work in. These anti-Semitic policies continued under Tsar Nicholas II.

All the evidence indicates that originally the Sitsky family and the Toper family came from the Pale of Settlement area of Russia. (The Pale of Settlement was the term given to a region of Imperial Russia in which permanent residency by Jews was allowed and beyond which Jewish permanent residency was generally prohibited.) As can be seen from the map, the Pale of Settlement covered a very large area of Eastern Russia. This area included Belarus, Poland and Ukraine.

Sitsky Family During genealogical searches conducted to find the origins of the Sitsky family, the only regions of Imperial Russia where the name Sitsky was found was in the Minsk and Vilnius (Vilno) areas of the Pale. From the birth certificate of my father we know that the Sitsky family once lived in the Penzenskaya Region of European Russia. According to family stories my great-grandfather Alexey (Isaac) Sitsky was conscripted into the Tzarist (Nikolayevsky) force at the age of 13, for a period of 25 years. From this, it was estimated that he was born around 1825.

During genealogical research undertaken I have found that in the early 1800s the 16th Infantry Division of Russia was stationed in the Penza province. The Division was recruited from Minsk and Mogilev provinces. It is therefore very likely that Isaac Sitsky served in this very Division. While no direct proof has been found, we can assume that the Sitsky family originated from either the Minsk or Vilnius regions of the Pale. Because of his military service Isaac Sitsky was permitted to settle outside the boundaries of the Pale, and he moved to the Penzenskaya Region of Eastern Russia – shown in red on the map. Apparently Isaac got married after leaving military service. The year of his death is also unknown but has been estimated to be around 1890. We know nothing about the woman whom Isaac married. From a death notice written in the 1940s for Yuliya Sitsky, we find that her patronymic name was Abramovna. So, we can safely say that Yuliya’s father was Abraham Yudov.

Toper Family My great-grandparents on my mother’s side came from Wislica; the location of Wislica is shown on a current map of Poland. In the mid 1800s it was in Russian Central Poland and was within the Pale of Settlement. Wislica was a village or small town located in Kielce Province (District of Pinczov) about 60km south of the regional capital of Kielce, and about 62 km NE of Krakow. About half the population of Wislica in the 1800s was Jewish.

The Topf/Toper pedigree was started by the union of Eliezer Topf and Raizel Klainer; they were both born in 1845 and were married in 1864. The Rosenzweig pedigree was started by the union of Yakov Rosenzweig and Zenia Bukiet. They married in 1860 in Wislica. Both these families moved to Eastern Russia in the 1860s or 1870s.

Note: In Appendix A there is a simplified genealogical chart for the Sitsky/Toper pedigree for the years 1820 to 1940.

2. Migration from Russia to China – Boris & Yulia Sitsky Like many other thousands of Russian Jews, my grandparents moved to Northeast China from Russia to a region that was then called Manchuria. My paternal grandparents moved there right at the end of the 19th century or right in the beginning of the 20th century; my maternal grandparents moved some years later – starting around the time of the Russian revolution in 1917. Both my grandparents on my father’s side were born in Western Russia. Boris Sitsky (Cицкий) was born in 1873 in either the Penzenskaya Region of Russia or in Cheliabinsk, also spelt Chelyabinsk (Челя́бинск). His Jewish name was Chaim-ber Isekov. While in Russia he was able to travel relatively freely (for a person of Jewish descent) because he was the son of one of Nikolai’s soldiers; as mentioned earlier Boris’s father was conscripted into the Tsar’s army for a very lengthy period. This ‘freedom’ of movement was a privilege not generally given to Jews. Life for the Jews in the tsarist army was very tough – they were subject to daily cruel discrimination. After the Russians gained the right to build the Chinese Eastern Railway they controlled Manchuria. Russian law, politics, culture and social order were predominant. Manchuria also became one of the very few escape avenues for Jewish migrants. We have no information of the route that Boris took to get to Harbin. It may have been directly from Irkutsk, but it is more likely that he first travelled to Khabarovsk or Vladivostok before heading to China. Larry remembers that father spoke about the family moving to China from Vladivostok1. So Boris moved to Harbin (哈尔滨), in North-eastern China, around 1900, because of work opportunities created by the establishment of the Chinese Eastern Railway2 ( 东清铁路). He obtained a low grade clerical position with this railway company. The Russian Government was keen to develop Harbin, and both Russian and Jewish immigrants were encouraged to settle there.3 Yuliya Abramovna Yudova4 (Юдовa) was probably born in Samara (Сама́ра), sometime after 1873. (Note that Samara was called Kuybyshev (Ку́йбышев) from 1935 to 1990.Yuliya’s Jewish name was Yudash. Boris married Yuliya either in Eastern Russia or in Harbin around 1900. I have not been able to obtain a marriage certificate to confirm this. It is interesting to note that the first Jewish family from Russia arrived in Harbin in 1898 - so this makes Boris and Yuliya real pioneers5. The Harbin Jewish community was officially established in 1903. In 1904 there were already 500 Jews living there. Harbin was for all intent a Russian-made city.

Around 1900 the administration of the Chinese Eastern Railway was moved from Vladivostok to Harbin – if Boris Sitsky was employed by the Railway, this would further account for the move to Harbin. 2 Coincidentally in 1900, Chelyabinsk was the key town involved in the construction of the Trans-Siberian railroad. 3 After Russia won the concession to build the Chinese Eastern Railway in 1896, it effectively won the right to develop a Russian city in Northern China. 4 Yudova surname can be translated as “daughter of Judah”. 5 It is generally regarded that 1898 is the year of Harbin’s official foundation.

The city offered opportunities denied to the majority of Jews in the cities of Russia. Communal institutions were soon established, and these institutions maintained their religious and social identity. Boris and Yuliya had four children – their first child, a boy, died at birth. Next was my father Abie (also called Abraham) born in 1904, David in 1907 and finally Joe in 1910. All the children were born in Harbin. By 1910 there were about 20,000 Jews embedded in a community of 200,000 Russians. (In fact there were 36 different communities in Harbin made up of various nationalities. The Chinese community that numbered about 150,000 persons at that time lived in an area that was called Fujian – Daowai district today.)

This picture of the Harbin Main Synagogue6 was taken in 1910. It is therefore most likely that Boris and Yulyia went to this synagogue while they lived in Harbin.

The whole family later moved to Tientsin probably around 1917, most likely to escape from rampant anti-Semitism that was ever present in Harbin. At some stage in Tientsin, Boris got involved in the affairs of the Jewish community: it is recorded on the Jews of China website7 that “B.A Sitsky was a member of the Revisionist Committee of the Tientsin Hebrew Association in the 1930s”. The Sitsky family demonstrated considerable initiative and energy, and also took some large risks in their moves from Western Russia to China. All this was done in order get a better life for their family and for future generations. Note: There is no genealogical or historical evidence available to show how the family acquired Sitsky as a surname8. One possibility is that Boris Sitsky’s father was given this surname, as the authorities did not want a soldier to have a Jewish surname. Another possibility is that a conversion took place many generations ago. I favour the former possibility as the most likely event. The name Sitsky originates from a river Sit9 to the north of Moscow. 6

It was built on Artilleriskaya Street, in the Pristan' district (now Tongjiang Street, Daoli district). Its foundation stone was laid on May 3, 1907 and the building completed in January 1909. The first Jewish cemetery in China was opened in Harbin in 1903. 7 The website http://www.jewsofchina.org/ is dedicated to preserve the history of Jews in China. There is information on both the Harbin and Tientsin communities. 8 In general, the Jews of the Russian Empire began to give surnames in the late 18 th century, when Catherine II decided to conscript Jews into the army. For this purpose, the population census was taken, during which all Jews were given surnames, usually either at the place of residence or the name of one of the parents, as well as on other grounds, such as professional. Before this time most Jews did not have surnames, only first names and patronymic. 9 The Sit' River (Сить) is a tributary of the Miloga River. It is located on the 58° latitude.

The photo below of Boris and Yuliya was probably taken in the late 1930s. Unfortunately, our family does not have an earlier photo of either Boris or Yuliya.

3. Migration from Russia to China – Pavel & Sofa Toper My mother’s parents were called Pavel and Sofa Toper. The origin of both my maternal grandparents was Wislica10, then in Russian Central Poland. Both my grandparents’ families moved from Wislica in the 1860s or 1870s. In those days, the majority of the population in this village was Jewish. The move to Siberia was imposed because both families were punished for their involvement in smuggling and related illegal activities. (When Pavel’s first son was born in 1900, the Irkutsk synagogue’s birth register noted that ‘the father was a peasant with a convict background’!) My grandmother’s niece, Zina Rosenzweig, told me that the family involvement in smuggling was a topic of conversation during her youth in Irkutsk. The distance from Wislica to Irkutsk ‘as the crow flies’ is nearly 6000km, so it was a monumental journey for both families. According to Zina Rosenzweig this long journey to the east of Russia must have taken nearly one year, as the mode of transport for ‘peasant convicts’ would have been by ox-cart. The Trans-Siberian Railway was not in existence in those days. Pavel Lazaravitch Toper (Toпep) was born in Ust-Kut (Усть-Кут) in the Kirensk area, about 500 km north of Irkutsk, and in the Irkutsk Oblast, in December 1880. The family soon moved to Irkutsk. At that stage, his surname was Topf. However, most of the family changed their surname to Toper11, probably because they wanted a Russian name rather than a Polish/German one. Sofa Rosenzweig (Poзeнцвaйг)12 was born in Irkutsk (Ирку́тск) in June 1881. The family lived in 28 Bolshaya Street. Bolshaya (Grand) Street is now called Karl-Marx Street which is the second main street in the city. It was called Bolshaya before 1917. This photo of Bolshaya Street is from the early 1900s.

In the course of the German occupation in World War II, Wislica’s Jewish population perished in the Holocaust. I first heard of this change of surname from my mother when I was a 14 year old teenager in Australia. This was a topic that was not mentioned when we were living in China. 12 Rosenzweig means rose twig in German. 11

Pavel was often called by his Jewish name, Pinkus. He married Sofa (Yiddish name Zisia) Rosenzweig in 1899. Their children were all born in Irkutsk – Abrasha in 1900, Grisha in 1903, Sarah in 1909 and Samuel in 1912. In 1903, Pavel was already a retired lance corporal from the Yenisei battalion – this is noted on the birth register when his son Grisha was born. It is not known when he was first recruited into the Army.

Pavel then served in the Russian Army during the Russo-Japanese war (1904-1905). He was wounded and was ‘mentioned in dispatches’ for his bravery. He never talked about his army career to the family. At some stage he trained in the army medical academy. The Russian army was notoriously anti-Semitic and it would have been a dreadful time for him. He became a prisoner-of-war at the siege of Port Arthur. It was here that he met another prisoner-ofwar, the legendary Russian Zionist Joseph Trumpeldor.13

At the conclusion of the war, Pavel was awarded a commemorative badge by the Russian Army. The official name of the badge was Imperial Military Medical Academy silver badge. This event probably happened in Port Arthur, now known as Lüshun Port.

Numerous Jewish soldiers, demobilised after the defeat of the Russian army by the Japanese in 1905, chose to settle in the Far East rather then returning to Russia.

Irkutsk had a wooden synagogue which was built in 1881 – a modest building, but quite large. The Jewish community was substantial. An Irkutsk Jewish birth register from this period points to a movement of people from the ‘Pale of Settlement’ in the west of Russia.

The Toper family may have lived in Marx Street (now Kommunarov). The Irkutsk Jewish Synagogue records say that a Toper house was constructed in 1910 and that it had four apartments - one for Pavel’s parents, one for Pavel and Sofa, one for the Preisman family (cousins), and one for Pavel’s brother, Mosia. One significant feature of the Toper house was the heated stables – uncommon in those days. It is known that the Toper and Rosenzweig families lived near each other. According to information from the Rosenzweig family, it is believed that they lived on 28 Karl Marx Street. Here is a picture of this address taken in 2009. This is an old building, so it is very likely that the Rosenzweig family lived in one of the apartments.

This is a map of the centre of Irkutsk showing the location of the streets where the Rosenzweig and Toper families lived. I have been unable to determine the actual street number for the Toper family.

This photo of Pavel and Sofa Toper and their three children was taken circa 1908 before the birth of Samuel. In the middle is my mother Sarah, Grisha at the left and Abrasha at the right.

Around 1910 the whole Toper family (except Sam) travelled back to their ‘roots’ – Wislica, in Poland. This was a very big trip to undertake, and their party included a person to look after the three children. When they arrived, they were disappointed they could not communicate adequately with their relatives and friends, as they could no longer talk the local Yiddish dialect. From left: Grisha, Pavel, Sarah, Abrasha and Sofa. In the middle is the governess, who was a relative on the Rosenzweig side of the family.

Here is the only known picture of the four Toper children – it must have been taken in Irkutsk around 1913: Sarah, Abrasha, Samuel and Grisha.

Pavel Toper moved to Northeast China in 1913/1914 to establish a fur business. Because of border crossing limitations from Russia into China after the start of WWI, he had to live by himself for many years in Harbin, until the rest of the family could join him. He was afraid to return to Russia as he knew he would be again conscripted into the army. Many of the Rosenzweig family and Toper family moved to Harbin during the time of the Russian revolution in 1917, others after the revolution was over. It was not until the 1920s that communism took complete control of the eastern part of the country. Both the Toper and Rosenzweig families lost the titles to their homes in Irkutsk – the Soviet State simply took over their properties. Therefore, they had to start from scratch in a new country – a daunting experience. Grisha, together with his cousin Leova Preisman, left Irkutsk for Harbin illegally in 1919, working as cooks on The Trans-Siberian China Railway. Sofa Toper together with Sarah and Sam moved legally to Harbin in 1920.

Harbin, which is originally a Manchu word meaning a place for drying fishing nets grew from a small rural settlement. The early Russian-Jewish pioneers made a major contribution to the growth of Harbin to a vital and prosperous city. The city is located on the banks of the Songhua River. There was a considerable RussianJewish population in Harbin during the 1920s, and as a result, many of the buildings reflected this fact. For example in the picture on the left, the ‘Star of David’ can be seen in the brick dome area as well as in the upper section of the glass window. The building was the Jewish Gymnasium or the Jewish Middle School. It is located on 86 Tongjiang Street, Daoli District next to the Main Synagogue of Harbin.

The whole Toper family moved to Tientsin (now Tianjin, 天津) in 1926. Tientsin means The Ford of Heaven. They rented a colonial house in the French Concession at 86 Rue Dillon.

Note: Both the Toper and Sitsky families were considered to be stateless - once they left Russia they did not possess any passports. After the Russian revolution, there were some Russian Jews who elected to become Soviet citizens and to hold Soviet passports but the Toper and Sitsky families were not amongst these. 14

4. Maps of the Migration Routes The distances involved in the family migration from European Russia to Northeast China were great for both the Sitsky and Toper sides of the family. Some of the travel within Russia was probably made by the use of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which was completed in 1898. The journey of the Topf and Rosenzweig families from Wislica to Siberia in the 1860s or 1870s, a huge distance across Russia, would have been undertaken by horse-cart or ox-cart. The Chinese Eastern Railway14 was not completed until some years later, so the journey taken by the Sitsky family from Siberia to Harbin would have been very slow. I am showing two maps â&#x20AC;&#x201C; one for Western Russia and one for Eastern Russia and China

For more information on the Chinese Eastern Railway see http://www.transsib.ru/Eng/history-kvzd.htm

5. My Father Abie Sitsky Abie (also known as Abraham) was born in Harbin, China on 1st October 1904. It is interesting to note that officially his name was Abie (Aбe in Russian) and not Abraham. Here is his birth certificate – note that the date of birth is 18 September 1904. However, the September date was according to the old Julian calendar, so he later on adopted 1 October 1904 as his day of birth. The certificate was issued by the Harbin Jewish ‘House of Prayer’.

Here is a full translation of the certificate:

Who performed circumcision

Date of birth and circumcision Christian Date

Date of birth and circumcision Hebrew Date

Place of birth

Status of father, and names of father and mother

Who was born and what was the given name

Abram Naer Ilia supervised by Rabbi Levin

18 September 1904

22 Tishre 5665

Harbin Manchuria

Father a common citizen from Penzenskaya Region father Chaim-ber Isekov Sitsky mother Yudash Yudova

Boy name Abie

This is an accurate copy from the metric book of the temporary Harbin Jewish Prayer House given to Chaim-ber Isakov Sitsky as requested. Learned Jew performing duties of Rabbi Stamp: 28 September 1904

Signed Sh Levin

Board of Temporary Harbin Jewish Prayer House

Nothing is known of his early schooling in Harbin. Russian would have been his main language but he probably was given some lessons on the English language. When the Sitsky family moved from Harbin to Tientsin â&#x20AC;&#x201C; most likely in 1917, Abie was 13 years old.

In Tientsin, he attended a local school called St. Louis College, run by the French Marist Brothers, although all tuition was in the English language because English was the main language of commerce among the foreigners. The brothers came from France, Spain and Germany. Most of the students would have been Catholics, but there were also Russian Orthodox and Jewish students.15 Father very much enjoyed his period in this multicultural school. The photo above of St. Louis College was taken in 1933. However, the building would have been the same one as when father attended from 1917 to 1920. At an early age, 15 or 16 years, Abie had to leave school and get work as his father Boris became seriously ill and the family needed a regular income. He was sorry to leave school life including the sporting aspect. Father loved to play baseball. Here is the earliest known photo taken of Abie â&#x20AC;&#x201C; in the mid 1920s perhaps, when he turned 21. 15

Some people have said that the most famous old boy of this school was Chou En-Lai â&#x20AC;&#x201C; but many China experts dispute this.

Abie used to tell me how he loved to play baseball, especially as a pitcher, whether this was in a special team or just between friends, I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know, as I never asked. He said that he could sometimes make the ball move in the air and trick a hitter. He was a rather reserved, serious person with a high sense of responsibility. He was not interested in drinking, dancing or gambling â&#x20AC;&#x201C; unlike his brothers. However, he loved watches - he was given two gold watches in China. When he turned 21 years, his parents gave him a beautiful fob watch. It was an L Audemars made in Geneva, shown on the left. He also was given a gold Eberhard wristwatch as a wedding present.

He also enjoyed wearing this ring, probably a present. It was a gold ring with his initials inscribed.

We have very few photos of Abie prior to him meeting my mother. This one, taken on a street in Tientsin, is interesting to see because it shows the local men’s fashion in the 1920s. Father’s friend is not known. I have no knowledge of father’s early employment history. He got permanent work at the British American Tobacco Company (later called Yee Tsoong Tobacco Company) in 1922, and stayed on there for 29 years, until our departure from China. The BAT Company was located on the banks of the Hai River. The company only commenced operation in Tientsin in 1921 but by 1930 it employed about 4000 workers. He told us that one day, early in his time with the company, he punched a Chinese factory worker who insulted him because of his Jewish background; this incident seems to be out of character. Father had a robust constitution and he was hardly ever sick. The one ailment that afflicted him most of his life was piles (haemorrhoids). 21

In this photo of my father from the 1920s he is proudly posing with a walking stick. Though Europe was far away some customs from the west inevitably made their way into the local foreign community. As a Russian-Jewish person father escaped any victimisation during the Japanese takeover of the BAT factory from 1937 to 1945. However, matters were different for the Chinese workers. They were continually terrorised and mistreated by the Japanese military that were in charge of the factory during this long period. Father told us of a particularly brutal treatment handed out to a Chinese troublemaker â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the poor wretch was tied to a post, water poured over him and then left overnight in the middle of the Tientsin winter.

Here is a historic photo of the senior staff of the B.A.T. Company taken within the grounds of the factory in the late 1940â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s. Abie is sitting in the front row, eleventh person from the right.

On the right is an enlarged section of the photo showing my father Abie with his immediate working colleagues. It is interesting to see that there are many women shown in the photo.

Father had access to regular free cigarettes in the factory and he became a heavy smoker. He told me that at one stage he used to wake up in the middle of the night and light up! In the late 1940s after seeing the tar vats in the basement of the factory he made the decision to quit. He never smoked again. However, he started putting on weight around this time, and by the time we left China for Australia he was considerably overweight.

I remember that father brought cigarettes home from the tobacco company in large cylindrical containers like this one. He then transferred them into a special brass cigarette box (shown later) after lining the box with damp blotting paper. He used to say that kept them in top condition.

The company also marketed cigarettes in regular packets like this one:

The tobacco factory was located in the Russian Concession, on the Bund. In summer, father caught a boat every morning and evening to go across the Hai River. In winter, the river froze up and the boat service ceased to operate. Father had to walk to the closest bridge, several blocks away in the wrong direction, and this would have made it a very long walk to get to the factory. He told us that he occasionally took a short-cut and walked across the frozen river. Luckily he never had an accident. Larry remembers father giving him a look inside the factory. In particular, he still remembers the giant vats of tar that were used in the manufacturing process. After China became a communist country, the tobacco company was nationalised but this did not affect father’s employment. The company’s Chinese name remained as the Yee Tsoong Tobacco Company. Alex Auswaks reminded me that father had a humorous ear for nicknames. I don’t remember this side of him; perhaps I was just too young to have appreciated this character trait. He called Alex ‘Skinny Banana’ and Jesse Trachtengertz was ‘Sevka’ (he was generally called Seva).

6. My Mother Sarah Toper Sarah was born in Irkutsk on 26 November 1909. Unfortunately no original birth certificate could be located in the family papers â&#x20AC;&#x201C; in fact it looks as though the Topers destroyed all documents from Russia. Vera Toper told me that the whole family was scared that any evidence of previous residence in Russia could mean deportation to the Soviet Union. The certificate below was issued in Tientsin 1938, and it already incorporates Sarahâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s married name.16

One of the signatories on this Certificate is A. Izgur, a long-term headmaster of the Tientsin Jewish School

During 2012, when I was doing research involving the Irkutsk Archives, written records from the Irkutsk synagogue became available. The records stated that my mother was in fact born on 26 November 1906 (Julian calendar 13 November, Jewish calendar 9 Kislev 5667). We will never know the real reason for this discrepancy; was it an error made by my grandparents after their move to North East China, or was it deliberately done to reduce the age of my mother by three years? The most plausible reason was that by reducing my motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s age, she could travel to North East China as a young child rather than as a teenager. A close inspection of the photographs from that period does indeed indicate that our mother was born in 1906 and not 1909. The records shown below â&#x20AC;&#x201C; left to right - give the Russian (Julian) dates, the equivalent Jewish dates, place of birth, names of the parents and maiden name of the mother, and the name of the child.

The 26 November 1909 birth date was always the date that our whole family believed was my motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s birth date; it was the date recorded in all documents in China and Australia. I have continued to use this date in this account. There are no records of motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s schooling in Irkutsk. However, I am including the picture below of a school photo taken in Harbin in the mid 1920s; mother is in the back row fourth from left. 17

The school was the Jewish Middle School; it was established in 1918 and became the first Jewish Middle School in the Far East.18

This photo is featured on the Jewish genealogy Harbin website : http://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/harbin/images/Jewish_Middle_School_Students.jpg 18 It is now the site of the Harbin Korean Nationality No. 2 Middle School.

The second floor of this building had a pointed-arch-form window embedded with the Star of David. The circle-arch-form passage, tower pillars on the wall, and the circular dome on the roof made the building unique and rich in Jewish architectural style. It was located in 86 Tongjiang Street, Daoli District.19 There is a commemorative sign on the front of the building20; it is interesting to note that this was also a musical school â&#x20AC;&#x201C; it is therefore likely that mother was enrolled here for piano lessons.

In this family picture below, taken in Harbin in 1925, my mother was 16 years old.

Now the site of the Harbin Korean Nationality No. 2 Middle School

The sign was designed and texts written in 2004 by Professor Dan Ben-Canaan of Heilongjiang University in Harbin. This kind of sign was placed by the city government on all preserved Jewish communal establishment in Harbin.

After the family moved to Tientsin in 1926, mother went to St. Joseph’s High School. The curriculum prepared girls for the Cambridge University Overseas School Certificate Examinations. Here is how the school looked in those days.21

When we visited Tianjin in 2006, one stop we made was at mother’s old school, now called No. 11 High School. The building had changed a lot in the intervening 80 years, but the similarities are still there to see.

The photo appears in Brian Power’s book The Ford of Heaven.

Sarah was a very shy child, very different to her outgoing brothers Grisha and Sam. Her shyness did not stop her later in life from getting her own way in most situations with my father. I remember her as being a natural worrier, and always looking on the negative side of life. She was also a superstitious person – for example she believed in the concept of ‘the evil eye’, which was no doubt something that her mother had passed on to her. Russian was mother’s preferred language at all times. She knew how to speak basic Yiddish, but I do not know whether that was formally taught in the schools she attended, or she just picked up this language listening to her parents. She had a very poor knowledge of Mandarin that she mainly used when shopping or travelling by rickshaw. Once a well-dressed Chinese man knocked on our front door, and when mother opened the door he explained that a poor man died on the street in front of our house, and he was collecting money for a burial. Mother’s response was to slam the door in his face – she did not understand what the man was saying, and just assumed he was a beggar. Larry was there at the time and he certainly understood what the man had said! My mother used to tell me that the worst sickness she experienced before her marriage was scarlet fever. This sickness was endemic and very many people succumbed to it. Sarah started to learn to play the piano in Irkutsk, and carried on when the family moved to China. Learning to play an instrument was the sort of thing one did in a cultivated Russian household. She gave my brother Larry the first lessons in playing the piano.

One memento from Sarah’s youth that has survived is a Russian fortune telling game – a set of cardboard cards based on the names of different flowers. It is most likely that this game was manufactured in pre-Soviet times.

Another memento that has survived is motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s high school Russian literature text. Although half the front cover has been lost, all the pages are secure. This book was published in Harbin in 1922.

Another memento is a school atlas, published in 1896, that she used in Harbin. Unfortunately, most pages of the atlas have been lost.

The photo above was taken in the winter of 1930. It is the first photo I have of my father and mother (on the right) together, and was taken two years before their marriage. It was taken in the French Concession on the bridges over the Hai (now Haihe) River in Tientsin.

This bridge was still standing in 2011. It is now called the Jiefang Bridge.

In the late 1920s Sarah had a number of suitors. She would have been seen as a young woman from a good middle-class family. I remember father telling me that before he came on the scene there were several young men who were quite interested in her. He had to move fast to capture her hand! In St. Josephâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s High School Sarah met Esther Zasnikoff and they became close friends. Here is a photo of Esther Zasnikoff, Lily Toper (motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cousin) and Sarah taken in 1929 when my mother was 20 years old. Esther Zasnikoff later married Isaac Vilner and the friendship continued between the Vilner family and my parents, until the Vilners departed Tientsin for San Francisco in 1938.

During 1931 father started to appear in the Toper photos. Below is a photo taken on the Tientsin Railway platform in June 1931. All the Topers are there and Abie is in the front on the left holding a straw hat. A few of the people are unknown to me. Front row: Abie Sitsky, Lily Toper and an unknown person. Second row: Esther Zasnikoff, Sarah Toper, Sofa Toper, Mosia Toper and Sam Toper. Back row: Isaac Vilner, unknown person, then Pavel Toper and then another unknown.

We see a lot of photos taken on railway stations both in Tientsin and also in Peitaiho. It was a local custom to either farewell or welcome back members of the family or acquaintances.

Abie Sitsky and Sarah Toper were engaged late in 1931 and the marriage date was set. This is an excellent formal photo of the couple.

7. Abie Sitsky Marries Sarah Toper The picture below was taken in a reception hall in Tientsin. The date was 23rd September 1932. Many members of the Sitsky and Toper families and family friends were there for the big occasion. I always believed that the wedding reception was in the ‘Club Kunst’ (my mother also told me this) but in doing the research for these notes I discovered that Kunst was not fully completed until 1937. However, I have seen pictures of wedding receptions at the Club during the 1920’s. Therefore, my conclusion is that the Club operated from the late 1920’s, but without all the facilities, which became fully available from 1937. Both the parents of the bride and groom were present at the wedding. So were Sarah’s brothers Grisha and Samuel. Abie’s brother Joseph was there. Abie’s aunt Bluma was also there.22 Note the large S and A spelt out in the decorations hanging from the roof.

Here is a more detailed look at the bride and groom. Sarah was 23 and Abie was 27 years old.

Surprisingly my father’s younger brother David is not in the photo.

Here is the traditional wedding photo of the bride. Note the serious expression on my mother’s face!

Sarah had a narrow silver ring while Abie had a thick gold ring. Sarah’s ring was encrypted with ‘Abie 23-9-32’. Abie’s ring was encrypted with ‘Abe Sarah 23-9-32’23

My son Michael modified this gold ring and used it as his wedding ring on 14 January 2011.

After their marriage, Abie and Sarah lived with Sarahâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s parents at 86 Rue Dillon, which was located in the French Concession. After 1949 the name of the street was changed to Harbin Road, and the house number was changed to thirty eight. Friends who were close called them by their first name i.e. Sarah or Sarochka and Abie. More distant friends or acquaintances called them the Russian way - Sarah Pavlovna and Abram Borisovitch. Father called mother Sarunchik, as a term of affection.

Some Chinese employees of BAT presented my parents with a silver plaque together with two silver wine goblets. It was a significant gesture. Not only is it an important family heirloom but also a valuable example of the relationships between Chinese and Europeans who lived in China before the Communist takeover. On the next page is the translation of the plaque.

There was never expectation that mother would have some sort of paid job after the marriage.24 No doubt, she occasionally helped her father in the fur factory, but that was it. In that era, it was just the norm in the Russian-Jewish community for wives to be at home looking after the children and the house.

Sarah never had a paid job in Australia.

This was the Marriage Certificate for Abie and Sarah. The Tientsin Hebrew Association issued it nearly fourteen years after the event.

8. Larry and Bobby Arrive on the Scene Larry was born on 10th September 1934 and I was born on 22nd September 1939. Our Birth Certificates state that our given names were Lazarus and Boris – however we have never used those names. The Chinese authorities did not issue birth certificates in those days – documentation was only available via the Tientsin Hebrew Association. Note that Larry’s birth certificate was issued in 1946, twelve years after he was born!

We were both circumcised according to the Jewish law â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Rabbi Joseph Baronsky carried this out. He was the only moehl in Tientsin.25

His daughter Tamara, and her husband Leo Birulin were at my parentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; wedding.

Larry was born in Tientsin, but I was born in Tangshan – about 100km northeast of Tientsin. There was a major flood in Tientsin in 1939, and Sarah was advised to go to Tangshan for safety reasons. All records say, incorrectly, that I was born in Tientsin. Nearly 90% of the urban areas of Tientsin were flooded in 1939. The disaster caused thousands of deaths and huge loss of properties. The flood lasted more than 70 days, and when it receded, Tientsin was completely covered with wreckage. Larry remembers some trips on a rowboat during the floods. He accompanied an adult when some provisions had to be purchased. The floodwater did not enter our house, so the family was very lucky. All the yard and basement were flooded, and the water level covered most of the steps leading to the house entry. The floodwater smell was very strong. This is a photo taken in the British Concession during the 1939 floods – it shows that the steps leading up to the Empire Theatre are under water. The photo confirms Larry’s recollections that the flood level was not high enough to enter our house because we had a number of steps leading up to the ground floor.

This photo of Larry and me was taken in 1940; our house is across the road on Larryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s right, just out of view.

Below is a poem written for me by a family friend, with the Initial L.26 I was 10 months old and the family was on holidays in Peitaiho.

Apparently, the writing of a poem was something typical from those days when friends seemed to make a special effort, rather than just buying a greeting card!

My brother Larry has done the translation.

This is the first ‘formal’ picture taken of me by a professional photographer - in the summer of 1940.

Here is a photo of a lovely small silver cup given to me by one of my parent’s friends soon after I was born. Note my name inscribed on the cup. The year is 1940. Maybe it was a Kiddush cup i.e. reciting blessings over a cup of wine.

This is a posed picture that was artificially coloured; note the rough way in which the red and blue colours were applied. The photographerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s signature is on the bottom left corner of the colour photo: Lifshitz, Tientsin. My parents had this photo framed and it was a permanent feature in their bedroom in Tientsin. 43

On the left is a family photo taken early in 1942, when Larry was seven and I was two years old.

Here are two photos from the summer of 1942. On the left I am in one of my favourite toys â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a pedal car. And on the right Larry and I outside our front gate in the summer of 1942.

This three-piece silver set - eggcup, spoon and serviette holder shown here has the initial BS inscribed on every piece. It was given to me as a very young child.

The ‘colour’ photograph of me in a cowboy outfit was another typical studio arrangement.27 The picture was taken in 1943 when I was four years old. Note that in my right hand I am holding a pistol; my left hand is on the handle of a rubber dagger.

Note that the photographer signed the picture in English – not Russian – even though all communication with him was in Russian.

Around the time of my fifth birthday, for a period of about two years, I became very reluctant to have photographs taken of me. I believed that if my photo was taken that might mean that I no longer would be able to function as a boy. This studio photo was taken in 1945.

It is interesting to note that English was the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;officialâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; language in the community. It was used in all official certificates and legal documents. However, Russian was the language used in day-today living. Larry and I spoke Russian, English and even Chinese in our daily communication. We spoke in Russian or in English with each other; however with our mother and father it was usually Russian. Outside the family, we used the language that was most appropriate for the situation.

9. Foreign Concessions in Tientsin During the years from the mid 1860s the central part of Tientsin was divided into Concessions. Some of these Concessions lasted until the end of World War II, and a few existed until the Chinese Communist takeover in 1949. A historical explanation of Concessions is required: Following a series of military defeats in the middle of the 19th century, the Chinese authorities were slowly forced to permit extra territoriality for foreign nationals. Concessions in China were a group of territories within China that were governed and occupied by foreign powers. They are frequently associated with colonialism. Most were enclaves inside key cities that were treaty ports. In each city there might have been an entire host of Concessions. There were nine Concessions within Tientsin at the height of the era. Generally, the foreign powers controlling the Concessions were Western powers or the Empire of Japan. However, each foreign power usually administrated their own Concession, although occasionally several powers might agree to form a single settlement. In these Concessions the citizens of each foreign power were given the right to trade freely and travel from one Concession to another. They developed their own cultures distinct from the rest of China because each administration would try to make their Concession look â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;like homeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. Churches, public houses and various other western commercial institutions sprung up in the Concessions. Ironically, some of these Concessions eventually had more advanced architecture than that of the originating country. Each Concession also had its own police force, different legal jurisdictions and their own separate laws. Thus an activity might be legal in one Concession but illegal in another. Many of the Concessions even maintained their own military garrison and standing army. Military and police forces of the Chinese government were sometimes present. Chinese people were originally forbidden to live inside most of the Concessions, but to improve commercial activity and services most Concessions eventually permitted them by the 1860s but treated them like second-class citizens. They eventually became the majority of the residents inside the Concessions. Non-Chinese in the Concessions were generally subject to consular law, and some of these laws applied to the Chinese residents. By the 1930s, seventy years after the start of the foreign Concessions in Tientsin, the number of foreigners living there reached a total of 10,000, half of them Westerners and half Japanese. The Japanese occupied Tientsin in 1937. Meanwhile, the number of Chinese residents living in the Concessions was 170,000. With such numerical superiority one would expect signs of hostility from the Chinese, but they showed, at least on the surface, a willingness to accept the status quo. The Concessions were British, French, American, Japanese, German, Austrian, Italian, Belgian and Russian. In the older Chinese part of the city, inhabited by Chinese only, there would have been over one million people.

On the map below,28 the French Concession is shown in blue and the British in green. We lived in the French Concession, two and a half blocks away from the Hai Ho River. Opposite our house was the French Police Station. The yellow area was the Russian Concession, where the BAT Factory was located. It can be clearly seen that we did not have to travel far in our daily lives. Most of the Russian Jews who lived in Tientsin lived in flats in the British Concession - so our living arrangement did place us in a unique situation.

This map of Tientsin was issued in 1939 by The Oriental Book Store, and printed by A.J.Serebrennikoff & Co.

The photo below shows a typical street within the French Concession.29 The Jewish population in Tientsin in the 1930s was about 3000, however, it was only in 1939/1940 that a synagogue was established in Tientsin. It was located in the British Concession.

Although we lived in the French Concession, most of the Russian-Jewish population lived in the British Concession and that was also the location of the Tientsin Jewish School and the Tientsin Synagogue. This did not present any difficulty. There were no actual barriers placed to moving between Concessions, and one could walk or take a rickshaw to Concessions in any part of Tientsin. A skating rink was located in the Russian Concession and the family occasionally went there. Father enjoyed having a skate. Our family used a bank on the Rue de France, not far from our house.

It is interesting to note that the main road joining the French and British Concessions changed its name on the border - Rue de France became Victoria Road. When we went to school or shopping, we always first turned right from our street into Rue de France, then went along Victoria Road and then onto our destination. Victoria Road (shown here) was also an attractive street with well-designed buildings. 29

In our visit to Tianjin in 2006, we noted that many French colonial buildings are still standing.

10. My Grandparents in Tientsin My Paternal Grandparents My paternal grandparents lived in Tientsin from 1917. Abie’s parents did not have a long life. Boris, my paternal grandfather, died in 1938 when he was about 65 and his wife Yuliya in 1940, when she was in her mid-60s. Therefore, my paternal grandfather never held me in his arms and I have no pictures to indicate that my paternal grandmother saw me as a baby. My aunt Lara Sitsky remembered them as a wonderful couple very loving and outgoing – and she loved them dearly. They were both buried in the Tientsin Jewish Cemetery in Chin Lin Chwang. The cemetery no longer exists. It was located across the river close to where we lived. Also buried in this cemetery were my paternal grandfather’s sisters – Elka Sitsky, died in 1929 and Bluma Sitsky, died in 193730. Below is a picture of the entrance to the Tientsin Jewish Cemetery taken in the 1920’s.

The Chinese Government used the land for a housing project in 1958. The “Jews of China” website has a list of graves in the Tientsin Cemetery. http://www.jewsofchina.org/jewsofchina/Templates/showpage.asp?DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=909

My Maternal Grandparents My maternal grandparents lived in Tientsin from 1926 until 1946. Below is a photo taken in the late 1920s of the members of the Tientsin Hebrew Association. Pavel is sitting down fourth from the left. Next to him is Mr. Habinsky.

My grandfather Pavel was very active in the running of the Tientsin Jewish community. He was on the Synagogue Board from 1937 to 1940. This is a photo of the Board Plaque â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Pavel is in the top row, second from the left.

The Tientsin Hebrew Association had welfare and relief facilities under its administration, such as a Jewish hospital, Jewish old people’s home, Jewish mess hall and Jewish cemetery. Here is a document showing him as Hon. Treasurer and President of the Religious Committee of the Tientsin Hebrew Association. The association was known by its Russian name: Тяньцинская Еврейская Община.

Pavel and Sofa usually conversed with each other in Yiddish. I do not know if my mother learnt Yiddish at school, but she certainly could understand and speak this language.

The whole family regularly travelled by train to Peitaiho, (now Beidaihe) mainly for the summer vacations. Peitaiho is located nearly 200 miles northeast of Tientsin.

Here are three pictures taken in Peitaiho in the mid 1920s â&#x20AC;&#x201C; my mother sitting on a donkey and below, Sam in his swimsuit, and the whole family â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Sofa, Sarah, Sam and Pavel enjoying the sunny weather.

The photo below, also taken in Peitaiho shows my grandmother Sofa and my mother Sarah dressed casually in Chinese robes, while my grandfather Pavel and his sons Sam and Grisha are in their holiday white outfits.

From photos that I have inherited from my parents and also from the Toper albums from New York I can see that the family had a very good relationship with the Chinese staff both in the office and also at their house. In China people wear white garments after a death in the immediate family. In the photo below we have Grisha Toper paying his respects to a woman who may have been an Amah in the house. She is sitting in the front row on the right. The other Chinese were probably members of her family and the Chinese servants who worked in the house.

This same woman appears in a number of photos in the 1920s. It is clear that the family had a close relationship with her â&#x20AC;&#x201C; here she is sitting between Grisha Toper and Sarah Toper and on the left is their cousin Leova Preisman. These photos are not very clear, but I wanted to include them in my book to show the special relationship of the Toper family to their staff.

The Tientsin Railway Station was often the location for family photographs. In this photo taken in 1930 we have all the Toper family farewelling or welcoming Lily Toper; she is holding the bunch of flowers.

The Japanese occupation of China’s northeast commenced in 1930 after the Japanese Army took the city of Darian. They then invaded the rest of the northeast – they entered and took Harbin in 1932 and Tientsin in 1937. However, the Concessions were allowed to continue functioning in Tientsin until the Pearl Harbour attack in December 1941. During the Japanese occupation of Tientsin from the end of 1941 to 1945, life became more difficult. In order to survive, Jewish community leaders had to actively participate in parades and other events organised by the Japanese authorities. All businesses had to comply with orders given. Any non-compliance meant serious problems. Some historians maintain that the relative safety of the Jews during the period, in contrast to the Japanese treatment of Chinese during the war, was linked to an appreciation of Jewish culture and history by the Japanese and to the connections that many Jews had in the USA. The real reason was that the Japanese wanted ‘Jewish money’ in order to help their war-weakened economy. They thus devised the ‘Fugu Plan’ trying to get money from wealthy Jews. They treated the Jews with a carrot-and-stick policy. One of the first things the Japanese did was enforce mass inoculations of smallpox on the population. All adults had to carry an ID that showed the inoculation details. Injection stations were set up in the streets of Tientsin; there was one outside our house. I was too young to understand the meaning of the Japanese occupation. Father continued working at the British American Tobacco Company; his hours were long and his salary was low, but to have regular work was certainly a blessing. Grandfather Pavel also continued on with his fur business. The Japanese in fact encouraged business activity as this was a source of taxation revenue. Overall, one has to say that it was remarkable that in Tientsin, during World War II, the Japanese did not implement any formal discrimination or imprisonment of Jews. The Jewish Community was ignorant of the horrific events in Europe – it was only in 1944 that news got to Tientsin about the Nazi atrocities against the Jews. The community was ignorant or did not want to acknowledge the fact that there were Nazi officers stationed in Harbin! An active black market operated in some streets of Tientsin. If one had the cash it was possible to purchase goods otherwise unavailable through normal shops. Our father developed a great urge to ‘stock up’ on goods if they were plentiful. One winter father bought a large bag of coal from a black-marketeer, however after the vendor delivered the bag to our house, we later found that there were only a few layers of coal on top, while the rest of the bag was full of rocks. The black market continued to function after the fall of the Japanese with goods from the USA suddenly becoming available. Father used to occasionally buy on the black market in the area near the Tobacco Company in the Russian Concession. This habit of accumulating food supplies stayed with him for the rest of his life. In 1945 we heard the news that the Americans had exploded a new bomb on Hiroshima – a lot of information on the war originated from the Soviet newsagency, Tass. In August 1945 the Japanese capitulated. I do not know how the house finances were organised but I imagine that both Pavel and Abie shared in the expense of running a large house that at one stage employed up to three servants. Abie had a reliable job and Pavel ran a moderately successful business.

At the end of the war, the Soviet Union issued an amnesty to all Russians in China and invited them to take up Soviet citizenship and return to the motherland or ‘rodina’. A number of people took up this offer and actually returned to the Soviet Union – this proved to be a big misjudgement, as these people were treated with suspicion and many were arrested for treason as traitors and as spies for the Japanese. Most were killed at the crossing of the border and others were sent to the Gulags where very few survived. Luckily, our family never considered this move to the Soviet Union. I always called my grandparents the Russian way – dedyshka and babushka. Russian was their normal mode of conversation with the family and in the business. They could hardly speak any English. People outside the family addressed them in the traditional Russian way with name and patronymic – Pavel Lazaravitch and Sofa Yakovlina. Larry and I observed that our grandfather Pavel often used to tightly bandage his legs; we never asked the question why he did that, but in retrospect it must have been done because of his diabetic symptoms. I called my parents papa and mama – also the typical Russian way. I also called my father pop; this was due to the influence of the American presence after the end of the war. It seemed so normal to me to have all of us living together in one house – I do not remember any family squabbles or problems. When I look back, I can see that it was a special period in my life. Our grandparents’ presence provided Larry and me with a living link to the past. Of course as a child I would not have understood that concept. One of the roles of Grandma Sofa was being in charge of the kitchen. She organised the kitchen activities and often participated in the preparation of the food. For some of the time in this period of our lives we had a cook who lived in the servants’ quarters. One unusual feature in our house was the use of spittoons! A few of them were located in key rooms. I suppose that living in a society where spitting was very common in the streets, this practice must have seemed normal and extended to our house. I still remember once running into my grandparents’ bathroom to wash my hands and seeing a sink full of water I thrust my hands right in. To my horror, I found that my grandfather was in fact using the sink as a spittoon! I never complained about it to my grandfather, but my mother got all the details several times! That practice of having spittoons in the house ceased after Pavel and Sofa left China. Pavel was away from the house for a lot of the time. When he finished at the Toper Brothers office he often used to go to community meetings at the synagogue. Larry remembers that he usually wore a suit and carried a cane whenever he went out. Pavel loved to smoke cigars. Nowadays he would have been considered a chain smoker. From a very early age I can remember the smell of the lit cigar. I used to think it would be wonderful when I would be old enough to light up!

In 1946 my maternal grandparents Pavel and Sofa Toper migrated from China to join their sons Grisha and Sam who were by then American citizens and living in New York. Larry remembers seeing our grandfather disposing of his old Russian passport by stuffing it behind the fireplace in their bedroom.31 He wanted to destroy any evidence of a previous connection to Russia. There was no international air service operating from Tientsin so my grandparents first had to travel to Hong Kong. They boarded a ship docked close by on the Hai Ho (now Haihe) River, in the summer of 1946. They then travelled to New York by air. After their arrival in the USA the Tientsin Hebrew Association sent Pavel Toper a letter to wish him and his family a Happy Jewish New Year and also for a successful resettlement in New York. I have attached this letter as Appendix B. It took time for all of us to adjust to their absence. We wondered whether we would ever see them again. As a young child of eight years I adapted to the new situation relatively quickly but it would have been very hard on my mother to see her parents move so far away. The immediate impact was that father had to cover all the expenses in running the house and mother took over the running of the kitchen. Undoubtedly, our parentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; lives immediately changed as they had to adapt to their expanded responsibilities. Larry remembers getting a lecture from mother about being more responsible around the house.

In New York, Grisha and Sam Toper had a lease of an apartment which they occupied from the mid 1930s - the address was 165 West, 91st Street. My grandparents moved into this apartment on their arrival in 194632. Here is a picture of Pavel and Sofa taken in New York soon after they settled in. The Toper Brothersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; fur business was located on the corner of 27th Street & 7th Avenue. The business was closed in 1955. At the end of 1956, Pavel and Sofa contemplated a move to Australia; in fact, they obtained an Australian visa in November 1956. However, they never came.33 31

Unfortunately, we did not have the opportunity to check if the passport was still there, when we visited the house in 2006. The Toper family had a lease on this apartment from the mid 1930s till the end of 2012, when Vera Toper moved to an aged care facility in Connecticut. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a period of 77 years! 33 My mother had regular correspondence with them, both from China and afterwards from Australia. Pavel died in New York City in 1960. Sofa died in New York City in 1969. 32

11. The Toper Furs and Skins Business Pavel Toper moved to Northeast China in 1913/14 to commence the setting up of the family furs and skins business. The plan was to bring the whole family over to China as soon as the business was set up. However, the start of WWI also introduced border crossing limitations so it was no longer possible to legally migrate from Russia to China. Pavel therefore had to live in Harbin by himself for many years. There is no information available to say when the business was first established in Harbin. In the years 1919/1920 Pavelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s son Grisha and his nephew Leova Preisman illegally crossed over the Russian-Chinese border. A bit later Pavelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s brother Mosia joined the others in Harbin. Mosia became a key participant in the running of the business. The furs were bought from Chinaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rural and pastoral areas. After processing they were sold to overseas markets. In the 1920s and 1930s these were mainly USA and Germany where the furs were made into garments. In those days there were well over 100 Jewish firms engaged in this type of business in NE China.

The photo above was probably taken in a Manchurian rural town in the mid 1920s. Grisha Toper is third from left. There is another European sitting in the middle. It is likely that there was also a Chinese translator that Grisha brought with him. The building behind the group was probably the furs and skins factory. In the yard in front of the group are large bundles of furs and skins. The factory owners and the fur sales people are the other members of this group.

This photo, also taken in the mid-1920s, shows the method of transportation used by the Topers when they travelled to the countryside. Grisha Toper is sitting in the donkey cart at the right.

In 1926 after the Toper family moved from Harbin to Tientsin the business was re-established. It operated from the family home at 86 Rue Dillon for many years. The business was given the name Toper Brothers. Mosia Toper became a full partner with his older brother Pavel Toper.

The photo above, taken in the Toper Brothers Fur Factory, shows Pavel Toper in the middle. On the left are his son Grisha and his brother Mosia; on the right is Leova Preisman, his nephew and a Chinese employee. The photo was taken in the late 1920s. At its peak in the 1930s, the company would have about ten Chinese employees, so it can be regarded as being a well-run and profitable enterprise.

It is interesting to note that the younger foreign staff occasionally dressed up in Chinese robes for photo opportunities. Foreigners did not wear these garments at home or in the streets. The photos were taken on special occasions. In this photo, taken in the late 1920s, we have Grisha Toper on the left and Leova Preisman (second from right) dressed in robes while Pavel Toper stayed in his traditional office suit. 34

Below is an historical photo with the inscription ‘Toper Bros, Shuntehfu’. The Chinese characters can be translated as ‘Foreign Businessmen in Shentehfu in 1929’. Grisha Toper is in a light coloured coat sitting in the middle donkey cart. Shuntehfu (now called Xintai) is in Hebei Province about 330km south west of Tientsin. This indicates that the Toper Brothers firm was indeed an enterprising business that sought their furs and skins supplies far from their city office.

Professor Dan Ben-Canaan from Heilongjiang University in Harbin advised me that this type of action was to mark one’s presence among the ‘natives’. The practice represented a certain level of superior feeling on the part of the foreigner.

The world economic crisis that began in the west in 1929 toppled many Tientsin fur merchants into bankruptcy but fortunately Toper Brothers survived as a company.

In this photo Grisha Toper is standing at the bottom of the steps leading up to the entry to our house at 86 Rue Dillon. The sign on the wall is not clear enough to read fully, but we can read the larger writing on the bottom. It states that this foreign business is moving on 5th January to No. 20 Rue Corbet. The year was most likely 1932, the year that Sarah Toper married Abie Sitsky. The company was growing and required larger premises.

This photo, taken around 1932/33, shows a number of employees of the Toper business standing outside the factory after it was moved from Rue Dillon. The sign on the wall says ’TOPER BROS – FURS AND SKINS’ and underneath is the same information written in Chinese

It is interesting to note that Grandpa Pavel never cut the nail of his little finger on his right hand, and I remember it being very long and curly. He used that finger to help access the quality of the furs before purchasing them. Larry remembers playing with the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;code bookâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; used by Toper Brothers when an order was placed for pelts. The codes were communicated by the telegraph system to the suppliers. My brother also remembers that an employee sat near the front entrance to the factory. He would not permit visitors to go past unless they had a valid reason. Larry remembers him holding two polished walnuts in his hand, which he continually moved about. This is the letterhead that the business used in the 1940s. 20 Rue Corbet was a short walk from the family residence at 86 Rue Dillon.

I still remember the smell of the various pelts as they were being dried in the factory. There were bundles of fur being sorted out on wooden tables and the whole factory floor seemed to be covered by a large number of pelts. The business was closed in the beginning of 1946.

12. My Uncles and Aunts All my uncles played a significant role in my life in Tientsin. The Toper Uncles and Aunts Both Grisha and Sam Toper were born in Irkutsk; Grisha in 1903 and Sam in 1912. During my research for this book, I obtained this record from the Irkutsk Archives on the birth of Grisha:

Grisha was in fact given the name Gersh – a very popular Yiddish name during the early 1900s. The column on the left gives the names of the people who performed the circumcision (Rabbi Beilen and Shlema Bazirin). The double column provides the birth date by both the Christian calendar dates and the Jewish calendar dates – 11 August (Julian calendar) and 1st Elul (Hebrew calendar); the 18 August and 8 Elul are the dates for the circumcision. In the middle column is the place of birth – it says ‘in the city’, no mention of Irkutsk. The record states in the second last column that the parents were a retired lance-corporal Pinkus Lazerov Toper, peasant from the Irkutsk Province, Kirensk Area, Ust-Kutsk rural district, and his wife of the first marriage, Zisla Yankelevna originally Rosenzweig.

Grisha Toper was undoubtedly the extrovert of the family. This characteristic manifested itself in a number of ways. Grisha was a very keen amateur actor. We know that he was involved in stage productions both in Harbin and Tientsin; however it is likely that his involvement first occurred in Irkutsk. In the photo below, taken in Harbin in the early 1920s, Grisha is standing at the left near the door; he is the one with a moustache, probably at the conclusion of a performance.

Later in his life he was actively involved in a variety of organisations where he was often the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;front manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; who was required to talk publicly during gatherings. We can see from photos taken in Harbin during the early 1920s that Grisha and his friends went to photographic studios where it was customary to dress up in different clothes, or to pose and recreate a situation which they may have wanted to be in.35 As a young man he had a very active social life. He had a very wide circle of friends, both male and female. He had a reputation during his life before marriage of having many affairs. He married late in life, at the age of forty four. 35

Prof. Dan Ben-Canaan of Heilongjiang University in Harbin advised me about this custom from the 1920s in NE China.

From photos he has left we know Grisha travelled widely in the surrounding areas of both Harbin and Tientsin. This was for both business and pleasure. We have many photos of him and his friends taken in the early 1920s in Peitaiho. The fact that Peitaiho is located some 880km from Harbin did not deter him to have holidays on a beach resort. In those days it would have taken people nearly two days on a train to get to the coast. One photo from mid 1925 that was taken in Tangkangtzu shows Grisha and his girlfriend; this town is over 600km from Harbin and is known for its hot springs and holiday destination. My motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s brothers, Grisha and Sam, both arrived in Tientsin in 1926 with the rest of the Toper family. While Grisha was involved in running the Toper fur business Sam was completing his education. He spent considerable time in Shanghai attending the local university and studying languages and finance. He was also very interested in becoming a singer and gave many concerts. Both Grisha and Sam moved to New York in the mid 1930s. Sam enrolled in a local university when he was 23 years old. Grisha made an official declaration on May 1935 stating his intention to apply for US citizenship. Both Grisha and Sam became citizens of the USA in 1942.

Here is a picture taken in 1937 showing Larry with both Uncle Sam and Uncle Grisha. I saw Uncle Sam in 1946 when he arrived in Tientsin. The whole family was quite excited to have a family member in a USA uniform. He stayed with us for quite a long time and I got to know him well. I remember arm-wrestling with him many times. I was determined to beat him at it but never succeeded! He told us stories from his last posting in Hamburg where he was a Russian interpreter in the US army. Sam had a very pleasant singing voice and Larry remembers Sam giving the family a few concerts in our dining room where we had a piano. He also performed in the Club Kunst for the local community.

I regarded him as a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;heroâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; as he served with the US Army during World War II. On the next page is a 1942 photo of him in USA army uniform. Sam worked as an interpreter in Russian, Chinese and French. He was the only member of our family who participated in the war. After the war he returned to university where he received a doctorate in economics. At this stage in 1946 he was not married. There were several matchmaking attempts while he was living with us and some of those nearly came off!

He married Vera in 1947. Vera was a Holocaust survivor – she was born in Vilna, Lithuania in 1924.36 Here is a photo of them in 1947. I met her for the first time during our trip to the USA in 2007.

Uncle Grisha also made a long visit to Tientsin in the summer of 1946. He certainly was an outgoing type of person who loved to socialise within the community. He was also the businessman of the family.

This picture of him with Larry and me was taken in our front courtyard.37 Grisha’s main reason for the visit was to escort our grandparents to New York.

So both uncle Grisha and Uncle Sam were culturally active. Sam was a very good amateur singer and could have gone on to a professional career. Grisha was a good actor who had great talent for comedy routines and vaudeville type acts. So maybe it is not surprising that Larry inherited the musical genes of the family!

A CD-ROM called “A Life and Spirit that Transcended The Holocaust” was published in New York in 2010. In this recording Vera talks about her childhood and wartime experiences. 37 In the early 1950’s Grisha moved to Japan to run a pearl business in association with his close friend Tolya Ponevejsky. He gave all our family quite a few pearl items, such as strings of pearl for my mother, and cuff links for my father, Larry and me. He lived in Tokyo for more than 20 years, and became a collector of Japanese stamps and netsuke. When I inherited some of these items, I sold the stamps, but kept the netsuke to pass on to future generations.

After Grisha was married in 1947 in Tokyo he made another visit to Tientsin during 1948 and brought his wife Sophie with him. That was the only time I remember meeting her. She was a very pleasant, largish woman also from a Russian/Jewish background.

Abrasha Toper was the one uncle I never met due to the fact that he refused to leave Russia with the rest of the family. During my research for this book, I obtained this record from the Irkutsk Archives on the birth of Abrasha. He was born on July 6, 1900. The record gives the dates 7 June (Julian calendar) and 23 Sivan (Hebrew Calendar). He was given the name Abram. It is interesting to note that this record states that Abram’s father was a peasant from a convict background and the family came from Ust-Kut. There is an error in this record that gives the father’s name as Leizar Shmulevich Toper and the mother’s name as Reia Girshevna. These were Abrasha’s grandparents’ first names.

Here on the left is the only photo we have of Abrasha with Grisha Toper. It was taken in Irkutsk in 1916/1917.

When the Toper family decided it was time to leave Russia, Abrasha made the decision to stay on. He was keen to complete his medical degree; also he did not want to be separated from his friend Nina. The photo of Abrasha and Nina (above right) was taken around 1920. By this time they were a married couple. He would have married when he was about nineteen years old. This photo of Abrasha and his daughter Alla38 was taken in Vladivostok in 1927 when his daughter was seven. The family had hardly any contact with Abrasha. Mother occasionally wrote to him but never received replies to her letters. Finally, Abrasha did reply. He made it clear that he did not want to have any communication with anyone who lived in a foreign country. The family understood that it was unsafe for a Soviet citizen in the Stalin era to have links with the West. In fact when my motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cousin, Zina Verny (nee Rosenzweig) visited Moscow in the 1970s she learned that Abrasha had spent some time in prison when Stalin was in power. In the 1940s and 1950s Abrasha was a doctor in the Red Army with the rank of Major. Although the family did not often talk about Abrasha he was clearly missed by them all. He died in Moscow in 1967.

During the writing of this book I tried to locate Alla and her daughter, but unfortunately was unsuccessful.

The Sitsky Uncles and Aunts My father’s two brothers were David and Joe. They were both different from Abie. Abie was the serious type who had a regular job, hated taking any risks, and loved to stay at home listening to classical music. His brothers were outgoing and fun loving and enjoyed going out to clubs, drinking and dancing. Family tensions occurred when Abie’s brother David asked him for a loan to pay off some gambling debts.

Here is a formal picture of David and Ida Chedukh taken on their engagement in 1931. David was 24 years old.

Because he had to take on what he saw as head of the family, father saw himself as the big brother to David and Joe and he felt that one of his roles was to help them out. This caused continual disagreement with mother who nagged Abie about this situation. Despite the nagging Abie did not change his attitude towards his brothers! Both David and Joe lived in small apartments in the British Concession. Larry remembers visiting David and Ida in their apartment in Dickinson Road – not a desirable address! Our mother saw this and their life styles as not keeping up family standards. However, my Aunt Lara and cousin Lily told me that they led a pleasant and full life in China - even though they lived in a small apartment. Unfortunately, mother tended to be very critical in her views and was very mindful of what ‘others’ might think. Here is a picture of David taken in the early 1950s probably after they moved to Israel. I remember David as a jovial person who was always ready to tell you a joke. Once when he was quietly telling a ‘dirty’ joke to father in our lounge-room, I crept up and hid behind a curtain to try and hear what it was all about. To my annoyance, I never worked the joke out, but it must have been a good one because of the roars of laughter from both of them after the punch line was given.

Both David and Joe were tall – as a child I saw that they towered over father. My father said they were close to 6ft and he did not like to stand next to them as they were so much taller than he was. He was probably around 5’7”.

Ida‘s family came from Odessa. She was an educated woman who learned to play the piano. When her family moved to Israel, she gave all her sheet music to Larry. David, his wife Ida and son Mara moved to Israel in 1950. Here is a photo of me with Aunty Ida just prior to their departure from China. She took me to the English Park to have an outing and to give me a treat. The family knew that Ida was a ‘difficult’ person. Unfortunately, this aspect of her personality caused considerable angst in later years.39

Joe was the youngest of the Sitsky brothers. He attended high school and college which were both run by French Marist Brothers in Tientsin. After graduation he worked for a publishing company, then for a company which exported straw for hats. As Joe completed his schooling he was in a better position to obtain good employment. In his youth Joe was a keen basketball player who played in regular junior league competitions. Here he is in 1932/33; he is 23 years of age and in a team called JRC. He is standing in the back row on the right. The photograph appeared in a local Tientsin paper.

Ida and David ended up breaking all contact with their daughter-in-law and grandchildren soon after the premature death of their son Mark in 1978.

This is another picture of Joe taken in 1933. One day Joe went to Harbin on business where he met Larisa while she was working in a cafe. It was love at first sight for both of them! Shortly after that Lara's parents decided to move their firm from Harbin to Tientsin, where Lara and Joe got married and lived happily until they moved to Bangkok, Thailand. Lara's relationship with her in-laws was excellent - in fact, her father-in-law, Boris, used to say: "Since you married Joe, God will forgive you for all your sins", because Joe used to be quite a ladies' man before he met Lara!

Here is a picture of Lara before her marriage to Joe. The fact that Joe married a Russian gentile caused some mild family friction. Mother viewed something as simple as Lara putting up a Christmas tree very critically! Lara told me when we visited the family in Florida in 2007 that she had made a promise to Joe’s father Boris that she would bring up her children in the Jewish faith. Joe and Lara always observed the Jewish holidays during their life in China. Lily first attended the Tientsin Jewish School and then transferred to a Russian school. She had a very happy childhood in China. Lara remembers that all the Sitsky brothers and their families generally got along very well. All the families used to gather for Jewish holidays at Sarah’s and Abie's place and always had a great time. Lara and Joe had a very busy social life in China, especially at the Jewish Club Kunst where they played Mah-jong, attended all the dinner-dances, teas, etc. Lara was also quite busy doing volunteer work for the club. The next stage in their lives came about through the influence of Michael Facturovitch, a cousin to the Sitsky brothers. Mike’s mother, Anna was my paternal grandfather’s sister.

Mike moved from China to Bangkok, Thailand, and after a while asked Joe and his family to join him there. This was in 1947. Mike owned a very nice nightclub and Joe worked for him temporarily as a manager until Joe was offered an excellent job at an import-export company (Sino-British) where he worked until the family moved to Brazil, again because of Uncle Mike! Both families lived in Sao Paulo for many happy years, then Mike moved to another city and family contact was broken. The picture of Lily, Lara and Joe was taken in 1950 in Thailand.

As far as I know, my parents had very limited contact with the Facturovitch family, both in Harbin and later in Tientsin. I do not remember meeting any of them.

Here is a picture of Mike Facturovitch taken with his parents â&#x20AC;&#x201C; this is the only picture I have seen which shows my paternal grandfatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s sister Anna.

One interesting bit of information that emerged during my research was that in 1927 the Harbin Sports Association awarded Mike Fakturovitch an athletics certificate of proficiency - shown below.

By early 1950 all our close relatives and many friends had migrated from Tientsin. We knew that it would not be long before our turn would come.

13. Hobbies and Games in the 1940s Comic Books – Comics played a significant part in our young lives. We were always on the lookout for new comics and the exchange of comics between friends was the norm. I remember the thrill of looking at ‘new’ Superman, Captain Marvel or Batman comic books. We accumulated a large collection of comics but unfortunately, none were brought out to Australia. Larry and I used to draw comics ourselves; they were naturally very amateur but I wish I had kept some of these drawings. Stamps – As far back as I can remember I was very interested in the collection of postage stamps. Larry and I combined our collection. We were reluctant to paste stamps in albums, as was the fashion in those days. Instead, we found a source of local stock-books. I remember the thrill in 1949 of receiving the Scott’s Stamp Catalogue, which we arranged to be posted out from the USA. Again, exchanging postage stamps with our friends was done on a regular basis. Larry and I used to go to stamp fairs and persuaded our parents to buy us mint Chinese stamps. I remember going to the post office with my mother and asking her to buy me stamps when she was posting an overseas letter. Before we left China we made a special trip to stamp dealers and bought up the latest Communist Chinese stamps. I still have these stamps in my collection. Reading books and magazines – I was a keen reader of books, both English and Russian. I just loved the English series of books for boys that had all sorts of adventure stories and puzzles. I used to borrow both Russian and English books from the school library. At one stage, we used to receive copies of Life magazine from New York, our grandparents sent them to us by sea-mail after they had finished with them. I treasured the special Life magazines on subjects such as history and science.

Ripley’s Believe it or Not – Both Larry and I loved reading the amazing stories told by Ripley. When ‘pocket books’ first became available in Tientsin in 1945 after the end of WWII, we made sure that we purchased the Ripley series. The first one was Pocket Book number 96 and was the 24th printing. We managed to buy the first eight in the series. I still have these eight pocket books.

Going to the swimming pool – During the summer months, we went to the local swimming pool. Dad was keen to do his one or two laps of the pool so it was always he that took us swimming. Mother never went swimming with us. I managed to keep afloat doing some very basic overarm strokes. This was also a good social occasion as we met many of our friends at the swimming pool. The pool was located in the British Concession and located within the English Club. To get admission one had either to be a member of the Club or pay an entry fee. As far as I can remember, no Chinese were permitted to swim in the pool! 75

Volleyball – this was a very popular game at school. We played about six to eight people a side and games were taken very seriously. The senior boys used to play this game during recess, so the junior classes had no chance to get the ball! Ball games at home – One ball game that I loved playing by myself at home went something like this: we had a series of about 10 steps from our court-yard to the front entrance; the game was to throw the ball hard against the steps and award oneself points – the high points were given if one managed to catch the ball that bounded up after striking the corner of the steps. Occasionally the ball went over the high wall onto the street, one then ran flat out to collect the ball before a passer-by was able to take it! When I went out on the street I did it as quickly as I could; if I lingered there would develop a large crowd that would surround me and stare at the strange looking boy! Marbles – This was a big game in Tientsin, especially at school. We had different types of glass marbles, but I remember the top marbles were called ‘onyx’. One had to weight up carefully which marbles to use in the games as we were playing for ‘keeps’. Going to the movies – We had several cinemas in Tientsin. Going to see a film was regarded as a special treat. I remember seeing many different cartoons and Bud Abbot and Lou Costello comedies. Undoubtedly, one of my favourites was seeing Tarzan movies. We saw many Russian films, but all of them were produced by the Soviet system, and emphasis was given to the wonderful life under communism. The Empire theatre shown here was one of our favourite film houses.

Toy Soldiers – At one stage, I had a big set of toy soldiers; those made from clay or terracotta broke over the years, but my prized soldiers were made of iron. I used to form two armies and they fought battles. I managed to bring one of my prized iron toy soldiers to Sydney – here he is mounted on a horse.

Dreidel – I think this was the only ‘Jewish’ game we used to play in China. A dreidel is a four-sided spinning top, played with during the holiday of Hanukkah. Each side of a dreidel bears a letter of the Hebrew alphabet:

‫ נ‬nun ‫ ג‬gimel ‫ ה‬hei and ‫ ש‬shin Each player begins with an equal number of game pieces. Every player spins the dreidel once during a round. If ‫( נ‬nun) is facing up, the player does nothing. If ‫( ג‬gimel) is facing up, the player gets everything in the pot. If ‫( ה‬hei) is facing up, the player gets half of the pieces in the pot. If ‫( ש‬shin) is facing up, the player adds a game piece to the pot. If a player is out of game pieces then they are ‘out’. I just loved playing dreidel – with family or friends. I can still remember the thrill I used to get when spinning the dreidel, hoping to get gimel and winning all the pieces. Snakes and Ladders – This was a very popular game amongst schoolchildren. Was it our first introduction to the caprices of fate, or was it in playing the dreidel or Tientsin Millionaire? I often used to play snakes and ladders with Larry at our house. Mah-jong – We regularly played Mah-jong in our house. Our parents had friends over for an evening when they played Mah-jong for very low stakes. Larry and I played this game either with our parents or with our friends. For a young boy I was relatively proficient in getting a handle on the game strategies. We had two sets of Mah-jong – one in a leather case and the other in a wooden box specially made by our friendly carpenter. The foreign community fully adopted this one game! Here is the Mah-jong set in the leather case – it was made from bone and all the pieces are still there. Alex Auswaks says in his Tientsin recollections that our mother taught both Larry and Alex how to play Mahjong.

Tientsin Millionaire â&#x20AC;&#x201C; This would have been our most favourite board game. Larry and I never tired of playing this game with our friends. The game was adapted from the English Monopoly board game, but with local Tientsin streets from most Concessions!

The board was very similar to this one for Shanghai Millionaire, except that we had Tientsin streets. The hotels were orange coloured, the houses were green coloured, Community Chest was light yellow, and Chance was orange. The six metal tokens were old car - boat - canon thimble - handbag and iron. The bank notes ranged from 5 to 500. The game was manufactured in 1940.

Here is how the game was packaged when bought from a shop.

Cigarette Cardboard Boxes – Children used to exchange cigarette boxes in order to expand their collections. In those days there was, of course, no stigma at all about smoking cigarettes, so collecting cigarette boxes was viewed as a sensible hobby. As father worked in a cigarette company we were in a good situation to expand our collection! Larry remembers father giving him mint condition cigarette packs! Paper Aeroplanes – There was a continual competition between members of class as to the bestdesigned paper aeroplanes and their level of performance. We often threw paper aeroplanes during any short breaks between classes. Card Games – As far as I can remember, the main use of cards was to ‘build houses’. The idea was to build up a house until it collapsed. So in a way it was a game between friends as to who could build the tallest house. Dominoes – Both Larry and I had our individual set of dominoes. These were often produced when friends arrived.

Signatures - Larry and I used to practice our signatures; it was a form of a contest of who had the most memorable signature. Here is my signature, which I made in the end of 1940s taken from a book. In fact, it is the earliest example of my handwriting that I have found.

Keeping a Notebook - While writing these notes I was reminded of one of my interests by Alex Auswaks. He said I used to be ‘famous’ for a collection of Russian surnames and their meanings, which I kept in a notebook. Decades later, Alex mentioned my interest at a conference on names, and the Russian delegation all wanted to know where my notebook was. Alex remembers that my favourite was the Russian composer Mokrousoff, which meant Wet Whiskers. Alex also reminded me that I could recite: Shol pa ulitsi visoki chelovek, nizenkovo rosta, ves kudriavi bez volos, tonenki kak bochka = a tall fellow walked the street but he was short, he had curly hair and was bald and was as thin as a barrel. Toys – I remember a wonderful old rocking horse that our family possessed. Larry remembers a big wind-up train set and tracks that were laid out in the spare room next to my bedroom. We both remember playing with a wooden pinball machine that used magnetic marbles that could be loaded up and released with a spring. We also had a spinning top, a very traditional Chinese toy, and a shuttlecock with feathers which had to be kicked into the air. Our house had two musical toys – an accordion and a wooden glockenspiel. I enjoyed playing with both these toys, but of course it was Larry who could actually use them musically.

14. Our House in Tientsin We lived in a French colonial house which was first rented by the Topers in the late 1920s. The house had not changed at all when we visited Tianjin in April 2006. Here is a photo of Larry and me standing in front of it. Immediately to the left of my head was our grandparents’ bedroom; behind Larry’s head is the large storage room (see below). The windows further to the left belonged to the next-door residence. When our grandparents left for the USA in 1946, Larry moved into their room. He now had front street views instead of a back yard outlook. The room next to my bedroom was mainly used for storage. However, we also had a birdcage in the room. So, when I was about eight years old I formalised its name to ‘ptichka fanze’: (ptichka = bird in Russian, fanze = room in Mandarin40) I loved looking out of the ‘ptichka fanze’ onto the street below to see what was happening. Whenever there was a parade on Rue Dillon I looked out of the window to see the dancers and musicians in the parade. There were weddings, funerals41 and festivals. The processions were very colourful e.g. red weddings, white funerals, etc. The loud music and fireworks always gave me a thrill! Here is a photo of Magda, Larry, Lynn and me taken in 2006 when we visited Tianjin; the windows of ‘ptichka fanze’ can be seen above our heads in the centre – they have not changed! What did change, though, was that every bit of the yard space was taken over by roughly built ‘houses’. Before we left in January 1951 father arranged a transfer of the lease to the people living next door. This was quite lucky, as for a long time his attempts to transfer the lease were unsuccessful, and he already believed that this money would be lost.

Room in Chinese Mandarin is 房间 Pinyin = fang jian = room, chamber, apartment, suite Chinese funeral processions were most dramatic. Items accompanying the deceased included paper-made houses, and personal items. They believed that if these items were burned on earth during a funeral, they would exist in the person’s afterlife. 41

Here is a detailed plan showing the layout of our house:

Servants Rooms Chinese Residents Kitchen Cellar under Cool-room Cool-room Storage

Back doors Dining

Lobby

The lounge was leased to a French couple until the end of WWII

Lobby Lounge

Front Door

Amah’s Room

Toilet

Skylight Stairwell (Going Up)

Back

Back Courtyard

Adjoining Residence: Our family did not rent Ground Floor.

Steps to Our House Footpath

Steps Front yard Front Gate

Plan of Ground Floor 38 Harbin Road, Tientsin in 1950 Bathroom Storage

Toilet Bedroom (Larry)

Main Bedroom for Parents Stairwell Bedroom (Bobby) Lobby

Grandparents Bedroom later became Larry’s Bedroom

Bathroom

Store-room (Ptichka Fanza)

Plan of 2nd Floor

Here is a photo of Larry and me entering our old house in 2006, after an absence of more than 55 years!

Our dining room was located on the ground floor connected to the kitchen by a narrow room we called the cool-room because that is where the icebox was located. The dining room had wooden beams across the ceiling. It even had an old-fashioned pull chord to communicate with the kitchen. The piano was also located in the dining room.

Here is a photo taken of the front entrance in 2011. The photo clearly shows how the corridor ran the length of the house to the back door, which is open.

One great feature of the house was the long handrail running the full length of the staircase. It was quite exciting to jump on this rail and slide down the last section leading to the ground floor. Halfway up the staircase was a semi-clear glass section (with some doors) running up to the ceiling â&#x20AC;&#x201C; this allowed natural light in from the roof area.

Here is how the stairwell looked when we visited Tianjin in 2006. The long skylight adjoining the stairwell was still there, however, there is no natural light streaming into the house because the top of the skylight has been boarded up. The handrail was still there and I was tempted to have a go and slide down the last section! In our time there was a carpet running the whole length of the stairs with brass rods holding the carpet in position.

When we visited Tianjin in 2006 Larry suddenly remembered a feature of our house back from the 1940s. In my old bedroom were the hooks from where we used to hang a swing! The hooks can be seen in the upper doorframe. The fireplace in my old bedroom was still there and in very good condition.

Here is a Google image of our street as it looked in 2011.

The satellite picture clearly shows the distinctive corner of Rue Dillon and Victoria Streets. Some photos taken on this corner can be seen on page 94. The image shows that our house was slightly set back from the corner building. The roof of 86 Rue Dillon can also be clearly seen. Below is another view of the complete French colonial house taken in 2000 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; we lived in right two thirds of the house. Modern maps of Tianjin show the street as Haâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;erbin Road.

15. General Notes on Life in China Victoria Park and the Astor Hotel Many family photos were taken in Victoria Park in front of the war memorial which was dedicated to the British who had been killed in Europe during the Great War of 1914-1918. Before WWII, there reportedly was a sign at the entrance that announced, ‘No dogs or Chinese were allowed in the Park’. However, Amahs with foreign babies were permitted to enter. The park was laid out with neat lawns and well looked-after flowerbeds; it duplicated thousands of such memorials in Great Britain and Commonwealth countries. This photo on the left shows my mother’s cousin, Lily Toper, standing in front of the memorial in the late 1920s.

The picture on the right was probably taken in the 1930s. It shows Victoria Park and the Astor Hotel across the road from the park. The Astor was and still is the most known hotel in Tianjin. It opened its doors in 1863. I remember playing in Victoria Park with my friends on many occasions. My friend Bobby Trachtengertz used to live in an apartment close by, thus making it a very convenient playground for us.

Here is how the Astor looked in 2006 when we visited Tianjin.42

The Astor Hotel was completely restored to its original beauty in 2010.

Summers in Peitaiho

In summer Tientsin was very hot and especially miserable when winds from the Gobi Desert filled the air with sand, making it difficult to breath. It is not surprising then, that whoever could get out of the city did so, usually to popular beach resorts. Peitaiho (now Beidahe) located on the Bo Hai Bay (off the Yellow Sea) was a beautiful holiday spot. It had long beaches, rugged cliffs and attractive pine forests close-by. It was fundamentally a European style resort with Chinese servants. Many of the Tientsin residents moved to Peitaiho for the summer but our family could not afford such a luxury and stayed for only several weeks. We used to take the train to this seaside resort town. The trip would have taken several hours. I remember the thrill of walking along the beach and paddling in the water. As it was the open sea, there were good size waves. Donkey-rides were the other popular activity. The Tientsin coffee shop Kiessling operated in Peitaho during the summer months. I have very few memories of being in Peitaho during the summer holidays. The only times I would have gone there would be in 1940 when I was just a year old and then in the years 1946 or 1947, i.e. in between the end of World War II and the arrival of the Chinese Communist regime. Here I am in 1940 being held by father.

I remember nothing about our living arrangements there. What families used to do was hire a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;dachaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; (a Russian term for a holiday house) for the whole summer. Mother and children lived there for the whole period, while father would only be there for the weekends if he was working.

This is the only photo we have of Larry and me together with our mother in Peitaiho in 1940.

Advertisements such as this one were regularly featured in the newspaper North China Star during my time in Tientsin.

Talking Mandarin I could communicate effectively in Mandarin with most of the Chinese people I met â&#x20AC;&#x201C; these could be rickshaw drivers, street vendors or shop keepers. Chinese, both written and spoken, was taught in the Tientsin Jewish School. If necessary, I could also utter some profanities! The irony was that there were very few Chinese students in our school. To this day I regret the fact that we lived such a sheltered existence there was hardly any opportunity to really mix with the local population; therefore, I never had a Chinese friend. 88

Winters in Tientsin All winter, from November to February, the cold winds blew in from the interior. The river and canal froze. There was ice on the streets and it was easy to slip. I remember the heavy overcoats, gloves and hats we used to wear when venturing out into the cold. The temperature often dropped to -10 degrees Centigrade in the middle of winter. I even wore earmuffs when the temperature dropped below freezing. Father usually caught a rowboat or ferry to take him across the river to the British American Tobacco Factory. In winters, however, he either walked across the river (dangerous), or walked across the closest bridge. The factory was located in the Russian Concession. Our house had a reasonably efficient heating system during the winter months. All rooms had radiators and hot water was channelled through special pipes to every room. Generally that worked well and we used to turn the fire off when we retired for bed. When I was eight or nine years old the cold was particularly severe and many of our water pipes froze. Nothing could be done and we just had to wait until the spring thaw arrived. In the last few years of our time in Tientsin it became far too expensive to continue this practice so we stopped using the radiators. In all the main rooms we installed wood/coal stoves. We had a bigger stove in the middle of our parentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; bedroom, and we used to gather around this stove during the cold winter nights. I remember my mother cooking our meals on it. I loved to see the spring thaw on the river when the ice began to melt and break up. The movement of the broken ice and the accompanying sound are clearly etched in my memory. Boarders For many years we had boarders living in our house. The family saw this as an easy way to increase the household income. The room that subsequently became our ground floor living room was rented out to a French policeman and his Russian girlfriend. The policeman worked at the French Police Station across the road from out house.43 As there was no proper bathroom on the ground floor the couple had to walk up the stairs to use one of the facilities. During the war, the French police officer illegally operated a short-wave radio in his room. This was a very serious offence but luckily the Japanese never knew about this. Larry remembers the police officer keeping a map and marking the progress of the allied forces in Europe. Father knew about this illegal activity and occasionally he visited the Frenchman in his room to find out how the war was progressing. We used to get along fine with this couple but soon after the war was finished they went to live in France. However, permission was only granted by the French authorities after the couple got married.

After the French left China, the Police Station was taken over and converted to a Chinese Police Station.

Family Rows I cannot remember a single big row in our house in China; that in itself must be remarkable. I remember disagreements and minor arguments, but nothing more than that. Larry can recall a minor row. After a visit to our house by father’s friend Mr. Schelokhoff, he and father exchanged a joke. It was a pun on a Russian word. They agreed to meet somewhere and Mr. Schelokhoff said “ya budu tebya podzidat” which means “I will be waiting for you”. In Russian of course the word ‘zid’ is a term of strong abuse towards Jews. Father in reply said “Net, te budish menya poevreyevat” – so father substituted the phrase ‘evrey’ or ‘Jew’ instead of ‘zid’. Most would see this as a fast and witty exchange of phrases. However, mother did not like it at all. So they had a row over this interchange of phrases. Mother would say that every Russian is an anti-Semite and blamed father for fuelling this type of humour. So this resulted in a very rare shouting match between mother and father. There could have been many more rows in our house but father never responded to mother’s occasional nagging, thus Larry and I never saw family rows. Cats We always had cats around. However, they definitely were not pets and they were not permitted to be in the house, although they did spend a lot of their time in and around the kitchen. They were there to keep the rat and mice population under control. Of course, there was no de-sexing of animals in those days so we regularly had kittens around. I clearly remember a female black cat which lived on our property for a long time, and which had many litters; it would regularly kill some of its young soon after birth. Many of the younger cats were given away. Some cats died; I remember a particular young cat that I was very fond of suddenly dying in the back yard. There were no vet facilities in the city. Larry and I occasionally rescued some cats that were trapped behind a tall wall adjoining our back yard.

The Kitchen We had an old-fashioned large kitchen stove that used either coal or wood. On the top it had four or more positions for the cooking pots and there were a series of circular iron holders that you removed to expose the flames i.e. the more holders you removed the larger the opening. In winter, after the fire was put out, the cats used the stove for their nap at nights, either on top or sometimes in the openings in the front if the grate was open; a rather dangerous practice. One of the jobs I enjoyed doing was sweeping away the ashes from the previous night’s fire. We had a large deep clay bowl in the corner of the kitchen in which the cats used to have their litters. Near the back door we had a small tub in which live fish were kept before they were required for a meal. Next to the kitchen was a small room that had a large icebox. Ice was delivered to our house on a regular basis. When we received the delivery of milk in the morning it was immediately placed in the icebox.

Birthday Parties

Larry and I had combined birthday parties as both of our birthdays are in September. Here is a photo taken in September 1945 – Larry is sitting in the middle of the lounge and I am sitting on the floor in the middle of the front row.44 It was an exciting time for me. I still remember waiting impatiently for my friends to arrive and receiving birthday presents from them. Birthday parties in Tientsin all followed a certain pattern – dressing up, giving of presents, opening of presents, range of food and drinks. Parents with money hired projectors and showed films. The parents who brought the children also had to be looked after while the children had their party. I never had a ‘best friend’ in Tientsin. However, I did have a number of friends with whom I met either in our house or in their house. The only childhood friend in China that I continued seeing in Australia was Bobby Trachtengertz (In Australia both Bobby and his brother Seva later changed their surname to Tracton.) I used to stay over at his parents apartment in the British Concession and he used to stay the night in our house in the French Concession. He was born with a cleft lip; he underwent surgery to correct this condition, but that only partially addressed the problem.

Here were my friends in the front row (l to r) Lolly Longo, Bobby Trachtengertz, Venya Goorevitch, me, Mara Britanisky, Menia Glick and Teddy Levin. Larry is sitting on the settee in between two girls – Mary ? and Laura Vichner. On the right is Elia Levin. In the back row were Larry’s friends (l to r) Seva (now Jesse) Trachtengertz, Issia Hootoransky, Senia Babushkin, Tony Kobilnitsky, Mara Paretsky, Sana (Alex) Auswaks, Mara Sitsky and Harry Trigubov. Harry Trigubov became one of the richest men in Australia. He was Founder and Managing Director of the Meriton Group of Companies.

Street Beggars One memory that I will always have is of Chinese street beggars. Wherever one went, there were street beggars. These were hungry, homeless people eking out an existence on the streets. There were people who were deformed or limbless, begging mothers with naked children, blind people, etc. I never wanted to look too closely at the beggars as it was just too upsetting. As soon as they saw us walking along the street the street beggars would quickly approach us with extended hands; as soon as mother or father would give them some money they would move away and look for someone else to approach. We just got used to seeing these poor people as part of our daily living in Tientsin. As a youngster, I did not fully understand the significance of poverty and hunger. All this was occurring outside the parameters of the foreign communities. Lifelong poverty, hunger and vulnerability were the norm for a big proportion of the population in China. After the establishment of Communist China in 1949 it seemed to us that there were less poor people living on the streets of Tientsin.

Rationing During the War Years A ration card system was introduced during the period 1941 to 1944. Products such as sugar, salt and cooking oil were all restricted. If one was desperate then there was always the black-market. I suspect that my parents would be unlikely to break any civil laws on as regular basis and would only buy on the black-market on rare occasions.

Inflation between 1946 and 1949 There was rampant inflation in China in the three years before the Communist takeover. There were a number of revaluations of the local currency but nothing worked. In 1948 the Chinese government decided to stamp out inflation by introducing a new ‘stable’ currency, the FRB (Federal Reserve Bank) and pegged the currency to the US dollar. Many people exchanged their foreign currency and gold into yuans as directed by the authorities. However, within months inflation was rampant and those people lost their life savings. As our family did not have gold bars or foreign currency to exchange we did not go through that trauma. I remember father arriving home on paydays with a huge sack of money. Father’s pay would have been hundreds of millions of yuan per month. One was forced to carry many cash bundles when going shopping. Larry remembers giving half a million yuan for a rickshaw ride. At one stage, shopkeepers adjusted their prices twice a day. Nobody knew in advance how much anything would cost. It cost one million yuans to take a short ride on a rickshaw. Just before the Communists took over in 1949 the exchange rate had reached three million yuans to the US dollar.

Club Kunst

The Jewish club, Kunst (Arts), was completed in 1937, although it operated since the late 1920s. It was located in the British Concession, in what is now Qufu Road. This was a cultural, recreational and social club. I loved going to this Club as there would always be a good chance to have a coke or enjoy an ice cream! These were real treats in those days. Most of the Jewish community belonged to the Club. Our parents joined the Club but they were not big ‘club’ people so visits to Club Kunst were not that frequent. Larry regularly used the Club’s library and attended lectures and film screenings. He also gave performances on the piano a number of times. The Club had amateur performances held in a large auditorium; lectures on various subjects; a library, including files of several newspapers and magazines; and a large short-wave radio in the lobby where various foreign broadcasts could be heard etc. Here is a picture of students from the TJS during a performance on the stage of Club Kunst. Behind the very plain and unpretentious external façade was an important and effective cultural and social institution.45 45

Club Kunst was demolished in 1999. For many years it was used as the Tianjin People’s Gallery of Art.

The Corner Café The café Karatzas, owned by a Greek, was located on the corner of Rue Dillon, our street and Rue de France. It was just half a block away from our house. It was wonderful to visit this café and buy cakes, drinks, or ice-cream. Unfortunately our family could not afford to go to Karatzas for a meal. In the picture, taken in the very early 1920s, Rue Dillon is on the left. One can see a line of three rickshaws waiting for customers. Beyond Karatzas was a splendid gift shop in an arcade, just before the bridge over the Hai Ho.

Here is a family group picture taken on the same corner in 1934. L to R: Acea Aisenberg, Fira Ponevejsky, Grisha Toper and Dina Ponevejsky. Another floor was added in the early 1930s.

The building was refurbished in the 1930s. This is how Larry and I remember Karatzas in the 1940s.

This is how this corner looked in 2010. Café Karatzas is long gone.

Our Parentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Parties

Here is a photo of a party at our house in 1946. The party was held in the dining room of our house. You can see Larry and me at the back; our mother is standing next to Larry, and father is on my right just past our dentist Mrs.Voronoff. The food on such occasions was as follows: first we had zakuski (starters), which would include diced eggplant, herring, chopped liver, cucumbers, etc.; cold beetroot soup would follow with optional ingredients such as diced hard-boiled egg, chopped onions and radish; in winter it would be hot borsch; a Russian pirog (pie) would follow: either cabbage or rice and salmon; the food ended with a variety of Russian cakes such as napoleon or kulich. Coffee or tea would end the proceedings. During the meal the only alcoholic drink would be sweet sherry. Hard liquor was not consumed. As can be seen in the photo, people dressed up for parties. Men wore suits and ties irrespective of the very hot and steamy summers and women usually had nice dresses. Even Larry and I would have ties on these occasions. After the photo was taken Larry and I would have been told to go back to our rooms. In general the parties were noisy and happy occasions. I only remember once that after father had a few drinks he actually relaxed from his reserved manner. I can still see him clapping and thumping his leg in time to the music. I cannot remember the actual party but it may have been Larryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Bar-Mitzvah celebration.

Finances It is fair to say that our family did not have a lot of money. Mother never had a paying job. Father did have continuous employment at the BAT factory but it was not a well-paid job. It would not be cheap to run a house as large as ours. I know that when things were tight, money was sent from the USA, from uncle Grisha or mother’s parents, to supplement the family’s income. A good example of this was when it was time to leave China. This was only possible after US dollars arrived from New York to enable the purchase of our travel tickets to Australia. Father bought shares only once in his life. This was in 1948 when all employees were given an option to buy shares in British American Tobacco. He bought £17 of stock.46

When I sold the accumulated shares with dividends in 1989, they were worth more than $10,000.

Technology in the 1940s My father was the proud owner of a Philco short wave radio receiver. He often listened to the Radio Australia news service. The whole family used to gather around the radio and we were all amazed by the strength and clarity of the sound. We had a special large antenna on our roof designed to receive short wave transmissions. Father spent a bit of money to get the antenna installed but the results justified that expense. I still remember the voice of Peter Dore Smith as he read the news bulletins emanating from Melbourne. We also listened to the Voice of America and the BBC after the end of WWII. It always amazed me how we could hear a broadcast emanating from far away Australia. I would never have believed that one day we all would be living there and I would be working in the broadcasting industry. The radio was similar to this one shown on the right. Father turned on the radio every day; he just loved the idea of listening to broadcasts from all over the world. After the end of the war there were two radio stations run by the U.S. Marine Corps, XBOR and XONE. The European community in Tientsin enjoyed having this extra radio service available. During the war it was illegal to listen to foreign broadcasts. The Japanese authorities waxed the tuners so that only local radio stations were available. There were severe penalties in force if the tuners were tampered with. We never had a telephone installed in our house. It was probably considered too costly and unnecessary. However, Grandfather Pavel had a telephone at his business. Later, when we arrived in Australia I thought how wonderful it was to be able to communicate in this way.

.Our Chinese Neighbours We had Chinese neighbours all around us but in all the years we lived there we never socialised with them. That certainly says something about our insular life. There were neighbours living in the adjoining duplex to the left of us. We had a Chinese family living in part of the ground floor in our side of the building. There was also a Chinese family of a mother and three daughters living in the corner at the end of our back courtyard (shown in the plan on page 81). Larry remembers observing a wedding celebration of one of the girls in the late 1940s. The house standing next to ours was used as a factory. At some stage in the 1940s our neighbours in the adjoining complex ran a business called Ihua Trading Firm. This firm bought the lease to our house when we left China.

The Marines Come to Town The formal surrender of Japanese military personnel in the Tientsin area took place on October 6, 1945. For us World War II ended when the US marines arrived. It was a full six weeks after Japanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s capitulation before the Americans reached Tientsin. The cheering population spontaneously welcomed the 7th Okinawa and the 1st Guadalcanal US Marine divisions when they marched through the main streets of Tientsin. The marines stayed in Tientsin for several years. It was exciting for me as a child, to see representatives of the most powerful country in the world in my hometown. Suddenly we had access to Wrigley chewing gum, comic books and Hershey chocolate bars. The marines were very generous in handing out their K-rations, stockings, cigarettes and badges to the locals. One benefit of having the marines in the city was the improved quality of the water. The water was properly treated and for the first time we were permitted to drink straight from the tap. The military barracks were located quite close to our house and we often bumped into the marines in the street. Father became friendly with some marines and once I was given the opportunity to have a ride in an army jeep. I sat next to the driver while father and his friend sat in the back. There were no seat belt restraints in those days and as the driver turned sharply around a corner I was nearly flung out of the door-less vehicle. It was a close shave. I will never forget this first ever ride in a motor vehicle; I was seven years old. Father invited a music loving marine to come over to our house a number of times to listen to Italian opera. The Americans were generally welcomed into the community during the years they lived in the city.

16. Big Brother Larry

Here is the first photo taken of Larry in 1935 when he was six months old.

The family had very few photos of my paternal grandparents, so here is the only photo of Larry with his paternal grandmother, Yulia Sitsky. Larry is nine months old.

While I do not have a photo of my Amah, there is a photo of Larry with his Amah. This was taken in 1935, on a street in the French Concession. Larry was one year old.

This is the first photo of Larry with mother and father. It was taken when Larry was one year old, in September 1935. On the right is a studio photo of Larry taken when he was one and a half years old. Note the very solid legs!

This lovely studio picture of Larry, taken by the community photographer Mr. Lifshitz, again typifies the style of photos in the mid-1930s. Larry was two and half years old.

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This picture of Larry was taken in 1937 when he was 3 years old. The custom in those days was for young childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s heads to be shaved at the beginning of summer.

Here is a picture of Larry and grandfather Pavel taken in 1938 in the front garden area of 86, Rue Dillon. It obviously is winter; note the very heavy coat worn by Pavel; the Russians call this type of coat a schuba.

Larry is five years older than me. Here is a formal photo taken in a photographic studio in 1941 when I was about one and a half years old and Larry six and a half years old.

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Below is a picture of us taken in the summer of 1942 when I was two and a half and Larry seven and a half. It was taken in the French Park.

Larry’s musical education started when he was five years old. Mother was his first piano teacher but these lessons did not last long, probably because Larry was a bit difficult to handle. Then there were a succession of piano teachers who came to our house. The locally made upright piano was located in the dining room. For many years, Larry was a member of the Betar Zionist Youth Group. It was the only Jewish youth group active in Tientsin. Betar was considered a ‘right wing’ organization; it was founded in Poland in the 1920s and quickly spread to other parts of the world where there were Jewish communities. Its aim was to engage young persons in paramilitary ways that will allow them to defend themselves and to support the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.

This is a formal photo taken in 1942 of the Betar group in the Tientsin Jewish School. There was a room allocated to Betar in the School grounds. Larry is in the back row, third from the right. He was eight years old. 102

We used to play in the front yard in the summer months. This was not a front yard with a green lawn. Most of the surface area was covered with bricks, and there was a large rough brick wall that separated us from the house next door. I cannot remember our parents ever using the front yard for recreation purposes. A tree dominated the yard. As can be seen in this photo of Larry taken in 1943, it was an unattractive small yard. However, to us it was a place to play ball games and do some tree climbing. Like all brothers we had a mixed relationship. There were times when we quarrelled and there were times when we enjoyed each other’s company. Thinking back however, I believe that the good times far outweighed the times when we quarrelled. Larry received piano tuition at the Tientsin Conservatory of Music. His first public piano recital took place in 1946 when he was twelve years old. My parents bought a locally made Tientsin piano called Moutrei. There were always arguments at home about his music lessons; mother and father complained that he was not practicing his scales the way his teacher, Mrs. Khokhlachkina, wanted. Larry complained that scales were too boring and that he wanted to play pieces.

Almost all of the materials associated with Larry's musical education and early compositions are lost; left behind with our move from China in 1951. At the age of seven Larry had already penned a score for bassoon and piano. Settings from Pushkin, written in 1944, is Larry's only complete composition remaining from his youth in China. Luckily he had packed this work in his suitcase when the family left Tientsin. It is a work of enormous sentimental value to Larry and is now in the Australian National Library's collection of Larry’s papers.47

This composition Settings from Pushkin (1944) is catalogued as (MS 5630 Folio 5, Item 21). “Sitsky's early works are austere and modern in style: Here was a young man anxious to join in the movement that would liberate musical language from its nineteenth-century shackle", writes Jim Cotter, Larry Sitsky's colleague and former student in his book Sitsky: Conversations with the Composer (National Library of Australia, 2005).

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While I never openly expressed my admiration for Larry’s musical talents during my childhood, somehow that was beyond my capacity, I was always proud of his abilities and accomplishments. Surprisingly my parents never seriously encouraged me to learn to play the piano; maybe having the constant hassle of Larry’s music education wore them down. This picture is of Larry taken on the day of his Bar Mitzvah in September 1947. This would have been the biggest religious event in our family that I can recollect from Tientsin. Larry and a friend and classmate, Isia Hootaransky, were called up together; Isia sang the prayer while Larry read it. They also put on the tefellin48 as a symbol of their coming of age. Afterwards a lot of people came to our house to continue the celebration.

This photo was taken in 1949 on the steps leading to one of the entrances to our house; I was nine and a half and Larry fourteen and a half years of age. Obviously the five year gap was considerable in certain situations; I was excluded from Larry’s room when he had friends over as I was too young to participate in many conversations. I remember once when I stuck my ear to Larry’s door to hear him and his friends talking ‘dirty’; that was the first time in my life when I heard the word ‘fuck’, it made quite an impression on me. When I loudly repeated this word later to Larry and his friends I was told in no uncertain terms to shut up. Larry’s favourite subjects in school were Russian poetry and English literature. Therefore he leaned towards the artistic side of the curriculum from an early age. His favourite teacher was Bartashov, a most intelligent and cultured Russian who taught a wide range of subjects.

I have already described earlier how we co-operated in hobbies that were mutual. When Larry and his friends wanted an extra player to play some games, somehow my age was not a problem anymore! In fact, looking back, it is surprising how easily I fitted in with Larry’s friends; many of them I regarded as my own friends.

Tefillin also called phylacteries are a set of small black leather boxes containing scrolls of parchment inscribed with verses from the Torah which are worn by observant Jews during weekday morning prayers.

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When Larry was considered to be a ‘naughty boy’ by mother, she threatened to tell father when he came home. When father came home after work he would take a leather belt and Larry got a few whacks on his behind. Looking back to those days now Larry agrees that he was not a cooperative son; he disliked school and that had ramifications at home. There were always arguments about the amount of homework that he had to do. Mother nagged him a lot and he responded very badly by being rude to her, so it was a kind of vicious circle. The punishment was always of a physical nature. We did not get any pocket money in those days so that was one potential avenue of punishment that was not available. Larry generally got on much better with father; he thinks it was their common interest in music that forged a bond between them, a bond that was never there with mother. That bond started when Larry was very young and continued through the teenage years. However, mother did help Larry in subjects such as Russian literature. She was more comfortable and knowledgeable in this subject and was therefore able to confidently discuss the curriculum. On the other hand, father had left school early and he had a poor knowledge of this subject. One particular incident I have never forgotten. We had a big quarrel over some minor matter and I felt very hurt and humiliated, so while our mother was trying to bring peace to the house, I grabbed a hammer from a tool play-set, threw it at Larry and surprisingly managed to hit his forehead. It was not a serious blow, just a glance, but that action is something that is implanted deep in my psyche and after more than 60 years I can visualize that event with great clarity. Being five years older than me Larry had some opportunities to visit the old Chinese city. This was an area beyond the Concessions. These were organised trips from our school. He also used to sneak off from our house to see and experience a local Chinese theatre; no doubt this was Larry’s early venture into the world of the arts. Our mother did not approve of these unorganised trips but Larry saw it as a good way to get exposed to Chinese culture. Larry developed friendships with a number of non-Jewish boys who attended the TJS. These included a Russian and a Chinese boy. When Alex Auswaks, one of Larry’s closest friends, left Tientsin, he gave Larry his BB gun.49 One day we decided to put the gun to good use. Every winter the high tree in our front yard was used by many ravens; not surprisingly they made an awful mess in the yard below where we used to play. So Larry and I made a hole in the mosquito netting in our grandparents’ old bedroom and took some shots at the ravens. They dispersed immediately but I can’t remember whether the problem was fixed or not. Larry used to go with father to a shopping area called Paysage; this was essentially a very large number of stalls selling a variety of goods. This was a good place to buy the latest 78rpm records. As he got older Larry used to search out the records in the Paysage and then run home to get an adult to come with him for the purchase. 50

An air gun designed to shoot very small metal pellets. Larry remembered finding a record of Egon Petri playing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. Little did he realize that some 15 years later he would be studying with that great musician in San Francisco! 50

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This picture was taken at the end of 1950, a few weeks before our departure for Australia. We were 16 and 11 years old.

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17. The Extended Family In this part of my story, I am covering aspects of the extended family on my mother’s side. Unfortunately, there is nothing to write about my father’s side of the family as no links were ever made during my time in China. Boris Sitsky had two unmarried sisters, Bluma and Elka who both died in Tientsin. I have already mentioned earlier his married sister Anna; she had a child called Mike Facturovitch. Anna died in Bangkok. Boris also had one brother who may have moved to Petrograd but no details are known about him. Yulia Sitsky, my grandfather’s wife, had a sister Liza Yudova, but Larry or I can’t recall meeting her. The Topers were a very close-knit family. This was evident both on a social level and at a business level. I have already written earlier about the living arrangements in Irkutsk. All the Topers and the Preismans, my grandfather’s brother in law, were living in adjoining apartments. In this section of my account I am briefly covering the extended family life across generations and countries. Family photographs over very many years clearly show close family life in Tientsin and when on holidays in Peitaiho. In the photo below taken in 1930 we see Mosia Toper, Pavel’s younger brother, on the left, and his daughter Lily, in the middle cuddled up to Sarah Toper, together with Sam, Grisha and Pavel. It appears that Sarah Toper and her cousin Lily Toper had a friendship over many years. Sarah was five years older than Lily.

Pavel and Mosia51 had a very long business association – this would have started in the 1920s in Harbin and Tientsin, and extended until the 1950s in New York. There was also a very close association with the Rosenzweig, Preisman and Ponevejsky families. This came about in a number of ways – the marriage of Pavel Toper and Sofa Rosenzweig; the marriage of Pavel’s younger sister Sonia Toper to Samuel Preisman; and the marriage of Sofa Rosenzweig’s older sister Miriam to Grisha Ponevejsky. Descendants from these marriages have in many cases continued to maintain family ties and connections.

In 2005 when visiting in New York, Lynn and I met up in with Mosia’s grandson, Arnold Obler and his wife Geraldine.

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Grisha Toper, Tolia Ponevejsky and Lova Preisman had a life-long friendship that dated back to Irkutsk in the early 1900s. They were three bachelors who together had an active social life. Grisha Toper and Tolia Ponevejsky52 also had a very long business association in the 1950s and 1960s. This photo, taken in the 1930s, is of Tolia Ponevejsky and Grisha Toper.

In Tientsin, Leova Preisman worked together with Pavel and Mosia Toper in their fur business. Acea Aisenberg, Ronya Aisenberg’s (nee Ponevejsky) daughter, stayed at 86 Rue Dillon, Tientsin, with the Toper and Sitsky families on many occasions. Acea told me that she, her brother Joe and Dina Ponevejsky boarded in schools in Tientsin in the mid 1930s and they all stayed with the Topers once a month during those years. While it is not possible to fully explore in this book the complex family interrelationships, a study of the family genealogical charts will go a long way to clarify the situation.

To complete this section of my account I am showing several photos that illustrate the family extensions. On the right is a picture of Sonia (nee Toper, sister of my grandfather Pavel) and Samuel Preisman with their grand-daughter Tamara53 (Ponevejsky) taken in 1937. Sonia was robbed and killed in her home in Harbin 1947.

Tolia Ponevejsky funded the building of Ponve House in Tel Aviv, Israel – this is now the headquarters of the organisation Igud Yotsei Sin (Jews From China) 53 Lynn and I have met up with Tamara (Rozanski) a number of times – in New York in 2006, and in Sydney in 2007.

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The photo below gives a good example of the extended family that functioned in NE China in the early 1930s.

In this large family group we can see many family groups linked together on my grandmother’s side of the family, the Rosenzweigs. Back row standing – Annushka Rosenzweig, Mania Bender, Tolya Ponevejsky, Galia Bender (Ponevejsky) Middle row sitting – Israel Aisenberg, Ronya Aisenberg (Ponevejsky), Sarah Meiroff (Ponevejsky), Michael Mieroff, Miriam Ponevejsky (Rosenzweig), Grisha Rosenzweig On floor – Osik (Joe) Bender, Acea Aisenberg, Joe Aisenberg There are a number of links that can be shown from this group of people. Miriam Ponevejsky was the elder sister of my grandmother Sofa. Grisha Rosenzweig was the older brother of my grandmother Sofa. Tolya Ponevejsky was a life-long friend of my uncle, Grisha Toper. Later when Tolya married Gita Preisman this was in effect another union of a Rosenzweig and a Toper. Ronya Aisenberg was the daughter of Miriam Rosenzweig. It was the Aisenberg family that sponsored my parents, Larry and me to enable us to come to Australia in 1951. All these families had their roots in Russia, most of them came from Irkutsk and moved to NE China.

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Below is a picture of Annushka and Grisha Rosenzweig, Paul and Sofa Toper with their grandson Larry Sitsky, and Miriam Ponevejsky (nee Rosenzweig) taken in 1938.

Here is a photo of three cousins taken in Sydney in 1954. On the left is Sarah Sitsky (nee Toper), in the middle is Ronya Aisenberg (nee Ponevejsky) and on the right is Zina Verny (nee Rosenzweig).

Even though this picture was taken in Sydney and not China, it does illustrate the continuity of family ties that started in Irkutsk in the late 1800s, extended to Harbin and Tientsin and later on in many parts of the world. In Appendix E I have summarised how the extended family is functioning in the 21st Century. 110

18. Chinese Servants and Tradesmen My Chinese Amah I can see her now – she is dressed in faded, blue pants and jacket. Her feet are bound, misshapen and triangular looking, much smaller than feet should be. She pads around the house on them and one cannot hear her steps. Her grey hair is tightly bound behind her head. I can still remember the smell when I sometimes saw her remove the binding from her feet and I observed her deformed feet. I remember that she had very few teeth left; the ones she had were thin and yellow looking. An explanation of foot binding is required. It was the custom of applying painfully tight binding to the feet of young girls to prevent further growth. It was common in the whole Chinese society except the lowest classes. This photo clearly shows the distorted feet of an adult woman. I only ever knew her as Amah. To this day, I am ashamed that I never bothered to find out her real name. No photograph exists of her. She was just there for the family - there was no effort made to find out facts about her family. I did not even know if she had children of her own. To me she seemed ‘old’ but probably she would have been about 50 years old when we parted. She was with our family for a very long time and it must have been very hard for her after our departure. When I was a toddler, my Amah had a unique way to settle me down when I became hyperactive – she put me on her breast! This was the Chinese way of handling toddlers. Mother did not approve of this type of behaviour! Once, when I woke up in the middle of the night I was shocked to see her standing next to my small child’s bed. I must have been very small at the time as there was a safety rail on the bed. I think she was pulling on my penis. When I asked why she was doing this she said she was trying to make it bigger – it was probably a Chinese custom. I wondered how often she did this to me while I was asleep! She lived in our house although I cannot remember clearly her sleeping arrangements. I think she had a bed in the alcove on the ground floor near the dining room. Once, when she was quite sick, we placed her in a small cottage located in the back courtyard and we asked the people living in the adjoining houses to look after her. I enjoyed going to our large kitchen at the back of our house. It is there that I saw her mould her millet buns for cooking. She would give me a portion of the millet bun that I quickly ate up. I thought the taste was wonderful, but my mother was not impressed! She regarded it as peasant food. My Amah did so much for me and I never did a thing for her. I should have but I just did not have that understanding. 111

Our Amah lived in a small structure which was really one medium sized room in the back courtyard. In winter it sometimes got bitterly cold in Tientsin and that room did not have any heating. On one particular occasion, Amah did not appear at our house in the morning. We went over to check and found her in a deep sleep; loud speech did not wake her and neither our attempts to shake her into waking. The Chinese family living nearby came over but they also could do nothing. A local doctor was called and luckily he managed to wake her. Apparently she had overdone the bedding and suffered some type of oxygen deprivation. We were all shaken by this episode. After this father decided that she had to sleep in our house from now on. There was plenty of space available so that was not a problem. On our last day in Tientsin, my father gave Amah a substantial amount of cash to help her in her future and she said that she would return to her village. Her younger sister came to Tientsin to help her move. My parents gave Amah quite a lot of goods from our house; we do not know whether she sold them or took them with her to the village. As we were sitting down, in the Russian tradition, just before our last rickshaw ride from our house, she came around to say good-by to all of us. I remember father asking her not to cry! As it was the middle of winter I had my gloves on. Larry, quite rightly, was annoyed with me that I did not take them off when she was saying good-bye. Other Chinese Servants and Tradesmen I remember that for many years we had a Chinese servant who did all sorts of general work around our house; this included cleaning, which was a big job as the house was quite spacious. He was a tall man, quite old, with a bald head. Other jobs would have been keeping our two yards in an orderly condition. Another job that would have been given to this man was polishing the family silver. He was the servant who stuck strips of paper on all our windows before the communist army took over Tientsin. This was a precaution against flying glass in the event of bombing.

Father also employed a Chinese carpenter to do special jobs. I remember him building all the large storage boxes for the bits of furniture and goods we transported to Sydney. He also constructed a special box to house the currency and other bits used in the Tientsin Millionaire game. We still have this box, which has a sliding cover.

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Larry remembers how this carpenter even repaired his records when they broke – sure, they made a click on the joins, but at least they could be played! I was really impressed by his carpentry skills and I remember watching him as he was doing his work. I also remember him as a nice person. It upsets me to acknowledge that we never took photographs of any of our servants. They were just there for our convenience. One of the jobs my Amah did was the family’s laundry. In those times there were no washing machines of any kind so the work was done the hard way; scrubbing the wet and soapy clothes on a serrated wooden washing board. There were rooms near the kitchen for servants to use. At one stage, during the time when my grandparents were still living in 86 Rue Dillon, we had three servants living in the servants rooms. So in addition to our Amah we had a cook and a general handyman. After the grandparents left China for the USA we just had Amah for most of the time. Father’s salary was not sufficient for us to employ more than one full time servant. Chinese tradesmen regularly travelled along our street to look for work. Those that we previously employed came to the back door to see if any work was required. There were people who repaired shoes; those who sharpened knives and scissors; and others who repaired pots. There were also vendors who walked the streets carrying their wares slung across their shoulders on bamboo poles. Those carrying hot freshly-cooked food were the most common. Every tradesman had their individual call and we soon learned to identify them. One of the Chinese tradesmen who regularly called was the hairdresser. If it was summer a seat was placed in our back garden and Larry and I would get our regular cuts. I also remember when I was a bit older going with my father to a Russian hairdresser. “Many families had the same servants for decades and they became part of the family. Parting caused heartache and the feeling of guilt and helplessness.” Alex Auswaks, from one of his stories in the Bulletin magazine of Igud Yotsei Sin.

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19. Newspapers and Other Services in Tientsin Local Newspapers A very large range of newspapers serviced the relatively small foreign community of Tientsin. Newspapers were a very important source of information. There were at least four major English newspapers available in Tientsin in the time when our family lived there â&#x20AC;&#x201C; The Peking and Tientsin Times (a weekly paper) and North China Star (a daily paper) The Tientsin Evening Journal (a daily paper) and The North-China Herald. Larry only remembers the North China Star. From my research it seems that The Peking and Tientsin Times ceased publication before I was born. This is the Peking and Tientsin Timesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; masthead in 1902. I have not been able to find a later version in any library.

And here is how the masthead of the North China Star in September 1940.

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Here is the front page of The Tientsin Evening Journal from November 1945.

There was also a short-lived journal called Yevreyskaya Stranitsa meaning The Jewish Page. The first Jewish daily newspaper in Tientsin started publication on March 10, 1931. It appears in Russian and was entitled Utro (Morning) and edited by Dr L. Bichowsky. The following is the text from the 1931 issue announcing the establishment of this newspaper: Tientsin is about two hours' journey from Pekin, and is situated in the centre of China. It has a Jewish population of about 1,200 persons. There are foreign Concessions and settlements there which are exempt from Chinese jurisdiction, and enjoy extraterritorial rights. The Russian White Guardists do not possess so much power there as in Manchuria, which explains why it was found possible to publish a Jewish daily newspaper there, and not in Harbin, where the Jewish population is much larger.54 Russian language newspapers were very popular in Tientsin. Nasha Zarya (Our Dawn) was published in Tientsin. Other Russian language newspapers imported from Harbin were Zarya (Dawn) and Rupor (Trumpet) - these were also widely read by the Jewish community.

The last sentence was wrong â&#x20AC;&#x201C; there were Jewish newspapers in Harbin which started publication much earlier.

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Another Tientsin Russian newspaper was called Svobodnoe Slovo (The Free Word or Free Speech). Here is the front page from January 1947.

Yet another Russian newspaper was called Nash Golos (Our Voice); it had, on a semi-monthly basis, a page written for the Jewish community. After the war we also read Pravda; this paper was imported direct from USSR and not printed in China. Larry remembers that we used to subscribe to two newspapers â&#x20AC;&#x201C; one in Russian and one in English.

Postal service We had a daily postal service. The postman would knock on our front door and hand over the mail. Those were the days before the compulsory letterbox at the front gate. Letters were a vital source of communication between our family and motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s family in New York. During the Japanese occupation, especially after the USA joined the war against the Axis powers, we received mail from USA via the Red Cross. Of course, this was a very slow process, and the messages were restricted in length.

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Travel within Tientsin Travel within Tientsin was generally done by rickshaw. During my time, there were the two types of rickshaws â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the hand-pulled and the tricycle type. Our family tried to avoid the handpulled rickshaws as we all felt it to be a cruel form of transport. At the same time, if there was no alternative, one had to support the rickshaw puller, these poor people had no other source of income. In this picture taken in 1932, mother and father use a rickshaw as a prop. Mother has her dog Prince on her lap. The photo was taken in our front yard just inside the front gate.

Medical Matters I remember going to our family dentist, Mrs. Voronoff. She had a dental chair in her flat. Looking back, I can see that her dental equipment was very basic e.g., she had a foot-operated drill. It is doubtful if she was properly qualified. I still clearly remember when she had to pull out one of my first teeth to allow a permanent tooth to come through. Her husband, who was a qualified dentist, was killed at the end of WWII by a stray USA bomb meant for the Japanese. We had several family doctors; the one I remember is Dr.Sandler. He had a very bad hump on his back so he could never stand straight. Among the more common drugs used at the time were sulphur drugs that were banned later because of their inherent dangers. Dr.Sandler was always patient, unruffled and caring. An earlier doctor was Dr. Mayboehme, of German extraction. He may have been a Nazi as he proudly displayed the swastika in his rooms. He disappeared from our lives at the end of the war. Other doctors in town were Dr. Dichne, Dr. Michaelis, and Dr. Lenchitzky. Measles and mumps were two illnesses that I did catch in China. However, later in Australia I also found out that I was in contact with tuberculosis. Although I cannot remember them, there were two pharmacists in Tientsin catering for the foreign community. One pharmacy was run by Leo Birulen, a friend of the family. However, that family left for the USA in 1939. Tientsin was not a backwater. We had first class doctors and first class pharmacists. A Jewish Hospital also operated in Tientsin for many years. There certainly was no shortage of Jewish doctors!

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20. Family Items In this section of my notes, I want to mention the family items that originated in either Russia or China and which were brought out to Australia. Writing this section of my account made me realise just how many family items my parents brought to Australia. I have presented here all the major items but I must also mention that there are many items that I have not covered. I just did not want this section of my story to take up so much space.

In those days in China it was traditional for middle-class families like ours to accumulate silver and crystal. They were given as presents or just bought for family use.

Mother used this crystal tray for presenting fruit or pastry to guests.

The two crystal wine decanters shown below were mainly used for sherry. If you have a look at the photo on page 95, the tall wine decanter can be seen on the party table. It is very likely that these decanters were brought out from Russia during the move in 1920.

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These small liqueur glasses were brought out from Russia and were used in both China and Sydney. They come with silver holders.

Vases were also very popular. This pair of Japanese vases was in our family for a long time. They were a wedding present for Sarah and Abie in 1932. Most of the silver cutlery items in our family originated in Russia and would have been purchased by my maternal grandparents.

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Many of the silver spoons we have inherited are of this shape, but there are a number of different sets of initials on the handle.

This one has the initials (З )ZT: These are my grandmother’s – Zisia (Sofa) Toper

This one is also grandmothers. The writing is decorative, with the Russian ЗT

This one has initials (ПЭ) P E. These initials are unknown to me.

This one has the initials (MC) M S. These initials are unknown to me. Maybe the S stood for Sitsky?

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Perhaps the best example of silver is this teapot from Czarist Russia. It is part of a set of four pieces â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the other pieces being a hot water pourer, sugar container and a milk jug. I hope this will stay in our family for many generations. This was likely bought in Irkutsk in the early 1900s.

My motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s initials SS are on this silver table serviette holder â&#x20AC;&#x201C; it was a wedding present. This item was bought from the shop owned by Mr. and Mrs. Linsky who were friends of our family. The Linsky name is embedded in the base of the serviette holder.

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This traditional Chinese table below consisted of four dragon style legs supporting two brass trays. I clearly remember this item from my childhood. Its usual place was in the living room.

We had an ornate brass cigarette container which was always kept full. It was kept on the top tray. There was also an assortment of brass ashtrays on the top tray. Smoking was a serious business in Tientsin in the 1930s and 1940s!

We had a big range of Russian and Chinese white tablecloths. These were proudly displayed when we had guests. They were also used during the Jewish holidays.

Each tablecloth had a different pattern, like this one shown. The patterns would have been hand sewn.

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A silver set I ‘discovered’ when writing this story relates to my Uncle Grisha. This cup and saucer set was given to Grisha: the inscription says “To my great grandson Grisha from great grandfather to remember me by 1/6/1907". On the other side of the cup is a large T. The inscription T means that it came from the Topf/Toper side of the family. However, by 1907 my uncle’s great grandfather was long gone! Therefore, this seems to be a mystery. However, I do remember uncle Grisha telling me that it was a joke played on him by friends. This lovely spoon was not part of any joke; it was given to Grisha as a child; his name is engraved on the back.

Another mystery is this small cup. It has the inscription To a Friend 11/8. I cannot relate this date to anyone in our family tree.

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This pendant has been in the family for a very long time. It came from Irkutsk and was worn by my grandmother. At some stage, it was passed on to my mother, maybe when she visited her parents in New York in 1960. Below, the brooch is open to show how my mother wore it during her life, with small photos of her parents.

This womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s gold watch used to belong to my grandmother. It has a very old mechanism so would date from the very early 1900s. It was made in Russia.

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The diamond ring on the right was my mother’s engagement ring. On the left is another diamond ring that came to us when Uncle Grisha died. It would have been his wife’s ring.55

Pearls were very popular in China for the first half of the 20th century. Mother had a number of pearl necklaces, and the one shown above was one of her favourites.

My daughter Ana now wears my mother’s ring, while my son Michael used the other diamond to have Zoe’s engagement ring made.

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One day our parents decided to give us a small carpet each for our bedrooms. This was a good idea as Tientsin was famous for its traditional Chinese carpets. Larry ended up with a reddish carpet and I got a blue one. We used these carpets in our bedroom in both China and Australia.

One of my earliest memories of family possessions was this clock. As a child I was impressed by its size, shape and marble colour. I also remember the ritual of my father winding the two springs every few days. The clock mechanism struck the correct number of bells every hour and a single bell every half hour.

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This unusual object has also been in our family as long as I can remember. It very much looks like a tool that was used by surveyors. I think it would have come from Russia. I used it in Tientsin as a ruler to help me in my homework.

The camphor chest shown below was bought in Tientsin. Mother stored all her furs and woollens in it during the summer months. Carved chests like this one were very popular in the community.

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This large Russian travelling chest was the one that the Toper family brought out from Irkutsk to China in 1919.56 The chest was built very solidly; one outstanding feature is the decorations on all the brass edging. Some of this decoration can be seen in the picture below.

For many years this chest was located at my parents unit in Tamarama, it is now located in Moruya in Larryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s and Magdaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s country retreat.

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21. Relationship with my Parents Larry and I did not have a close relationship with our parents, it was more a relationship based on rules. Doing the right thing was very important to them, especially if other people were there, otherwise there was a ‘loss of face’. I have no recollection of ever cuddling up to them; if that did happen it would have been when I was very little. My mother used to tell me that God was always watching out and if I were naughty he would note this and I would be punished. This notion worried me. I remember as a child lying in my bed and often thinking what God looked like. I concluded that his face must have looked like an alligator! My parents were very prudish in their behaviour. They never let me see them without any clothes. I remember once, I must have been eight years old, bursting into their bedroom and seeing my father naked as he was leaving their en-suite bathroom. I could see that he was most embarrassed and ‘covered up’ with his hands, while I laughed as I pointed my finger at him. Similarly, when as a seven year old, I remember being bathed in my parent’s bathroom when my mother’s dressing gown slipped and I saw her pubic hair. I straightaway pointed this out to her and she immediately denied that this had happened. This type of behaviour was undoubtedly a product of the times and their upbringing. Although they were loyal to each other and supported each other in their daily lives, they did not show open affection to each other in public. They would have regarded this as something that one did when they were alone. When I was seven years old I saw for the first time a naked adult person! As a curious boy I just happened to look via the keyhole into my grandparents’ bathroom to see my naked grandmother. I remember my mixed emotions at the time – embarrassment at invading someone’s privacy and amazement in seeing someone’s private parts! Their prudishness extended even further. I remember lying in bed and my mother coming in to say good night and to check where my hands were – she told me to keep my hands above the sheets! Larry and I never received any sex education from our parents; this was a subject that was just never mentioned. It was only after our arrival in Australia did I find out the ‘facts of life’. It is probably fair to say that there were two phases in our life in China: the period when our grandparents were living with us and then the period after they left for the USA during 1947. Having our grandparents in the house was wonderful for Larry and me. Our grandmother in particular was very indulgent towards her grandchildren. After the departure of our grandparents it became a bit tense in the house as mother and father had to assume much more responsibility in running the household. Larry in particular noticed this difference. Father was the person who dispensed discipline. If I was naughty this would be reported to father when he came home from work. Depending on the particular issue, the result would be either a verbal reprimand or warning or a smack with a belt on the legs if it was considered a significant misdemeanour. It was mother who ensured that I had enough to eat; she went to considerable effort to prepare food that she knew I liked. It was also mother who took action if I fell sick; she was the one who took me to a doctor, monitored my medication and gave me the clearance to leave our house.

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However I do remember father taking me to a traditional Chinese doctor to clean my eardrum. Some water lodged in my ear after a swim in the pool, and western doctors were unable to help me. It was fascinating to experience how the Chinese doctor cleared the problem with the insertion and manipulation of very fine wooden sticks. Here is the only photo I have showing me together with my father with his arm around me. It was taken in 1949 when I was 10 years old. I do not ever remember my parents having a serious confrontation in Tientsin; there were disagreements of course, but all problems were solved in an amicable manner without any resort to shouting matches. Maybe they waited until I was asleep in bed before sorting out any difficulties. The fact that we all had individual bedrooms meant that my parents had privacy when they wanted it. They each played out their respective roles and did not cross the line to upset that relationship. This type of stability was very important to both Larry and me. Father used to say that he was the ‘breadwinner’ of the family. No doubt that was correct; however, mother was the one who seemed to make most of the decisions on how the family income was to be spent. My parents were over protective. If there was any possibility of being hurt I was not allowed to do it. Taking risks was definitely not an option I had when they were supervising me. Obviously as a child I found that protectiveness very frustrating at times. Looking back, I can see that our mother’s protectiveness of me was her way of demonstrating her love for me. Every evening, father would check all the external doors to our house to ensure that they were locked. This probably took a relatively short time but to me it was a lengthy and important procedure that ensured the safety of the household. Mother was not keen for father to have non-Jewish friends. She was brought up with the notion that all Christians were anti-Semitic. Father was used to mixing with people of different backgrounds through his schooling and work while mother had led a sheltered life surrounded by family and only Jewish friends. However, our family did eventually have a few non-Jewish Russian friends and over a period even mother realised that such friendships would not be a threat to our family. We never had picnics or attended outdoor events. Entertainment was either at home, at the cinema, or in someone else’s house. This was partly because we never owned a car; in fact, very few people in our community did. I do not want to create the impression that I was unhappy; on the contrary, I think I had a happy childhood with minimum stress. It is true that I did not get my way every time but who does? The security within our house, the caring school, having good friends, friendship with my brother, all contributed to my development during my 11 years in Tientsin. Tientsin is still part of me, and I often think about the events in China during my childhood. 130

22. Jewish Life in Tientsin Some background notes on the political environment in Tientsin are necessary to show how it influenced the life of Russian Jews. In the period I am covering in these notes it is important to note that the Japanese occupied Tientsin from July 1937 to August 1945. Before 1941, stateless Russian Jews living in China were better off than Soviet Jewish citizens who were exposed to the particularly nasty anti-Semitism of Russian fascist mercenaries who worked for the Japanese. However, probably the key criterion used by thugs when targeting Jews of Russian background in the 1930s was not the Soviet passport or lack thereof, but the apparent wealth of the victim and the victim’s family. When the Pacific war broke out in December 1941, the situation reversed itself. The tenuous protection of the foreign Concessions was gone. The Soviet Union at that time was not at war with Japan so Soviet passport holders (including Jews) had a kind of protection from Japanese intimidation and attacks by Russian fascists. Our family did not have Soviet passports and were therefore vulnerable. Russian Jews lived in China no more than two to three generations. Typically, one generation was born in Russia and then moved to China and the next two generations were born in China. Generally, the Russian Jews who lived in China viewed themselves as transient refugees. They knew that they did not belong to Northeast China. As such, they felt that they had a mission of preserving their identity and their culture as Jews and they resisted the influence of Chinese customs, art, and institutions on their life. Assimilation of Russian Jews into the Chinese community was almost totally absent. Even though my maternal grandfather, Pavel, was a very religious man, and my paternal grandfather, Boris was active in the Jewish community, I would not describe my parents as being religious. They fasted at Yom Kippur and we celebrated Passover and the Jewish New Year but my parents never went to the synagogue on a regular weekly basis. Their religious observance was more of ‘keeping up a tradition’ rather than a belief. At home, neither father nor mother knew how to say the Jewish prayers. Therefore, after my grandparents left for the USA we did not have any formal religion at home. Therefore, Larry and I were brought up knowing we were Jews but no great emphasis was ever placed on religion. At the Tientsin Jewish School we were taught to read and speak Hebrew, learned about the Jewish Holy days, and studied Jewish history. However, Russian and English were the main languages of the school, so most of the time ‘being Jewish’ was not a major aspect of our lives. (Larry may disagree with me, as he joined a Zionist Youth Group called Betar. This organization was very active in Tientsin). The Tientsin Jewish Union built the Tientsin Synagogue in 1939. This was the result of large numbers of refugees coming to the city before and during World War II. It occupied an area about 600 square meters. Before 1939, Gordon Hall was regularly hired by the Jewish community to celebrate the holy days like Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah. The local community started to learn about the destruction of European Jewry soon after the end of World War II. There were lists of communities and people that perished; these were published in the local press. When the full news of the Holocaust became known there was an outpouring of grief at a family level and at the community level. Mirrors in our house were covered and grandmother and mother sat ‘shiva’57 on the floor for one week. No doubt our grandparents read about deaths of distant family members in Europe. 57

A mourning period ritual, during which family members traditionally gather in one home.

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I clearly remember standing with my mother in our dining room and her telling me about the establishment of the State of Israel. I was eight and a half years old. She had a copy of a local (Jewish?) newspaper spread across the table. I remember a picture of Theodore Herzl on the front page and my mother telling me that this event was foretold nearly two thousand years ago.

I remember going to the synagogue with my class in May 1948 during the celebrations for the creation of the State of Israel. This day was undoubtedly the greatest public event in our lives in China. The synagogue was packed as the picture shows. The older generation were praying all their lives for a ‘return to Jerusalem’. Now that their prayers were answered there was huge excitement in the community; people felt that they were privileged to be alive when this momentous event actually happened.

Alex Auswaks described the atmosphere in the synagogue the following way: “And then there was Krimchansky. He was just an outstanding cantor – his voice wept when he prayed Kol Nidre (prayer recited in the synagogue at the beginning of the evening service on the Day of Atonement); it resounded with thanksgiving when he sung Psalms on the 15th of May, 1948 - he was triumphant.” 58

The overflow of people can be seen standing on the steps of the synagogue and in front of the synagogue. Most probably, Larry and I are in the crowd. The weather was perfect for this huge occasion. As a member of Betar (the Zionist Youth Organisation) Larry would have participated in the march from the Tientsin Jewish School to the synagogue. On that day people who never attended a service in the synagogue were there. The Tientsin synagogue is now the only public building relating to past Jewish life in Tientsin that is still standing. It is located at the political and cultural centre of the city.59

58 59

Alex Auswaks, IGS Bulletin 329 The synagogue was located at the crossing of today’s Nanjing Road and Zhengzhou Street.

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Naturally the Jewish community organized a number of celebratory events and here is one example: Jewish community leaders sitting in front of a picture of Theodore Herzl with the Russian inscription behind saying ‘Free State of Israel!’ Mr. Habinsky is standing 4th from left.

This same picture was published in ‘The Tientsin Evening Journal’ in May 1948. The names of the people in the photo were also listed.

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The Chinese community, including the Chinese Communist Party, generally welcomed news of the establishment of the State of Israel. Below, the Jizhong Duobao, a communist newspaper, applauds the founding of the State of Israel.

The Tientsin Synagogue was run on traditional, orthodox lines. We never knew anything about reform synagogues. This is how the interior of the synagogue looked in the 1940s.

“There aren’t many cities in the world where the synagogue is aesthetically the most beautiful edifice. However, in Tientsin the most beautiful house of worship was the synagogue. It was a tall graceful building with insets, long upright windows and beautiful wooden doors. The ceiling was sky blue with a multitude of gold stars painted on it.” 60

The Synagogue building has now been approved as a State-preserved monument of architecture to be owned by the Tianjin Municipal government. In Appendix H are pictures of the restored building. 60

Alex Auswaks, IGS Bulletin 341

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Alex Auswaks remembers when the Jews of Kai Feng Fu once came on pilgrimage during Rosh Hashanah/Yom Kippur to the Tientsin Synagogue, and our grandfather Pavel, as Gabbai,61 arranged seating for them in the front row as a mark of respect. I remember participating in the annual Passover holidays at our house in Rue Dillon. Grandfather was in charge of eliminating any traces of leavening from one's possession. Even the cracks of kitchen counters were thoroughly scrubbed, to remove any traces of flour and yeast, however small. We also used a special set of crockery and cutlery for this holiday. During the first evening meal (Seder) it is the youngest person around the table that asks the question ‘Why is this night different to all other nights?’ - known as the ‘Manishtana’. I memorised the Hebrew text and recited the question without any difficulty – knowing how to read Hebrew certainly helped. Here is the Passover prayer booklet62 we used during our last years in China – note that it was available in China because of the presence of the US Army from 1945. Our grandfather hid the ‘afikoman’ (the piece of matzo that is hidden and then eaten at the conclusion of the Seder meal) and Larry and I had to find it and then receive a present. After our grandparents left for the USA our Seders changed significantly. Father was not able to read the Hebrew text and while mother was probably able to do so she did not take on this role. While we still had the traditional Passover meal there were no prayers or traditional songs. It is fair to say that the Chinese generally did not show any prejudice against the Jewish community; anti-Semitism mainly came from the ‘White Russians’ as well as Germans living in their German Concession. Marriages across cultures and nationalities were easily arranged. Jewish conversions were carried out with minimum fuss. While most of our friends were Jewish, our family did have some non-Jewish Russian friends. The Schelokhoffs were good friends of my parents. Mr. Schelokhoff and father both worked for the British American Tobacco Company and they were regular visitors to our house. Alexandra (Alya) Shadrin was in the same class with me at TJS and I regarded her as a friend.

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A Gabbai (Hebrew: ‫גבאי‬‎) is a person who assists in the running of a synagogue. The Haggadah (Hebrew: ‫הגדה‬‎, "telling") is a Jewish religious text that sets out the order of the Passover Seder

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The Jewish community in Tientsin was largely self-operating. Its people ate customary Jewish and east European food, often bought from Jewish grocers. There were shops of every conceivable kind. There were Jewish watch repairmen, jewellers, tailors for western-style suits and handmade footwear of relatively high quality and style, Jewish run pharmacies, Jewish doctors and dentists, Jewish barbers and beauticians, and of course Jewish charities. It was a generous, homogenous community, very conscious of the needs of the elderly and the less fortunate. Mr. Lifshitz ran a photography business and he took all the official photos for the Jewish community. Our family also used him and you can see his signature on the bottom right of all his photographs. The kosher delicatessen was Levin’s. The favourite butcher was the handsome Misha; he was Chinese but had married a Russian girl. Thanks to the generosity of Moses Triguboff, the Jewish Community had an old people’s home.

New books were bought from the Oriental bookstore owned by Mr. Paradissis, old books from Life Bookstore. Russian books were bought at Serebrennikoff, who also sold toys and stationery.

I remember going shopping with my mother; she shopped mainly in the English Concession – Cousens Road, Meadows Road and Taku Road. She often shopped in non-Jewish shops, including a number of Chinese owned shops. I loved those shops that sold nuts and oils and herbs; I can still smell the aroma in those shops, everything was in large sacks or boxes, there was no packaging. A special treat was to be taken to the Kiessling restaurant for an ice cream. I can’t remember that any bartering took place in shops. Prices were generally fixed and customers just paid for the goods that they required. However, in markets it was customary to barter; prices would suddenly get inflated if a westerner wanted to purchase any item. Two-tone shoes were very much in vogue in Tientsin in the late 1940s. Father decided that we should follow that trend and took Larry and me to a Chinese shoe shop on Victoria Road. We had our feet measured up and a week later the shoes were ready. So without any further ado we all walked out of the shop in our brand new brown and white shoes. Unfortunately for me, we met up with a number of my classmates who checked us out very carefully! The next school day I received considerable ribbing about our family’s fashion statements! The Tientsin Hebrew Association (established in 1904) took charge of religious and social affairs in the Jewish community. It existed over 45 years and built up a whole set of community facilities.

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Here is the front cover of the Association’s report for 1939. Note that the report was written up in the Russian language, even though English was the language used in all commercial activities.

The Russian/Jewish community in Tientsin was indeed very fortunate that it managed to escape any real form of persecution during World War II. The primary reason for this was that there was a non-aggression pact between the USSR and Japan during most of the war. In effect this meant that as ‘Russians’ we were not treated by the Japanese as aliens. When Russia finally declared war on Japan in 1945, the Japanese had far more pressing matters to attend to and so the Jewish community was spared any special attention. In fact, during World War II, the Jewish community maintained its original existing shape and became a refuge for Jews fleeing the Nazi Holocaust.

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A Russian Jewish weekly newspaper was available in North China from 1921. It was originally called Siberia-Palestine. The name changed in 1926 to Jewish Life. There was an English Section within the newspaper. This is how the front page looked like in March 1940.

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Before my grandfather left Tientsin in 1947, he gave me a miniature Torah scroll. The Torah is Judaism’s founding legal and ethical religious texts.

He also gave me and my father silk praying shawls (Larry was given one in 1947 for his barmitzvah).

Father’s was a largish one – about one metre by two metres – one end of it is shown below.

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Mine was a blue and white one – about half the size of my fathers.

Both my father’s and my shawls had their own embroidered carry bags – as shown below.

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23. My Parent’s Friends My parents had quite a large group of friends. I have listed below some of the families that made a lasting impression on me. Paretsky Family: Here is a picture from 1932 of father and Ilusha Paretsky, at the war memorial in the English Park. Their son Mara was a friend of Larry’s. They moved to Israel and contact with my parents was lost. However, I did have email contact with Mara for many years. Linsky Family: Mr. Linsky was a successful jeweller. His wife had one short leg so she wore special shoes and used a walking stick. Mrs. Linsky (her name was Rivachka) was nicknamed Kolokolchik (Little Bell) – she had the most beautiful laugh. They were one family that had no children. They also moved to Sydney in the early 1950s. Goorevich Family: They were a family that was close to my parents. I was also friends with their oldest son Venya. They moved to Australia soon after us, and the families continued to be good friends. Schelokhoff Family: Mr. Schelokhoff worked with father in the tobacco company. The family was typically Russian Orthodox. As a child, I always looked forward to their visits as they brought a different perspective as compared to our Jewish way of life. This friendship lasted the move to Australia; together with their son Alex, they were regular visitors to our house. Pelyavin Family: What I remember most was that Mrs. Pelyavin and the two sons were very much overweight – something unusual in those days. They moved to the USA after 1949 and my parents had some exchange of letters with them. Fligil Family: The Fligils were friends of the Topers for many years, even before father met mother. Even after my grandparents moved to the USA this friendship with the Fligil family continued. My parents valued this special relationship. Trachtengertz Family: Their son Bobby was in my class at TJS and was one of my close friends. We used to sleepover at each other’s places. Mr. Trachtengertz was a very successful merchant both in China and in Australia. Their older son, Seva (known in Australia as Jesse) was a friend of Larry. The friendship continued in Australia. Sakker Family: They had two children who also attended the TJS, Sam and Shelly. The family moved to Australia around the same time as we did, and the friendship continued. Auswaks Family: They were one family who also lived in the French Concession. The friendship was more with Mrs. Auswaks – also Larry and Sana (Alex) were the best of friends. (Between 1991 and 1998, Alex Auswaks wrote a series of articles on Jewish life in Tientsin in the 1930s and 1940s. They were published in the magazine called Igud Yotsei Sin (Association of Former Residents of China). 141

Kiselyoff Family: They were the closest friends of mother and father. Their family was friends of the Topers even before my parents met up. This photo was sent to the Toper family in 1929, well before mother and father met. When I knew them Mr. Kiselyoff suffered from Parkinson’s disease, and trips to America to get some relief were unsuccessful. I found it upsetting to observe Mr. Kiselyoff’s shaking, rigidity and slowness of movement. We visited them just before our departure from China and my parents knew that we would never see them again. They migrated to Israel later on with their two sons. They maintained regular letter contact with them. (In fact, after mother died I found an unsent letter to Mrs. Kiselyoff.)

Britanisky Family: This was also a long lasting friendship. Mr. Britanisky attended my parents wedding in 1932. I was a good friend with their son Mara. They moved to the USA in the late 1940s. Zasnikov and Vilner Family: This family was very close to the Topers. Esther Zasnikov and my mother were very good friends – there are many photos from the period 1929-1931 showing them together with other Toper family members. This friendship continued after Esther married Isaac Vilner. My parents were Godfather and Godmother to the eldest of the Vilner children. This picture of Esther and Isaac Vilner was taken in 193163.

Mrs. Voronoff: Not only was Mrs. Voronoff our dentist, she was also a friend of the family. This picture of her was taken in the late 1940’s. She was a true cat lover.

David Vilner, the son of Esther and Isaac Vilner, visited us in Australia in 2011.

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24. Music in Our House I remember the solidly built RCA Victrola hand-wound record player. The cabinet was stained a beautiful rich burgundy colour. A pull-up lid revealed the turntable with a largish hollow arm on which was mounted a stylus or needle assembly. The lid had provision to be locked. The end of the arm was internally connected to an acoustic chamber; the front of this chamber had a mesh, which is similar to a mesh found on modern speakers. The long winder was inserted in the right of the cabinet, and one had to wind the spring for about fifteen seconds to enable several records to be played. It was a beautifully made piece of furniture from the 1930s. The instrument did not have any electrical element; the design relied only on vibrations and acoustic amplification. The standard of the sound quality was surprisingly good for a non-electronic device.

This was the label on the inside of the pull-up lid. The picture on the right shows the hollow arm assembly, very similar to the one we had on our Victrola.64 In those days, all records were either 12” or 10” in diameter. They were made of shellac and broke easily if not handled carefully. The steel needles had to be replaced after every record was played, as they went blunt very quickly. Unlike later microgroove records, the 78s required a heavy arm to be used in order to obtain a satisfactory reproduction. The needles were purchased in small metal containers that held about one hundred of them. A 12” record side would last about 3 minutes; a 10” record about 2 minutes. A few of our records had grooves only on one side; they were very thick, and I regarded them as being very old. After the end of World War II in 1945, 78rpm recordings made of flexible vinyl became available, mainly due to the American influence. Both the record player and the short-wave radio were proudly displayed in our lounge room, together with the large range of 78-rpm vinyl records. Father used to boast to our guests about these technological marvels and encouraged them to listen to the radio or the record player. Father inherited a fabulous collection of records from his father Boris. Lara Sitsky remembers that Boris adored music. He would invite relatives and neighbours over for listening sessions but if anyone dared to start talking, he would immediately stop the music! Father built up the collection of classical records and by the beginning of the 1950s, he must have had about 500 records. The records would have been purchased mainly in the late 1940s. For those days the collection was a substantial one. As mentioned below, the strength of the collection was mainly from the classical period. (Father arranged for our carpenter to build special wooden boxes to transport the whole collection to Australia. All the records survived the long journey!) 64

One of my regrets is that I did not have the foresight to save the family’s classical RCA Victrola for future generations. First, my parents ‘gutted’ it in the 1960s and used the space for storage; finally, they cut the legs to make it into a telephone table!

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Looking back, I can see the early impact of music on my life. It was just the norm to hear great symphonies, piano and violin concertos, as well as great singers performing both opera and classical songs. Larry’s daily piano playing all added to the atmosphere in our house. Looking back, I can see that it was father who mainly passed on to me (and especially Larry) a love for classical music. While mother was the one who received formal training in music in her youth, she was not demonstrative in her passion for music as compared to father. Vocal Records Father’s great love was to listen to that great Russian bass Chaliapin. He had every recording of Chaliapin that he could get his hands on. He often pointed out to me the marvellous vocal range of Chaliapin. He used to say that no other singer in the world could match the artistry of Chaliapin. He loved to listen to Chaliapin’s interpretation of Boris Gudounov. There is no doubt that recordings from this opera by Moussorgsky gave my father the greatest pleasure. I think he regarded these arias as Chaliapin’s greatest achievements. I clearly remember father listening to the famous scene when Boris sees the image of the young prince who he arranged to be murdered. He said that he got ‘goose bumps’ whenever he listened to this part of the opera. To me it certainly was a clear and memorable demonstration of the power of opera. Here is how the cover of this wellloved album looks. He also had many Russian folk songs sung by Chaliapin. He once saw Chaliapin on stage when the great singer came to Tientsin as part of his China tour in the 1930s. Father often talked about Chaliapin being not only a great singer but also a great actor and artist. Mother never shared father’s love of Chaliapin. She would not sit and listen to Chaliapin; her assessment of him was generally pretty scathing; she did not appreciate him as a great actor and singer. Larry also does not remember mother ever seriously listening to orchestral records.

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Father’s collection included La Traviata (no doubt his favourite) and a good selection of arias from Rigoletto. There were also many records from a large range of other Italian opera. Verdi was the big favourite. Others included Puccini, Rossini and Donizetti.

To play an opera in those days one had to have a large album holding about a dozen records. The La Traviata album had 15 records, by far the largest single album of father’s collection, so one had to get up from the chair every few minutes to either flip a record over or select the next one in the series to place on the turntable. This booklet came with the La Traviata album. This was treasured by father who had the booklet bound to ensure its longevity. Here is the label from inside the cover.

Father also loved to listen to solo vocal artists that included Caruso, Gigli, Tagliavini and Galli-Curci. The collection included these great artists singing arias mainly from Italian operas. He also had a collection of that great Jewish cantor Josef Rosenblatt. This was the man who could have been a top tenor on the world’s stage, but instead decided to stick to Jewish singing in the synagogue. My father’s father who was very interested in this type of religious music influenced the collection of cantor music.

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Below is a label from one of father’s Rosenblatt records. The one exception father made in his selection of vocal recordings was that he would not purchase or listen to German opera or singing. He felt that just by listening to the German language one made some sort of concession to the Holocaust. The fact that Beethoven or Schubert composed their works more than 100 years before World War II did not sway him in his opinion. Music from operettas was not high on the agenda. While some records collected had highlights from operettas, complete operettas were not collected.

While mother sometimes listened to father’s vocal recordings she was never passionate about them. She liked to listen to Russian vocal artists such as Alexander Vertinsky, who mainly sang romantic songs. Vertinsky lived in China for many years and this added to his popularity in the Tientsin communities.

Orchestral and Soloist Records Surprisingly, father had hardly any records from the baroque period. I remember there were a few Bach pieces but nothing by composers such as Vivaldi, Handel, Purcell, Telemann or Gluck. The symphonies and concertos from the classical period were the strength of father’s record collection. Composers like Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms were very well represented. There was no doubt that Beethoven was the composer that father admired more than anyone else. In particular, he loved Beethoven’s third, fifth and sixth symphonies and I can still remember listening to them in our lounge room.

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Surprisingly, father did not have a large collection of Russian composers. He naturally had the favourite symphonies and concertos of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff but his Russian collection did not go much further. This one shown is Tchaikovsky’s piano Concerto No. 1. The romantic period was also well represented by composers such as Schubert, Liszt, Chopin, Mendelssohn and Schumann. However, Wagner was definitely not collected. Surprisingly even a composer like Bruckner was not collected. The Beethoven piano concertos were father’s favourites as was the Beethoven violin concerto. Other composers in this category would include Brahms and Mozart. Again, surprisingly, father did not have any records of the Beethoven quartets. Father’s favourite violin soloists from the 1930s and 1940s were Fritz Kreisler, Yehudi Menuhin, Jasha Heifitz and Misha Elman. Favourite pianists in the collection included Schnabel, Friedman, Rachmaninoff and Egon Petri.65

In 1959/60, my brother Larry studied with Egon Petrie in San Francisco.

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The record album shown on the previous page clearly shows the way records were presented. There were good descriptive accounts of the pieces and the composers. Compositions from the 20th century were also not collected. Father considered them too ‘modern’. So we never heard in our house pieces by Bartok, Stravinsky, Strauss or Shostakovich. Other Types of Music Father had a limited interest in chamber music. To be fair, one has to add that chamber music just was not in demand or listened to in those days. Other forms of music like jazz or folk just did not feature in his collection. My parents were not the slightest bit interested in Chinese music. It was never played in our house. Occasionally we could hear some Chinese instrumental music from the adjoining house. Larry was interested in Chinese music; he especially loved Chinese opera and the use of percussion. The whole family encountered Chinese funeral music when long public processions passed our house. Anecdote from the 1940s Alex Auswaks recalls in his Jan/Feb 1999 article in the IYS magazine an amusing story about the Sitsky record collection. The Tientsin Jewish School decided to do a performance of The Mikado; unfortunately, they did not have any music for this operetta: ‘Not a problem! The Sitsky family had inherited a fabulous collection of records and surely, they would have a recording of THE MIKADO. The singers and chorus would listen to the records and pick up the melodies. The Sitsky family did not have a recording of THE MIKADO! For yonks (i.e. years) afterwards, whenever the Sitsky record collection was mentioned a rider was added, “But they never had THE MIKADO!”’

Note: My brother Larry has recently written a short article for a Chinese classical music magazine. The title of the article is Growing up Musical in Tientsin. There is currently little knowledge in China of the musical scene that existed in the large Chinese cities during the first half of the 20th century and Larry was asked to contribute an article on this subject. As this article is directly relevant to our family life in China I am including it in Appendix G.

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25. What Did We Eat?

Our grandparents and parents generally followed a Russian/Jewish diet. When grandmother was living with us, she was in charge of the kitchen. She had a very good reputation for her cooking skills, especially the traditional Russian and Jewish dishes. Here is the front page of grandmother’s cookbook. The English translation of the title is “Help to a thrifty housewife”. The book was published in Kiev in 1912.

Porridge and semolina were common at breakfast – these were the days before instant cereals. Mother liked to make her own yoghurt and that was eaten regularly. She used to place cups of milk with culture on the window ledge in the sun, or near the stove in winter. Eggs were also a very common start to the day – we had them boiled, scrambled or fried. The alternative to porridge was semolina, and both Larry and I preferred it, as it was so easy to eat. Mother always added cream and butter to the cooked semolina, so it was delicious to eat. At lunch, we had a variety of ‘zakuski’ with bread. These were an assortment of cold or hot appetizer dishes. These could be chopped liver, an eggplant spread called baklazhanaya ikra, or salted herring. We also had piroshky – Russian dumplings. We usually fried the piroshky until they were light brown, as shown in this photo. Again, various types were made – all were savoury. Fruit was also eaten at this meal. We often had kissel – a sweet Russian drink which mother made by first mixing potato flour and mashed berries and then boiling the mixture. Caviar was relatively inexpensive in China and we used to have it as part of our zakuski. It is the most famous Russian hors d’oeuvre. It was served cold and we usually had it on small slices of rye bread.

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At dinner, we often had a pirog, hot borsch/soups in winter, (cold beetroot soup in summer), cabbage rolls, etc. There were at least three types of pirog made in our house – meat, salmon and cabbage. My favourite was the salmon variety. I loved eating the thick pastry that came with the serve. The picture shows a cabbage style pirog. In winter, we also had lapsha, a milk soup with vermicelli. Desserts included fried pancakes or baked pastries. The pancakes were either plain or filled with cream cheese. When we had the plain pancakes we placed dollops of jam on top. Both grandmother and mother liked to make Napoleon cake. Again, this was also very rich with layers of cream in between the pastry. One of mother’s favourite dishes was studen but Larry and I tried to avoid eating a dish that was basically meat and vegetables in a solidified semi-transparent stock. Another favourite was stuffed minced meat in cabbage, called galuptsi. We also often had beef stroganoff – this was done in a rich cream sauce. Occasionally when available the family bought pheasant; it was considered something special but I found the taste too strong. Potato cutlets were another favourite of mine – they were decorated by a crosshatch pattern done by a knife. Russian salad or vinaigrette was also frequently eaten – this had beetroot, peas, potatoes, carrots, chopped pickles, onions etc. with lots of mayonnaise. The mayo was prepared from scratch at home using hard egg yolk, butter and oil. Kasha (buckwheat) is part of the staple Russian diet; when well-cooked is a delicious accompaniment to lamb or poultry. We had kasha on a regular basis. Both my grandmother and mother used to prepare beef sukiyaki as a regular treat and as a change from the normal cuisine. The noodles were thin vermicelli - thinner than the noodles shown in the photo. This was the one time that everyone was given chopsticks. Looking back it seems a bit strange that a Japanese dish was regularly served in our house; but not Chinese dishes. Another ‘foreign’ dish that we had was shashlik. This was a Caucasian dish, which involved cooking meat on skewers. The meat was usually marinated for some time before cooking.

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One of my favourite deserts was pascha – a mixture of cottage cheese, cream, milk, heaps of butter and many eggs. It was placed in a traditional Russian wooden mould made from five pieces of wood joined together. The mould first was lined with wet muslin. It then was placed in an icebox to harden before eating. I do not know whether our wooden mould came from Russia or my grandparents bought it in China. If we also ate Russian Easter cake, that really made the day.

Poppy seed rolls were another favourite. Mother regularly fried lapashki (similar to thin flapjacks) and to which we added cream or jam. However, with jam-filled vareniki, no additions were necessary. When I look back, I can see that a lot of the food that was on our diet was indeed very rich – lots of butter, lots of food fried in oil, lots of rich cakes, etc. Occasionally the whole family sat down to make pelmeni. Grandmother or mother rolled out the pastry and small round sections of pastry were cut out. Several types of mixtures were also prepared – meat, vegetables and even fruit. A dab of the mixture was placed on the round pastry and then one had to carefully fold them into little bundles. After boiling them, they were ready for eating. We usually had soy sauce or mustard to garnish the pelmeni. Sometimes we had them in our soup, as shown in this picture. Hundreds were made at the one time so that we could get a few meals out of all the work. Water was boiled before drinking. In summer, it was chilled in the icebox. We both thought it was very novel to be able to drink straight out of the tap when we arrived in Sydney. There was a samovar on our dining room table; tea was the popular hot drink in our house. Even though Larry and I loved Chinese food it was rare for us to have local food at our meals. Mother was not keen about Chinese food – she regarded it with some disdain as compared with European cuisine. We may have gone out to a restaurant no more than once a year; most likely to the restaurant in Club Kunst. The family had the tradition, started by our grandparents, that meals had to be prepared at home. Mother and father were also scared that we could pick up germs and infections when eating out. The other reason was that going out was just too expensive; father was on a modest salary and that was always a factor. 151

One of my earliest memories related to food is seeing my mother scrape a peeled apple in the puree maker. She scooped out the puree into my bowl and that was a simple delicious meal for me. The remarkable thing is that this simple glass scraper is still in use in our house.

A Chinese friend of my parents once invited us all to a Chinese restaurant. Larry and I really looked forward to this special event. It was a traditional Chinese banquet with everyone sharing the dishes after they were placed on the table. Afterwards my parents were critical of their friend in that he followed Chinese eating practice rather than European etiquette. When he tucked into the delicious soup and dumplings he dipped his spoon in the central dish several times instead of taking his portion onto his bowl. Larry and I were rather bemused by their criticism. I remember going with my mother to various shops to buy food. In particular, I enjoyed going to those shops that specialised in oil, nuts and herbs. Of course, in those days, nothing was packaged and one simply asked the sales person for quantities of the particular food. I didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t particularly enjoy the purchasing of chickens or ducks. Mother had to buy whole animals and there was the inevitable questioning as to whether the chicken was too lean. The more fat the better the chicken! I also knew that when we got home one job would be to pull all the feathers out of the chicken. At least once every summer we used an old wooden ice-cream churner to make delicious homemade ice cream. The whole family participated. Mother prepared the mixture; father, Larry and I filled the churner with pieces of ice and salt; then we took turns to operate the churner for one to two hours. This was done outside in the back courtyard; it was hot work. Of course, all the ice cream was made with rich cream. However, the results were great and I can still remember the thrill of tasting the fresh ice cream.

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26. Tientsin Jewish School (T.J.S.) Tientsin Jewish School was established in 1925 and lasted until the middle of 1950 – a period of 24 years. The address was 128 Victoria Road (presently North Jiefang Road) in the former British Concession. The school had previously been in Tientsin in three other locations in the 1920s and 1930s. The school was not actually on Victoria Road, we had to walk via a long alley off Victoria Road into the school grounds. Both Larry and I attended the Tientsin Jewish School. Larry attended from 1939 to 1950 and obtained the Cambridge Junior Certificate66 in his last year at school. I attended the school from Kindergarten to Form IV. Here is Larry’s Kindergarten certificate from December 1940.

We travelled to school by rickshaw; when I attended Kindergarten, I must have gone together with Larry, or my mother took me; in later years, Larry and I used to get rickshaws independently. One always had to settle on the fare before getting into the rickshaw to avoid a dispute on arrival at the destination. I used to carry a few extra notes to placate the driver if he demanded more cash. I was always a bit worried when travelling on my own in a rickshaw because of this potential dispute.

Equivalent to the Australian Leaving Certificate of the 1950’s and 1960’s

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Here are samples of two certificates issued to me by the School: Below is a kindergarten certificate awarded to me in 1946.

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And here is my Grade 4 certificate awarded in 1950.

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The School also implemented a Token of Merit. Every month the school issued gold and silver tokens to students who met the conduct, application, neatness and punctuality criteria. I managed to receive about six of these tokens every year. The standards were high â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the gold token was issued for students who scored 98--100%, while the silver tokens were given to students who achieved 90-97%. Fair and unsatisfactory tokens were also issued but I never seem to have received any of those.

My earliest school memory is from a kindergarten class; I am sitting in a class that has low tables and chairs; there must be at least twenty children sitting around the table. A female teacher is in charge â&#x20AC;&#x201C; she is teaching us letters of the alphabet, although I cannot remember the language. The aim of the school was to provide affordable Jewish and general education in Russian and English. In general terms the curriculum was based on the British Grammar School system. Every year the School had a sports day on the Lag Baâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;omer holiday and all the children joined in the running, jumping, tug-of-war, etc. activities. I considered myself a fast runner and looked forward to the race in my age group. It was a big letdown when I failed to make the top three. Here is a picture showing me (on the left) with two of my friends67 on the 1947 Sports Day. I can clearly remember my visit to the Chinese sports ground toilet. It just consisted of an enclosed area of ground where people of both sexes had to squat or stand to perform their business. One had to be very careful to walk in and find the right spot! 67

On the right is Mark Britanisky; he left with his family for New York in 1948.

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The arrangement of lessons at the school followed the normal traditions – a 40-minute lesson was over when a bell was rung and then there was a swap of teachers. I had the following subjects during my time there:              

Hebrew Jewish History English Chinese Botany History History and Geography of the USSR Russian Geography Arithmetic Handicrafts Gymnastics Singing Drawing

In 1941 the Japanese took over all the Concession areas. Larry was on his way to school but found that there was a Japanese soldier located with a bayonet at the border of the French and English Concessions. He was asked where he was going and then told to go home. When Larry told mother that he was not permitted to go into the English Concession she was not at all surprised; obviously all the residents were expecting the takeover. During the Japanese occupation of Tientsin it was compulsory for students to take classes in the Japanese language. Larry recalled an incident during a Japanese class: ‘Our unruly class used to reduce the gentle Japanese language teacher to tears. Help came in the form of a fierce Japanese officer whose method of keeping order was to place a bared samurai sword on the desk without a word. Needless to say this worked.’ Larry remembers the school assembly procedures during the occupation; Japanese soldiers raised the Japanese flag daily and all the students had to stand to attention and sing the Japanese anthem and bow to the direction of the imperial palace. While singing the anthem students used to substitute some rude Russian words that sounded like the Japanese. Luckily, they got away with it, as that sort of behaviour would have drastic consequences. The standard of teaching in the school was quite high; this standard begun at the lowest grades and carried all the way through to graduation. Even though many of the teachers never had teacher training the curriculum was strictly followed and poor performance was not tolerated. The school had a casual, friendly atmosphere; there were never any compulsory uniforms. The classes were small – my school certificates show that there were only between 4 and 13 students in the grades I attended. By the late 1940s the class number diminished significantly due to families moving overseas and especially Israel. The School combined different grades to try to make the system economical. Even so, in my last class in 1950 there were only four students. We used to have two sports houses: Maccabee and Bar Kochba but I cannot remember to which house I belonged.

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Even though it was a Jewish school we had a fair number of other nationalities. I remember that there were Russian and Chinese students. By far the biggest numbers of students were children from Jewish/Russian backgrounds; however, there were a few Sephardi Jews in attendance also. The headmaster of the school during my time there was Mr. Nachtman. At the end of his speeches to us during assembly we used to shout with one voice ‘Onward! Onward! T. J.S.’ Sometimes we sang the Jewish National Anthem and recited festival prayers at the time of the Jewish holidays. My friend Alexandra/Alya (Alice) Shadrin used to come over to do homework at our place. This must have been mother’s arrangement. When we played up and made lots of noise big brother Larry would stop playing the piano and tell us off. At school we used to play the ‘German Game’. This game involved two teams and the idea was to throw a soccer sized ball, and if you managed to get the ball to touch an opponent he was ‘out’. This was played on until there was only one person left. I was good at this game and managed to win a number of times. Below is the last school photo, taken in 1948. Both Larry and I are in the picture. Larry is in the back row, second from the right. Next to him on his left is his good friend Alex Auswaks. Our main teacher at the time was Rose Granevsky68 and she can be seen seated on the extreme right of the second row.

In 2011, by sheer chance, I established contact with Rose Granevsky. Her family moved to Israel in 1949, and subsequently moved to the USA. Her current name is Varda Yoran, and she lives in New York.

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I am in the first seated row with my friends – fourth from the right, after the teacher. Next to me on my right is Mark Britanisky and on my left are Lolly Longo, then David Ginzberg, then David Pitel. I have had contact with Mark, who lives in the USA.

It is worth noting that a sizable proportion of staff in the TJS were not Jewish. Not surprisingly there were a significant number of traditional Russian teachers and Chinese teachers. The TJS was not purpose built as a school; it was a large converted house in the British Concession with an extensive yard. Here is a picture of Larry standing on top of the steps leading to the front entrance – not at all an imposing entry. I am embarrassed to recall a particular incident. One lunchtime we were playing a ‘touch and run’ game. When it was my turn to catch someone, I picked the slowest and weakest boy, a Russian boy called Victor, but instead of just touching him, I pushed him quite hard and he fell over and bruised himself. A teacher who saw the incident came over and told me off. I immediately stopped playing the game. However, the boy I mistreated came over and asked me to keep playing. I can clearly remember this event in the school playground that happened 60 years ago and my feelings at the time – my total admiration for the boy and shame at my earlier behaviour. Another occasion I remember with some embarrassment is my fight with an old Chinese man from a house that adjoined the TJS. I must have been nine or ten years old. For a reason I cannot recall, I had a confrontation and ended up in a wrestle that ended up rolling on the ground with this elderly man. At the time I knew that I should not be fighting this elderly man but I was too proud to give in. The Chinese man’s son, who worked in the school, and who spoke up both against his dad and me stopped the fight. I am still uncomfortable when I think back and see this strange confrontation. 159

I remember that our parents paid Larry’s and mine school fees on a regular basis – probably at the beginning of every term. As the number of students was never high I think that the fees would have had an impact on our family’s budget. Above is a page from the 1944 financial ledger of the school. Larry’s fees are shown two-thirds down the page.

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Once when I was about 9 years old, during a school break, a number of my schoolmates told me that one of the girls would drop her pants and show all! We all crowded around this girl for the show. However, at the last moment she changed her mind and told the large audience that she would not drop her pants but would just pull her pants together tightly and show her bum. The audience was not impressed. For some reason I can clearly see this event so it must have had an impact on me. It was very common for me to be called ‘Bobka’. Adding a ‘ka’ to the first name was the easy way to familiarise our schoolmates. Some names like Larry or Harry did not lend themselves to such a practice, so other ways had to be found to give those nicknames. Apparently, we had a school uniform (blue shirts) but I cannot recall wearing it. School began at 8.25 am and seven short lessons of 35 minutes each followed. There were 5 minute intervals between classes then followed a break and an assembly in the yard. From the assembly it was back to classes. School finished at 1.15 pm. Note that there was no dedicated lunch break. There were three terms. The summer vacation was two months. Certificates were presented to all students at the end of the year at a special ceremony. School hours were extended for the higher grades. Larry remembers coming home for lunch and then going back to school to resume classes. One aspect of school life that upset Larry was the emphasis on rote learning in subjects such as Russian History and Russian Geography. Larry was always given the money for rickshaw fares to and from school. However, he often walked to school and thus was able to spend the money on Chinese street food. Larry remembers that a school uniform was in place for a short time – nothing more than a jacket and school-cap with a TJS inscription. Larry remembers that his class once held a strike. The students were protesting against a teacher who was intensely disliked. He was Mr. Greenfield and he taught Hebrew. Larry led the strike. The whole class went to Victoria Park for the duration of the Hebrew lesson. Afterwards, the class had to explain to the Headmaster the reasons for walking out; the protest was about the unfair discipline measures imposed by that teacher. I must have had a mischievous streak in me while at school. Adjoining our schoolyard, over a low wall, was what looked like a small brickworks factory. One of the workers, a solidly built man, used to squat and relieve himself in a different spot every day. It was generally when we had a break from classes. When we looked over the wall, we saw many places with small mounds of excreta. I suggested to a friend that we should keep an eye open for the time when he was relieving himself near the wall adjoining our school. My plan was to lean over the wall, and give a push down on the shoulders of this man when he was least expecting it! That is exactly what we did, but whether our plan succeeded, we never found out, as we quickly bolted away from the scene of the crime. I would never exhibit this type of behaviour out of school. I was quite confident in an environment which I understood, and there is no doubt that the school did provide me with a sense of security. If I was placed in an unfamiliar situation I would automatically revert to my basically introverted and shy nature. Many of my childhood characteristics have remained with me in my adult life. Looking back on my childhood in Tientsin, I can see that I was indeed fortunate. I cannot remember being bullied in school or being subjected to unpleasant experiences.

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During my time at the TJS, Mr. Nachtman was headmaster and when he left in 1948 Mr. Veinshtein took over. Their signatures can be seen on my certificates. While attending the TJS considerable importance was placed on the study of Russian literature. From an early age students were encouraged to read stories and poems of writers like Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov. We took all of this in our stride and thus developed a love of reading. The books shown below were bought in Tientsin.

In December 1949 Larry passed the Cambridge Junior Examination. This was taken via St. Louis College in Tientsin. In 1950 Larry sat for and passed the School Certificate issued by the TJS as shown on the next page. Note that seven people69 signed his Certificate Headmaster L.V.Veinstein Chairman J. Shluger Teachers Council Z. Yourieff, Courcelles-Bartaschoff ? (Two unknown signatures) A.Bartascheff He was due to sit for the Local Cambridge school certificate in December 1950 when he suddenly fell sick with typhus and was unable to attend. The Hon. Secretary of the Cambridge Local Examination, Bro. Charles from St. Louis College, made a statement that he was ‘certain that if he had been able to take his examinations last December he would have obtained good results.’

It is interesting to note that three of the teachers who signed this Certificate were originally involved in running a private boarding school - called Bartaschoff’s Boarding School. They were Professor A. Bartaschoff, his wife C. Bartaschoff and L. Veinstein. When the boarding school was shut down these staff transferred over to the TJS.

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Attending a Russian School After the Jewish School closed in the middle of 1950, I briefly joined the Tientsin Russian Gymnasium. Many other students from the Jewish school also switched over; this included Bobby Trachtengertz, and Alexandra (Alya) Shadrin. We dropped a grade to join the Russian School. This was a school modelled on Russian principles: boys wore black uniforms with silver buttons on the jacket, and wide brown leather belts with a large silver buckle. All were part of the uniform that all students had to have. All students had to stand when the teachers arrived in class. Teaching was in Russian. Class sizes were considerably larger than in the Jewish school. We learnt different things in that school and sang different rousing songs especially when the whole school marched in some parade to commemorate a Soviet event. Once we were in line, holding our exercise books and being marched to our next class. The boy in front of me was fooling around and he decided to give me a thump on my head with the books he was holding; with his back to me he swung his hands over his head. Unfortunately, he was also holding his pen and the nib pierced my hand. It could have been much worse if I had not lifted my hand to protect my head as it could easily have pierced my eye. I had an ink spot in my hand for the next 30 years! There were a few incidents of Russian students calling Jewish students ‘zhids’ – a particularly strong anti-Semitic term. After parents complained the school counselled those Russian students and the practice ceased during the rest of my time there. I must admit that the atmosphere in the Russian school was not as relaxed and friendly as in the TJS, however, I quickly adapted myself to the new environment. As the family was leaving for Australia in the beginning of 1951, I only attended the Russian school for less than half a year.

Note: A Brief Account of the Tientsin Jewish School, by Steve Upton, is included in Appendix F with his permission and with all rights otherwise fully reserved by him. It provides interesting background information on the formation, structure, participation and personalities who influenced the working of the School.

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27. The Changeover to Communism No civilians in Tientsin could possibly have grasped the gigantic scale of the military maelstrom surrounding them. The final push for Peiping and Tientsin began early in December 1948. Two of China’s most capable generals were in charge – General Lin Piao had control of the North China People’s Liberation Army and Fu Tso-yi was Commander-in-Chief of the Kuomintang’s North China Army. Fu Tso-yi was outsmarted and overwhelmed. When the People’s Liberation 8th Army entered Tientsin in mid-January 1949 my parents decided that it was time to hide in our cellar. Besides the four of us many local Chinese people who did not have access to a cellar also came to stay the night with us. This included our friendly carpenter tradesman. We heard a considerable number of explosions but it was not in our immediate vicinity. We were very lucky to escape any bombing and other dangers that existed in other parts of China during that period. The only bit of excitement we had was when a Nationalist Kuomintang soldier entered our cellar holding his handgun. However, all he wanted to do was to abandon his uniform and get dressed in civilian clothes. He chucked his revolver on top of the coal, changed to ‘civvies’ and made his getaway. By morning it was all over – the PLA had taken over Tientsin. The next day after the takeover, David, Ida and Mara Sitsky walked all the way from their apartment in the British Concession to visit us. They said that they saw a huge amount of abandoned military equipment and bullets in the streets. However, the PLA personnel they saw were most friendly. My parents were afraid that the Communists would place Chinese people in our house – an understandable fear as we were five people living in a house that could accommodate four time that number. However, that fear proved groundless. All foreigners in Tientsin saw how disciplined the PLA was compared to the Kuomintang forces. We saw no retaliation or looting. They quickly won over the majority of the population. The immediate repercussion on our lives was minimal. Besides the obvious changes in currency and postage stamps, life went on in the normal manner. As time went on, some Chinese became more demonstrative in their dislike for foreigners. One day when my mother and I were walking along Victoria Road to do some shopping, a young man shouted abuse at us and told us to leave China. He then threw a piece of ice at us; of course, this was unpleasant but not dangerous. As the weeks passed, public knowledge of the communist’s battle plans revealed impressive foresight. The PLA had deliberately avoided damaging key installations. Public services in Tientsin, China’s second largest industrial centre, resumed in a surprisingly short time. It was the communists who finally changed the foreign street names in the Concessions. It was during 1949 that our street became Harbin Road. One change that did occur was that the Russian communists became much stronger. These were Stalinist times and therefore the worship of Stalin became mandatory. I remember the endless speeches made by representatives from workers, students, business, etc. At the conclusion of every speech one had to stand and applaud the wisdom and leadership of that tyrant. Noncompliance with this ritual led to unpleasantness and even worse, so people went along with this madness. Larry remembers the presence of Russian Soviet personnel in Tientsin during the early days of the communists in China. 165

Larry also remembers the visible presence of armed troops from USSR in the streets of Tientsin. One swindle they practised was to ask male westerners the time; as soon as a watch was exposed the soldiers immediately forced people to hand it over. Larry was once talking to a Russian soldier who boasted about the numbers of watches he acquired in this manner. He rolled up his sleeves to show off multiple wristwatches. It did not take long for the citizens to stop putting on wristwatches while the Russians were in the town. One other unpleasant feature of the Russian presence was their practice of following people in the street. Once our family were on their way to the Club Kunst and they noticed a man following them not far behind. Our family was of not much interest to the Russians. However, some known political activists suddenly disappeared and were not heard off again. Luckily, we were spared the extended terror of Stalinist Russia. Also the friendship of the two communist countries had its ups and downs but after a while the Chinese communists took full control and the Russians were sent back home.

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28. Leaving China In 1949, soon after the Communist regime was established, it was made clear that all nonChinese had to leave. My parents started to plan our departure. In 1949 they got approval for us to migrate to Israel. The visa below is approval for our mother, Larry and me. Fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s application must have been done separately. The process was done via the Shanghai representative of the State of Israel. My parents ruled that option out; they felt that it would be too hard for them to cope in learning a new language and finding work.

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It must be said that China was a temporary refuge for the foreign population but at the same time it was a home where family and communal structures were established on a long-term basis. Leaving China was not foreseen or planned by most of the Russian Jews. Again the victory of communism, which had caused many of them to flee Russia, yet again made it impossible for them to continue their lives in China. My parents always intended us to go to New York and join up with our grandparents, Grisha and Sam. They started making applications in 1949 but after a while it became apparent that the American quota system would stop us. Because Larry and I were born in China, we were part of the very small ‘Chinese’ quota of entry to the USA, therefore that avenue was now closed to us.

Here is one of the last formal pictures taken in China, probably for a visa application. Note the huge crop of hair on Larry and the fashionable hairdo on my mother.

The alternative was not good. It would have been easy for us to go to the USSR and this was encouraged by the local Russian communist authorities. My parents were fully aware of the consequences of such a move and were determined to find an alternative. Many of our friends were going to Israel; after the establishment of the Jewish State this became a good alternative. David Sitsky, my father’s brother went to Israel soon after the doors were open. However, my parents were fearful of having to settle in a new country with all the potential problems; they also did not want to have to start studying a new language. Mother’s cousin, Ronya Aisenberg, came to the rescue. Ronya was the daughter of Miriam Rosenzweig and Grisha Ponevejsky. The Aisenbergs settled in Sydney in the late 1930s. When they agreed to sponsor us my parents went to the British embassy, which looked after Australian interests, to start the application process.

This picture was taken in our front yard in the winter of 1935 and shows Sarah/Larry/Abie Sitsky, Ronya Aisenberg (nee Ponevejsky) , Sofa Toper, Fira Ponevejsky (Ronya’s sister-in-law), Grisha Toper and Acea Aisenberg.

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As mentioned earlier, the Toper, Rosenzweig and Ponevejsky families had a very long association going back to Irkutsk in the late 1800s. We were required to have valid passports, so after applications were made to the Russian embassy, we soon became citizens of USSR70. To get things moving my father had to bribe a number of people; this included staff at the Soviet Embassy, who had to give their permission for our move; we required an official exit visa. All the family had to be formally interviewed by the Embassy staff, even Larry and me; the authorities wanted to make sure that our parents were not forcing us to go to Australia rather than the Soviet Union. For a long time father had no luck in finding someone who would take over the lease to our house. A solution to this problem was very close by. The Yihua Trading Firm owned the adjoining house and the manager was Zhang Yongli. Zhang handled all the required paperwork and the transfer was made, including the sale of most of the furniture.71 Another hurdle was the health issue. Both our parents were infected with the TB virus, not unusual in China. Father passed the test but mother did not. Apparently her condition was severe. There was a period of further testing and evaluation and waiting and finally the British embassy gave permission to proceed. We were on our way. Suddenly, our plans ground to a halt; Larry became sick with typhoid and had to be admitted to the local Russian hospital. This meant that our departure had to be postponed and our parents had to re-book our trip. Larry now suspects that he must have caught the disease by eating some Chinese street food. Larry’s sickness also caused problems in the transfer of our lease. Money had been exchanged with the new tenants and they had legal rights to take over the whole property. In the end, a settlement was made and we all had to share one room until our departure. All our beds and goods were placed in my bedroom and adjoining storeroom for several weeks. Larry used to tell me that I was lucky going to Australia, as I would be joining a British school system that encouraged sporting activities. Of course he was basing his ideas on reading the English Boys’ Annuals which were popular in Tientsin. Many weeks before our scheduled departure father arranged for some furniture to be transported to Sydney; this included the Philco radio, the RCA Victrola record player, a carved wooden chest made from camphor wood and a large wooden chest, which was decorated by coloured metal banding. Both these chests are still held by the family. Larry and Magda have the camphor chest in their Canberra home and the large chest is in their holiday house at Moruya. Larry and I were determined to bring some of our prized possessions to Australia; when our parents were distracted by other activities, we used to sneak into the room where the chests were sitting and hide our things among the other items. Unfortunately, most of the time, we did not succeed and some important items like a collection of badges, or books called Boys’ Annual were left behind. Father terminated his work at the Yee Tsoong Tobacco Company, branch of the British American Tobacco company, in December 1950. They gave him a good reference to bring to Australia:

We all had to hand in these Soviet passports to the Australian Immigration Department during the 1950’s when we applied for Australian citizenship. I contacted the Australian Archives in 2014, with the intention of photo-copying our old Soviet passports. However, I was advised that all these passports were destroyed. 71 All this information has been detailed in Anna Song’s second book called The Heavenly Ford.

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My parents bought three Tientsin carpets to take to Australia. One was for the Aisenberg family to thank them for their sponsorship; the other two were for our own use.72 We left Tientsin early in January 1951. I remember very clearly our last rickshaw ride. There was a rickshaw assembly point on the corner of Harbin Road and Victoria Street. Father ordered six rickshaws so that there would be room for all of us plus our luggage. All four of us had luggage in our rickshaw and two rickshaws held the balance of the luggage. A number of large wooden boxes were previously shipped to Australia; these contained some small items of furniture, clothes, record collection, books, etc. The carpenter we normally employed did a very good job in designing these crates. We left in convoy and a loud friendly cheer went up from all the other rickshaw drivers parked on the corner. It was a memorable rickshaw trip along the streets of Tientsin. In the dock was the cargo ship that would take us to Hong Kong.

The carpet for the Aisenbergs is still there; it has been in the same location in Myuna Road, Dover Heights since 1951! The other carpets were used by mother and father in 6/10 Kenneth Street, Tamarama from 1951 till my mother died in 1990. Unfortunately, the carpets were too large to fit into the rooms in our Paddington house. They are presently located at our friends Graeme and Colleen Russellâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s place in Palmgrove Road, Avalon Beach.

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There were a large number of people saying farewell to the people leaving. I was in a high state of excitement. I remember saying good-bye to some of my friends before going through customs; then rushing back after customs to say good-bye again. Father had a minor problem with the Chinese customs: when they asked for some luggage items to be opened, he could not locate the right keys, to the annoyance of the military officials. Father was told that if he could not open the next case they would break the lock. Luckily, the next case was opened and a thorough search was conducted. The customs people then permitted our entire luggage to be loaded on board. We got tickets on a cargo ship that had very limited passenger accommodation. It was early January 1951 and it was very cold in Northern China. The ice was so thick on the Hai Ho River that there were doubts that the journey would take place. An icebreaker had to be employed in front of the ship, so initially it was a very slow journey. When the ship got to Taku (now Tanggu) the Chinese military personnel left as the route to Hong-Kong was in international waters. I have forgotten the name of the vessel we travelled on but it was a general cargo/passenger ship. There were a mixed lot of passengers – mainly Russians and Jews but also other nationals getting away from China. My parents had one two-berth cabin allocated, so it was decided that Larry and I should sleep in the communal area where many of the passengers had to bunk down. However most nights I slept on the floor of my parents cabin, tucked in between the two beds. The trip to Hong Kong took eight days. Larry remembers an interesting conversation he had with a traveller on board about the famous Russian romantic singer, Vertinsky. The man knew this Russian musician, so they had a good discussion about Vertinsky’s compositions. Overall, the journey to Hong-Kong was uneventful and very pleasant. Larry and I enjoyed walking the decks of the ship and inspecting the lifeboats, cargo facilities and other technical facilities such as the radio room. There were big restrictions on the movement of money out of China. The communist authorities only permitted each family to take out $100 US. Father made a deal with an employee of Jardine Matheson in Tientsin. Father gave our money to this man and for a certain fee he would transfer the cash to a bank in Hong-Kong. It was a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ and it made mother very nervous; we would be in a dire situation if this transfer failed to materialise. We needed this money in order to purchase our tickets to Australia. It all worked out well in the end; when father went to the nominated bank with his ID, our funds were duly issued. We had several weeks extra time in Hong-Kong because Larry’s illness wrecked the travel schedule. Finally, we managed to obtain seats on a Qantas flight to Australia. In those days it was known as Qantas Empire Airways. Initially our parents planned for us to travel by ship to Australia but there were no seats available for a long time because of the large movement of refugees out of China. Even though airfares were very expensive it would have been even more expensive to stay for a lengthy period in our hotel. Our hotel was located in Kowloon. During these few weeks we did the normal tourist things. Once we got lost and ended up doing a long walk in a Chinese part of the city; when we got back to the Hotel, father found that a pickpocket had stolen his prized Parker pen.

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We travelled in a Douglas DC-4 (Aircraft VH-EBN) all the way from Hong Kong to Sydney. The National Archives of Australia was able to find the passenger list for this flight (No. EM209/012) and it can be seen in Appendix I. We boarded the flight in Hong-Kong on 3 February and disembarked in Sydney on 5 February, 1951. The photo below shows a Qantas DC-4, although with a different identification number. This was the first time that any of us would have an air flight, so all the family was excited by this prospect. Larry and I were very impressed by the four powerful propeller engines of this American built aircraft. It was my childhood dream to fly in a large aircraft and I could hardly believe that I achieved that goal. I loved every aspect of that flight from Hong Kong; the excitement of getting on and off the aircraft, the overnight stops on the way to Sydney and the delicious food that was served by the Qantas cabin crew. I had a mix of emotions about the inevitable changes coming to my life. I was eleven years old and was about to make my biggest life transition. I knew that our family had no choice but to leave China, but it was inevitable that I had feelings of anxiety about the unknown life ahead. I was wondering whether I would be able to make new friends. I was a very shy child and not at all confident whether I would be able to integrate into a different culture. However, I knew that because I could speak English my ability to integrate in a new country would be much easier. I also realised that moving to Australia would open up a whole new world of opportunity. Our first overnight stop was in Labuan (North Borneo). Larry and I did some exploration of the local jungle, just a short walk from our hotel. We were given a tour of a local war cemetery not far from our hotel. Larry remembers that the bus driver was an Australian. Then it was on to Darwin and another overnight stop. We arrived on Australian soil on 4 February 1951. We were surprised by the high humidity and heat. In Darwin Airport we bumped into Joe Trigubov, older brother of Harry Trigubov, whom we knew from Tientsin. It was quite a coincidence. Larry remembers being violently sick on the airflight; not a good introduction to aviation. I remember there was a huge tropical storm in Darwin the night we left for Sydney. Father told us that the Qantas pilots knew what they were doing. He was right; we touched down in Sydneyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Mascot Airport on the morning of 5 February 1951. The new phase of our life had commenced! 172

Appendix A

Sitsky-Toper Genealogical Chart (1820-1940) Isaac /Alexey Sitsky o 1825? Minsk or Vilnius regions of The Pale? + 1890?

Boris Alexeyavich Sitsky (Chaim-ber Isaacov) B. 1873? Penzenskaya Region or Tcheliabinsk? D. Tientsin 3.06.1938

Abie Sitsky B. Harbin 1.10.1904 D. Sydney 30.1.1986

M. Russia/Harbin? ~1900

Abraham Yudov Yuliya/Yudash Abramovna Yudova B. Samara? (Kuybyshev) 1873-80? D. Tientsin 6.03.1940

Larry Sitsky B. Tientsin 10.09.1934 M. Tientsin 23.09.1932

(Lejzor) Eliezer or Lazar Topf o Wislica 1845 District of Pinczov Poland + Irkutsk 1912 oo 25 Mar 1864 Raizel (Rosa) Klainer (Klajner) o Wislica 1845 + Irkutsk 1916

Alter /Yakov Rosenzweig (Rozencwajg) o Wislica + 1924 Irkutsk oo 1860 Wislica Zenia (Peefa or Pifela) Bukiet o Wislica + Irkutsk ~ 1914/15

Bob Sitsky B. Tientsin 22.09.1939

Pinkus/Pavel Laezerov Toper o Ust Kut 20 Dec 1880 + New York 8 Oct 1960

Sarah Toper B. Irkutsk 26.11.1909 D. Sydney 11.07.1990

oo Irkutsk 1899

Zisia (Sofa) Yankelevna Rosenzweig o Irkutsk 15 Aug 1881 + New York 1 Jan 1969

Synagogue records state that Sarah was born in 1906

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Simplified Genealogical Tree for Larry and Bob Sitsky Boris Sitsky B. Chelyabinsk 1873? D. Tientsin 1938 M. Harbin ~ 1900 Yulia Udova B. Samara 1873? D. Tientsin 1940

Pavel Toper B. Ust Kut 1880 D. New York 1960 M. Irkutsk 1899 Sofa Rosenzweig B. Irkutsk 1881 D. New York 1969

Abie Sitsky B. Harbin 1904 D. Sydney 1986 M. Tientsin 1932 Sarah Toper B. Irkutsk 1906/1909 D. Sydney 1990

Larry Sitsky B. Tientsin 1934 M. Sydney 1961 Magda Wlczek B. Czech 1938

Petra Sitsky B. Canberra 1968 Partner Mark Smith B. England 1963

Xavier Sitsky B. Sydney 2000

Bob Sitsky B. Tientsin 1939 M. Sydney 1971 Lynn Patterson B. Hamilton 1939

David Sitsky B. Canberra 1972 M. Canberra 2000 Miriam Blackburn B. Canberra 1971

Natasha Sitsky B. Sydney 2007

Michael Sitsky B. Sydney 1972 M. Sydney 2011 Zoe Methven B. England 1978

Anna Sitsky B. Sydney 1974 M. Sydney 2004 Chris May B. Sydney 1976

Charlotte Sitsky B. Sydney 2014

Blake May & Max May B. Sydney 2008

Sarina Sitsky B. Melbourne 2003

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Appendix B

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Appendix C

Migration History of Family Members The birth/death details and migration history below covers the family and relatives who have been mentioned in my account. The tables clearly show that nearly every Toper and Sitsky family member had to move from their birthplace to at least one other country. Members of the extended family were generally involved in moving to two other countries before settling down. My Mother’s Side of the Family: Name

First Migration

Subsequent Migration/s

Pavel Toper (my grandfather) B. 1880 D. 1960 Sofa Toper (my grandmother) B. 1881 D. 1969 Abrasha Toper (my uncle) B. 1900 D. 1967 Alla Toper (Uncle Abrasha’s daughter) B. 1920? D. ? Grisha Toper (my uncle) B. 1903 D. 1976 Sophie Toper (my aunt) B. 1901 D. 1965 Sam Toper (my uncle) B. 1912 D. 1995 Vera Toper (my aunt) B. 1924 D. 2014 Sarah (Toper) Sitsky (my mother) B. 1909 D. 1990 Mosia Toper (my grandfather’s brother) B. 1888 D. 1969 Lily Toper (Mosia Toper’s daughter) B. 1914 D. 1966

Irkutsk to Harbin/Tientsin 1914 Irkutsk to Harbin/Tientsin 1920 Stayed in Russia

New York 1947

Irkutsk to Harbin/Tientsin 1919

New York in mid 1930’s Tokyo

Irkutsk to Harbin/Tientsin 1920 Vilna to Poland 1943/France 1945 Irkutsk to Harbin/Tientsin 1920 Irkutsk to Harbin/Tientsin

New York in mid 1930’s New York 1946

Irkutsk to Harbin/Tientsin

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New York 1947

Sydney 1951 New York late 1930’s New York late 1930’s

My Father’s Side of the Family:

Name

First Migration

Subsequent Migration/s

Boris Sitsky (my grandfather) B. 1873 D. 1938 Yulia Sitsky (my grandmother) B. 1873 D. 1940 Abie Sitsky (my father) B. 1904 D. 1986 David Sitsky (my uncle) B. 1907 D. 1985 Ida Sitsky (my aunt) B. ? D. 1987 Mara Sitsky (my cousin) B. 1932 D. 1978 Joe Sitsky (my uncle) B. 1910 D. 1991 Lara Sitsky (my aunt) B. 1917 D. 2014 Lily Sitsky (my cousin) B. 1939 Bluma Sitsky (my grandfather’s sister) B. 1879 D.1937 Elka Sitsky (my grandfather’s sister) B. 1883 D. 1929 Liza Yudova (my grandmother’s sister) Anna Yudova (my grandfather’s sister) D. 1948 Larry Sitsky B. 1934 Bob Sitsky B.1939

Tchelyabinsk to Harbin 1900 Samara (Kuybyshev) to Harbin 1900 Harbin to Tientsin 1917

Harbin to Tientsin 1917 Harbin to Tientsin 1917 Sydney 1951

Harbin to Tientsin 1917

Haifa 1950

Odessa to Harbin/Tientsin

Haifa 1950

Tientsin to Haifa 1950 Harbin to Tientsin 1917

Russia to Harbin?

Bangkok 1947, Sao Paulo then USA Bangkok 1947, Sao Paulo, then USA Sao Paulo, Brazil then USA Tientsin

Russia to Harbin?

Tientsin

Harbin to Tientsin Tientsin to Bangkok 1947

Russia to Harbin? Russia to Harbin? Tientsin to Sydney 1951 Tientsin to Sydney 1951

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Bangkok

Other Family Members:

Name

First Migration

Subsequent Migration/s

Ronia (Ponevejsky) Aisenberg (mother’s cousin) B. 1895 D. 1981 Acea Aisenberg (Ronia Aisenberg’s daughter) B. 1924 Joe Aisenberg (Ronia Aisenberg’s son) B. 1921 D. 1996 Miriam (Rosenzweig) Ponevejsky (grandmother’s sister) B.1861 D.1941 Grisha Ponevejsky (husband of Miriam Ponevejsky) B. ? D. 1921 Fira Ponevejsky (married to Lyova Ponevejsky, Ronia’s brother) B. 1900 D. 1978 Dina Ponevejsky (daughter of Fira) B. 1920 D. 1993 Tolya Ponevejsky (nephew of my grandparents) B. 1900 D. 1969 Tamara Ponevejsky (Tolya Ponevejsky’s daughter) B. 1935 Lova Preisman (my grandfather’s nephew) B. 1903 D. 1988 Samuel Preisman (Sister-in-law to my grandparents) B. 1880 D. 1941 Sonia (Toper) Preisman (grandfather’s sister) B. 1885 D. 1947 Grisha Rosenzweig (my grandmother’s brother) B. 1866 D. 1943 Annushka Rosenzweig (Grisha Rosenzweig’s second wife) Zina Verny (Rosenzweig) (mother’s cousin) B. 1892 D. 1975

Irkutsk to Manzhouli Manzhouli to Tientsin 1937

Tientsin 1937, Sydney 1938 Sydney 1938

Manzhouli to Tientsin 1937

Sydney 1938

Wislica to Irkutsk

Harbin

Irkutsk to Harbin

USA

Irkutsk to Harbin/Tientsin

USA

Irkutsk to Harbin/Japan

USA

Japan to Philippines

USA

Irkutsk to Harbin/Tientsin/ Mukden 1939/Shanghai Irkutsk to Harbin

San Francisco 1950 New York

Irkutsk to Harbin

Wislica to Irkutsk

Harbin

Irkutsk?

Harbin

Irkutsk to Europe

London to Sydney

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Appendix D

Some Background Notes on Tientsin/Tianjin Few people realize that Tientsin (now Tianjin) is one of the world’s largest cities. In our time there, it had a population of over one million, now its population is well over ten million. An industrial and commercial centre, its handmade silk and wool carpets are renowned. Dagang oilfield lies nearby. Tianjin is now only one of four municipalities administered directly from Beijing; it includes the city of Tianjin and the port of Tanggu. (City and special municipality in Hebei Province, North China; municipality area 4,000 sq. km/1,544 sq. mi.) It is the sixth largest city of the People’s Republic of China in terms of urban population. I have marked on a current map the towns referred to in my recollections. Directly 50km east of Tianjin is the city of Tanggu (used to be Taku) – the port city of Tianjin; northeast of Tianjin is Tangshan – the place where I was born; and further northeast is Beidaihe (used to be Peitaiho) the resort town on the coast. (Harbin is located about 1000 km northeast of Tianjin)

Here is an old map of Tientsin showing the location of the foreign Concessions. I have marked the location of our house at 86 Rue Dillon.

Tientsin had a short Bund (on the Hai He) that ran along the foreign Concessions. It provided a nice walk in the city. There was also a very pleasant walk along the canal, which ran as a branch line from the main canal.

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The foreign schools were so good in the 1930s and 1940s that local Chinese used to send their children to them. A Korean merchant sent his son to study at the Tientsin Jewish School. There was a German school up to the end of WWII, There was also an English school, two Catholic schools (the Marist St. Louis College for boys and St. Josephâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s School for girls â&#x20AC;&#x201C; my parents attended these schools), and a Russian school. The English population ran their own school, but the lines between the others were loosely drawn. In the year of my birth (1939) there was a major flood in Tientsin. There were volunteer patrols and food distribution from all the different nationalities. Some came in motor boats, others rowed. They brought much needed food and other supplies as well as news of friends and relatives. During our trip to China in 2006, I took a picture at the old British Club, showing the water level at the 1939 floods. The sign was well over my head.

It is interesting to note that Tientsin had literary connections for a long time. The Victorian writer, G. A. Henty who used to write adventure books for boys, used Tientsin as his setting for the arrival of allied troops in Tientsin and their march to Peking. Pearl Buck is supposed to have been born, and partly raised in Tientsin. She wrote a fond memoir about it. The novelist Mervyn Peake comes from a family of medical missionaries in Tientsin. Israel Cohen travelled to China to propagate the Balfour declaration and he refers to his time in Tientsin. Probably the most well-known book is the one written by Brian Power, The Ford of Heaven, it is an affectionate memoir of life in Tientsin before WWII.

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Appendix E

The Extended Family in the 21st Century The movement of the extended families out of China to various parts of the world has inevitably meant that the strong links that existed in China could not be sustained. The passing of my parents has further affected these links. However, a number of links have remained, as I will attempt to show below. Rosenzweig Family: Grisha Rosenzweig was the older brother of my grandmother Sofa. His daughter Zina was a close friend of our family until her passing in 1975. The family maintained contact with her son Anatoly and wife Betty. In times that are more recent, I have established contact with their daughters Mary and Heather. Both have children, and Mary has a grandchild. We have seen them a number of times. Grisha Rosenzweig had a son, Misha, slightly younger than Zina. By pure chance in 2008, I discovered that Misha’s grandson was living in Tasmania. Since then we have had good contact with Yuri and Olga Rosenzweig. We see them when we travel to Tasmania and when they come to Sydney. They have three children, Eugene, Anton and Nina. Anton and Nina have their own children. Olga has written a book called Let Me Out Of Russia,73 which describes their family struggles in order to emigrate to the west. Ponevejsky Family: As mentioned earlier, Miriam Rosenzweig (my grandmother’s older sister) married Grisha Ponevejsky. One of their daughters was Ronya, who married Israel Aisenberg. It was Ronya and Israel who sponsored our family in our move from China to Australia. My parents had regular and close contact with them during their lives. They had two children – Joe and Acea. Joe married Golda Marks, and Acea married Henry Herman. They each had two children – Joe and Golda had Michael and Julie, while Acea and Henry had Avigail and Marc. We have maintained regular and close contact with Acea and her children. The youngest daughter of Miriam Rosenzweig and Grisha Ponevejsky was Esther – she married Mosia Moiseef. Our family in Sydney met up with the Moiseef’s in the early 1970s. The Moiseef’s daughter, Simonne, married George Sidline. Their son John and I had email contact on many occasions on family genealogical details. Preisman Family: As mentioned earlier my grandfather’s sister Sonia Toper married Samuel Preisman. Their second child was Lova Preisman. He was working in the Toper fur and skin business for many years. He married Sophie Raisin and they had two sons, Larry and Michael. Larry married Ellen and they had two children, David and Wendy. We have only established recent contact with Larry in 2007; he is now married to Diane Levine. David and Wendy have their own children.

Regal Publications, Launceston, Tasmania. ISBN 1 876261 06 4

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Preisman/Ponevejsky Family: This was a union between Gita Preisman and Tolia Ponevejsky. (Gita was the daughter of Sonia Toper and Samuel Preisman; Tolia was the son of Miriam Rosenzweig (my grandmotherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s older sister) and Grisha Ponevejsky. Gita and Tolia had two daughters Tamara and Irene. Tamara married Dorik Rozanski and they have three children, Helen, Mark and Rebecca. Irene married Ben Borevitz and they have two children, Craig (Chaim) and Bradley. Chaim married Tzameret Dagan and they have many children. We have met the Dorik and Tamara Rozanski family on a number of occasions, here in Australia in 2008 and in the USA in 2007. We have met up with Mark and Rebecca Rozanski both in Australia and the USA. Helen Rozanski married Howard Savin and they have two children, Joshua and Max. We have seen them a number of times in Sydney and in the USA. We have also met Irene Borowitz during her visit to Sydney in 2008. Ponevejsky/Moiseeff Family: This was a union between Esther Ponevejsky and Moisia Moiseeff. They had a son, Greg Moiseeff, and a daughter, Simonne Moiseeff. I had internet contact with Greg. I also have had email contact with John Sideline, son of Simonne. Sitsky Family: As mentioned earlier, my uncle, David Sitsky and his wife Ida and son Mara migrated from China to Israel in 1950. Mara changed his surname from Sitsky to Eshel soon after arriving in Israel. He died suddenly in 1978. He married Azara Neer in 1959 and they had two daughters Michal and Nirit. I had a brief email contact with them in 2003. Both Michal and Nirit did not have any children. My Uncle Joe, his wife Lara and daughter Lily moved to Bangkok, Thailand in 1947 and lived a very pleasant life there. When they moved to Sao Paulo, Brazil, Lily met and married JeanJacques, a Belgian young man from Brussels; his parents owned a lovely leather goods shop and factory on a fashionable street. Even though they loved the Brazilian way of life and lived there for ten years, they always had the urge to try life in the USA. Their next move was to Flint, Michigan, where both Lily and Jacques started working at General Motors and worked there until they took early retirement. Joe got sick with cancer and passed away in 1991. The family then moved to Florida in 1993. They now enjoy life in Lake Worth with a wide circle of friends and an active life style. I have regular contact with my cousin Lily and her husband Jacques. We last visited them in Florida in 2007. They have also visited us in Australia, together with Lara, Lilyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mother. Lara Sitsky died in 2014.

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Toper Family: We have maintained a strong contact with the Toper family in the USA. Vera Toper lived in the ‘Toper’ apartment on 91st Street in NY City until 2012 when she moved to an aged care facility. She had one son George, who married Pamela Jacobson. They live in Connecticut. We stayed with them all when we were in the USA in 2007. Vera was very helpful in my compilation of this story, particularly with regard to the Toper family in Russia and China. She died in 2014. George is a lawyer, mainly working in the conveyancing sector. He had an office in the Twin Towers and had a very narrow escape when the terrorists blew up those buildings. On that day in 9/11, he was running late for work, and that saved his life. My grandfather’s younger brother was Mosia. He married Marusia and they had one daughter, Lily. I have already mentioned that Lily was mother’s friend. Lily married John Obler and they had one son, Arnold, who married Geraldine Weil. When we were in New York in 2007, we met Arnold and his wife Geraldine. In my account, I said that most of the Toper family changed their name from Topf to Toper, most likely in the late 1800’s. However, my grandfather’s older brother, Joseph retained the Topf surname. There was no contact with this branch of the Toper family for very many years. However, in recent times Sophie Topf (who is a genealogist) discovered that family connection. Sophie married Leslie Caplan, and they had three children, Gideon, Jonathan and Benjamin. Larry and I have met up with Sophie on a number of occasions. In my account of the Toper family, I mentioned that Abrasha Toper was the one uncle I never met. He and his wife Nina had one daughter, Alla. Yuri Rosenzweig told me that when he lived in Moscow in the 1960s and 1970s he met Alla Toper. Apparently, she married a man with the surname Berin, and their daughter moved to Israel during the mass migration period of Jews out of Soviet Russia. Unfortunately, no contact has been established.

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Appendix F A BRIEF ACCOUNT OF THE TIENTSIN JEWISH SCHOOL by Steve Upton74 The Tientsin Jewish School (TJS) became one of the major schools for foreign children in Tianjin in the second quarter of the 20th century. The man who had the idea of creating TJS was Mr. Leo Gershevich, who had become deeply concerned when he saw some children from impoverished Russian Jewish families playing in the streets of Tianjin instead of attending school. Leo Gershevich and three other prominent Jewish residents of Tianjin (Mr. B. W. Zasnikov, Mr. G.I. Shick, and Mr. G.V. Rapoport) were the founders of TJS. Girls and boys attended classes together at TJS. It never was a boarding school. When TJS first opened, in September 1925, it had 27 students and 4 teachers, and only had three classes (grades or forms). In its first few years, TJS was only for Jewish students whose families could not afford the fees charged by other foreign schools in Tianjin. By the early 1930s, TJS was open to all Jewish students, and was open to students of all religions and nationalities. Complete or partial tuition subsidies were available for any student, regardless of religion or nationality, whose family could not afford to pay the full tuition fees. Tuition fees provided only a small part of TJS revenues. Most of the revenues came from people who paid annual fees to support TJS, and from such donors as the Jewish Benevolent Society, the Jewish Club “Kunst” and the Tientsin Hebrew Association. Other important sources of revenues were annual “Grand Ball” dances and annual performances of Jewish plays. TJS gradually expanded. In 1933, TJS had 75 students and 10 teachers, and had a kindergarten plus five grades. In 1940, TJS had at least 130 students and 14 teachers, and had two years of kindergarten plus seven grades. Some TJS teachers, such as the well-known ballet instructor Madame Voitenco, taught there on a part-time rather than a full-time basis. Grade 8 was added in 1941, and grade 9 was added a year or two later. When TJS first opened in 1925, it was in a rented building which had at least two stories and which was located next to the 176 Race Course Road residential building. When both of those buildings were scheduled to be demolished in the late 1920s, TJS moved to another location. TJS reportedly moved four times between 1925 and 1940. In 1930, TJS was in a rented building at 353 Elgin Avenue. By 1933, TJS was in a rented two-story building at 91 Taku Road. From the mid-1930s until 1950, TJS was in another rented two-story building, for which the address was 128 Victoria Road. This final TJS building was not actually on Victoria Road, and instead was on a lane that extended off that road. The final TJS building was very close to (1) the Leopold Building, (2) a small building where TJS’s Chinese caretaker and his family lived, and (3) a building that was used by the Jewish youth organization “Betar” Some of the TJS physical education classes were held in the Betar building. Most TJS students were from Jewish families that had come to China from the old Tsarist Russian Empire or from the Soviet Union. Other TJS students whose families had come to China from those regions included some who were Russian Orthodox Christians and some who were Tatar Muslims. Several Jewish students at TJS were Holocaust refugees from Germany and Austria. A few TJS students were wholly or partly of Chinese or Korean background. Some TJS students were from Hindu, Muslim, Parsi and Sikh families that had come to China from India. Two TJS students were partly of Italian ancestry. One TJS graduate was a British Christian.

PO Box 177, Concord, NH 03302, USA. This account was revised in June 2010.

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TJS provided an English-language education for its students, the vast majority of whom came from Russian-speaking families. Part of the TJS curriculum consisted of topics, which every Jewish child should know, such as stories from the Hebrew Bible and from Jewish history and literature, the background of Jewish holidays, how to read and write the Hebrew alphabet, and how to pronounce Hebrew words. The courses on Jewish topics were optional for non-Jewish students. Because of the primary focus on providing high-quality instruction in English, TJS did not provide its students with sufficient instruction to enable them to become fluent in Biblical or modern Hebrew. TJS students who moved to Israel, where Modern Hebrew is the national language, generally regretted that TJS had not provided them with better instruction in Hebrew. Courses in Russian language and literature, and in Russian history, were included to the TJS curriculum in the mid-1930s. These courses were optional for students who were not of Russian background. An optional course in the geography of the Soviet Union was added in the1940s. During one year in the mid-1930s, TJS provided instruction in the Tatar language for its Tatar students. TJS was one of only two major schools for foreign children in pre-1945 Tianjin which in some years provided an introduction to spoken Mandarin and to Chinese written characters (the other school was the Tientsin American School). At various times, the TJS faculty included Chinese-language teachers who were Chinese, including Mr. Chang, Mr. Ho, and Mr. Yang. A teacher named Mr. Zhukov also taught Chinese at TJS. TJS alumnus Emmanuel Pratt, who compiled the first important Chinese-Hebrew dictionary, learned his first 600 Chinese characters at TJS. Another TJS alumnus, Teddy Piastunovich, learned 2000 Chinese characters at TJS, thanks to the teaching skills of Mr. Ho. After Japanese military forces occupied Tianjinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s British Concession at the end of 1941, TJS was allowed to continue to operate only if it agreed to add some teachers who were Japanese to teach the students the Japanese language. The TJS students hoped that Japan and Germany would lose the war, and a number of them showed some disrespect to their Japanese teachers. After Japan surrendered in 1945, TJS stopped providing instruction in the Japanese language. Throughout its existence, TJS had less elaborate facilities and equipment than some of the other foreign schools in Tianjin, but these deficiencies were offset by the teaching skills of its faculty, the rigor of its curriculum, and the enthusiasm of its students. In the early 1930s, TJS began to develop an intense academic program which prepared its students to take the internationally respected Cambridge Local Examinations three years earlier than was usual at British schools. TJS students who took the various Cambridge Local Examinations consistently had extremely high rates of success in passing those tests. Passing scores on the Cambridge Local Senior Examinations were very well-respected at all British universities, including Oxford and Cambridge. TJS could not have been such a success without the efforts of its talented headmasters and teachers, including the original headmaster, Mr. L. D. Greenfield, and his successors Percy Montrose, Henry Whitgob, Abba S. Izgur, Moses Z. Nachtman, and Leo Veinstein. Some of the more notable other teachers were Alexander V. Bartashev (who also had operated Tianjinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s North China Russian High School), Leo Olshevsky, Rose Granevsky (later known as Varda Yoran), Benjamin Litvin, Henrietta Kloosterboer, Galina A. Tverdovskaia, and Edith Bihovsky Epstein (the first wife of famed journalist Israel Epstein).

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A very high percentage of former TJS students have had distinguished careers in such fields as business, education, journalism, writing, music, art, medicine, science, law, government, military service, and social work. They went to such countries as Israel, Australia, the United States, the Soviet Union, Canada, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Venezuela, South Africa, India, and Turkey. Some of them live in Hong Kong.

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Appendix G

GROWING UP MUSICAL IN TIENTSIN by Larry Sitsky There is a half-century of history that the Chinese people would probably be happy to forget, and who can blame them? I am talking about the Boxer revolution, and the immediate consequences of that uprising, which resulted in foreign troops from many countries invading China and dividing up the major ports into areas named “Concessions”, which in due course became minor cultural mirrors of their home country. Tianjin, which was then known as Tientsin was no exception, and my memories of the city include very colourful Concession areas from countries such as France, England, Germany, Italy, Russia, etc. Although the period represents a violent invasion from the point of view of China, after the event happened it became something else as well: a close grouping of different cultures coexisting side-by-side on the banks of the river flowing through the city, which was a bustling port and trading centre. Colonialism aside, this created a very rich and diverse cultural community of European nations embedded in a Chinese city. At its best, it featured very positive interplay between Eastern and Western culture. For many people, like me, it supplied an artistic foundation and a love of China that would last me all my life. I was born in Tientsin in 1934. My parents were Russian Jews who, like many others, had crossed into China over what were open borders during the civil war in Russian to seek a more stable future as well as to escape from anti-Semitic persecution in Russia itself. Some Jews were refugees from Europe, but most- in Tientsin anyway- seemed to be from Russia. The resultant cultural mix included many clubs devoted to stage and concert performances, as well as social activities, a variety of orchestras playing classical and light music, many public lectures on a variety of subjects, movies in all languages, food fairs, as well as ballet performances. Although our household was Jewish, my mother attended St. Joseph’s Convent School ( a Roman Catholic School, which is still there in Tianjin, functioning as a middle school ; (I was very warmly welcomed there on a recent visit to Tianjin), whilst my father went to St. Louis College, a French Catholic School run by the Marist brothers order. The Jewish School, which I attended, was not yet founded when my parents were at school age. There was also an English Grammar School, an American School, a Russian School, and so on. My entire schooling was at the Tientsin Jewish School, which provided tuition from kindergarten to matriculation level. There was also an arrangement with Cambridge University that allowed students to take Overseas Matriculation examinations and Matriculate for admission to Cambridge University. For the English residents of Tientsin especially, this must have been a very useful certificate. Many students from other than English Schools sat for these examinations, as the Certificate was valid all over the world. My brother, who was five years younger than I was, finished his schooling at the Russian School; the Jewish School shut down when most Jews left China to go to live in the new state of Israel. Each school, had a distinctive uniform, and it was common on the streets to see children from all these schools mingling at events. Interestingly enough, once the Jewish School achieved a good reputation, many Chinese students began to attend; their parents obviously deciding that some aspects of European education could be of some value; we made lifelong friends at that time. I still correspond with one of my Chinese friends, who now lives in Hubei, and made a career of teaching the English language.

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My music teachers (I studied the piano) were émigrés, mostly Russians. My mother gave me my first music lessons. She was a reasonable amateur pianist, and liked playing light Russian popular songs, and taught me how music was notated, but soon tired of teaching me and very wisely passed me on to a succession of teachers: I remember names such as Olshevskaya, Loesser (probably a German-trained pianist), Khokhlachkina and Levinson. Madame Khokhlachkina (they were always Madame) was my principal teacher, and she enjoined my mother to make certain that I was to be sent off to be trained at a tertiary music institution; she died of cancer, and Madame Levinson (who was also a German émigré) was my last teacher in Tianjin; she actually came to Australia at roughly the same time as my family made the journey. It should be stressed here that any family who had a pretension to being cultured made certain that their children took music lessons. Tientsin had a number of music shops and local manufacturers or importers. We had a Moutrie piano at home, and these pianos were made locally. There was also a large Robinson’s Music shop not far from where we lived; they sold Robinson pianos, and plenty of sheet music. There were also teachers of string instruments and voice in the community. My father was not a musician, in the sense that he was never given the opportunity to study an instrument. His father became very sick when he was a 14-year-old schoolboy, and soon he had to go to work to support the family. He worked at the British-American Tobacco Company (who manufactured cigarettes), and went to work each morning by getting a little ferry across the river, usually a tiny boat rowed by one person. I owe much to him as a musician. He was a passionate collector of recordings, and had an unusually large collection of 78 rpm. recordings. His father had already begun the collection, and had rare discs of Russian cantors and opera singers on the very earliest 78s, which were thick and had grooves on one side only. I still have some of these recordings; they constituted some of the first musical sounds that I recall from my childhood. Father added to the cantorial collection with later recordings by synagogue cantors such as Rosenblatt; but then he transferred interest in the voice to predominantly Italian opera, and so, there were plenty of discs from names such as Caruso, Gigli, Tagliavini, Galli-Curci, to name but a few. There were plenty of discs of Russian folksingers, light music singers such as Vertinsky, and a major investment in recordings of the great Russian bass Feodor Chaliapin. Chaliapin’s fame rested largely on his starring role in Moussorgsky’s “Boris Godunov”, and big slabs of the opera were captured on disc. The sounds of the “Clock Scene” from the opera were a clear and memorable demonstration to me of the power of musical drama. Chaliapin was a great actor as well as singer, and treated his roles with the utmost freedom. Mother didn’t particularly like his histrionics and I remember her grumbling about how he was being excessive. Father also collected the great pianists, and it was here that I first heard performers such as Egon Petri (with whom I was later to study), Schnabel, Levitzki, Friedman, Godowsky, Rachmaninoff, Sauer (I remember the Liszt concerti especially as thrilling and noble), Cortot, etc. Orchestral music was not neglected either, and we had some large scale symphonic works and smaller pieces in the collection. There were some curiosities there as well: Weingartner’s orchestration of the Beethoven “Hammerklavier” Sonata left an impression, plus many Germanic symphonies. The records were played on a wind-up gramophone; a large scale Victor Orthophonic had been purchased- it must have cost quite a lot, and we were never well off. It was my job to wind the motor and to change the needles on the playing arm. The works that one got to know well acquired an aural memory of where the record breaks were, and to this day, I expect the music to stop at a certain point when I hear it live or on a CD. String players were not neglected either, and there was plenty of Heifetz, Menuhin, Kreisler, Kubelik, Spivakovsky et al.

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Light music didn’t figure very large, although operettas appeared now and then (and they were performed in our ‘live’ cultural centres regularly); there wasn’t much chamber music either, apart from well-known works such as Schubert’s “Death & The Maiden”. Were such collections representative of the foreign community? Not generally; most of our friends had gramophones and records, but they were usually lighter. My Chinese school friends had early recordings of famous Chinese opera singers. When the World War came to end, Tientsin was occupied for a while by American marines, and with them we first saw and managed to acquire what was then called a “V-Disc”, which was still a 78 recording, but printed on a flexible vinyl, which felt and handled a little like the soon-tocome LP records. The purchase of records was an interesting exercise. There certainly were some record shops, but I remember the prices were very high, and though there were some very tantalizing items available, we couldn’t afford them. There was a huge shopping market- a kind of emporium close to our house in the French Concession; it was named Paysage, and was full of stalls filled with goods of all kinds, quite often second-hand. We found many treasures there. Records had to be examined one by one to make certain they weren’t scratched before one made a purchase. As I became more and more interested in recorded music, it became part of my ‘job’ to go to Paysage and look for recordings. During the Japanese occupation, we discovered very quickly that the Japanese were issuing what must have been pirated recordings of Western discs; they were perfectly acceptable in quality and were considerably cheaper. Many of the big-label records in our collection had Japanese writing on the label. I actually learnt to identify records before I could read or write, by the colour or some mark on the record or album, or by the size of the disc (12” or 10”) and used to ask for particular recordings to be put on the gramophone by this method of identification. Most households had radios, and many had shortwave radios, which became a problem during the Japanese occupation. They didn’t like us listening to the BBC or to Radio Australia, especially when the tide of the War turned against them. Policemen used to come to houses to inspect the radios and to seal off the shortwave reception with a wax seal. It was a serious offence if they found the seal broken. A French doctor who lived in the adjoining house had a radio hidden in his basement, and we kept up with the war news in this illegal fashion. But, apart from the shortwave problem, the radio was another way in which music lovers could hear concerts and recordings. Once again, Father spent his hard-earned money by purchasing a good quality receiver, and some music could be heard in this way as well. There were many local and nearby radio stations with music programs. Most of the local music teachers gave concerts in the various clubs around Tientsin. I was on the stage of the Jewish “Kunst” (Art) club quite often. Sometimes the concerts were reviewed in the local newspaper- and there were a number of them in different languages. Our synagogue had a cantor with a very fine voice- his name was Krimchansky, and it was a pleasure to hear him sing and also play the Shofar (Ram’s Horn) at the High Holydays once a year. Many of the various nationalities had similar cultural facilities. I should have mentioned that music shops also sold sheet music; this, too, was quite expensive, and many students bought collections of pieces- it was cheaper than buying single pieces separately. Once again, the Japanese provided cheap pirated editions of many Western publications, and this provided a source of music at a time when music from abroad was no longer coming to China. The repertoire taught by these largely Russian émigrés was very traditional. My teacher taught composers such as John Field and Hummel before you were allowed to play Chopin; Rubinstein was part of the repertoire; anything after Brahms was probably not on the list. I remember once asking to play some Bach, and my teacher said that he was a philosopher and I was too young to understand it! The German classics were OK, of course.

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At my first public recital, I remember playing some Liszt (Rhapsodies Nos. 6 and 12), the waltz from Faust, some short romantic pieces, and probably some classical music. Concertos, for me, consisted of Mendelssohn No.1, Hummel A Minor and Grieg. These were played mostly on two pianos, but as I was considered to be ‘talented’, I was allowed to also play with orchestra. I can’t remember whether this was one of the orchestras attached to the Central Conservatory (Tientsin had the Central Conservatory at that time) or a mixture of Chinese and foreign musicians forming some other ensemble. I vividly remember Chinese and European musicians sitting next to each other in the string sections. Schools did not provide any music tuition, which meant that kids like me had to practice after school and after all the homework was done. I hated school because of this. We had to study Russian, English, Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese (during the occupation), as well as allcompulsory subjects. There was no choice of any kind. Everyone did the same subjects, and there were many of them. My school graduation certificate lists- if I remember correctly- fourteen subjects! The Russian system demanded a lot of learning by rote, which took a lot of time and not meant for people with creative temperaments. But if there was no music at school, there was much to be experienced outside, apart from what I have already mentioned above. These early musical memories influenced me as a composer in all the years to come. Not far from us was a theatre and I began to sneak away to listen to traditional Chinese opera. The sound of the percussion and the special way of singing I found to be intoxicating. Mother didn’t like me going to the theatre because she was afraid that I would catch something from eating food from the public sellers. She was right; I actually contracted typhoid fever after eating something from an outside food seller. Also within walking distance from the house was a Buddhist Temple. Once again, I was completely seduced by the sound of the chanting monks, with the woodblocks and gongs interrupting the prayers. The monks, after a while, noticed, this strange little boy hanging around the outside wall, and asked me to come in. I was too shy, but did sit in the little temple garden and listen to the music. I remember, too, the public funerals for important people, with the long processions of mourners dressed in white and the accompanying music; weddings, naturally in red, were equally fascinating for their theatre as well as their music. One of our Chinese neighbours had a wedding, many years later I met her again; she was still in the same house and was now a grandmother! Other public events included light reviews, mixing comedy and singing; these I remember best as taking place in our Club Kunst. A potent demonstration of belief in the power of music was an event witnessed by me as a little boy- one of our Chinese neighbours falling ill, and the doctor coming to see her. Part of the treatment was the doctor playing a flute to her! I have never forgotten this episode. This whole world fell apart in mid-century. Chairman Mao asked all Europeans to leave, saying (quite correctly) that China had been exploited long enough by the European powers. Our precious 78-rpm records were packed into large wooden crates and arrived in Australia without a single breakage. I was in the last class to graduate from the Tientsin Jewish School. But the lesson of the possibility of different cultures co-existing and thriving next door to each other, to the benefit of all had been given. It was not until many years later that I fully appreciated what I had experienced in Tientsin and of how truly rich the culture of that time had been.

Larry Sitsky, September 2010

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Appendix H

The Renovated Tientsin Synagogue This is how it looked when we were there in 2006. Seeing it again reminded me what a welldesigned and aesthetically pleasing structure it was.

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In May 2010, the restoration work on the synagogue was completed. Here is a picture of the original window with the menorah on the sill.

And here is the restored entrance.

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Appendix I

Qantas Passenger List Hong-Kong to Sydney

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Appendix J

Reading List and References The three books that gave me most ideas in starting to write this account were:

 China Dreams, Growing Up Jewish in Tientsin by Isabelle Maynard (1996) ISBN 0-87745-562-7  Seaports of the Far East by Alister MacMillan. Historical, Descriptive, Commercial, Industrial 2nd Edition (1925) Publisher – W.H. & L Collingridge, London  The Jews in Tianjin; Ed. by Anna Song (2004) ISBN 7508505131

There have been many English books written about foreign communities in China and childhood in China. Here are a few of them:

 The Ford of Heaven by Brian Power, First Published 1984, 2nd Edition Signal Books,    

2005 ISBN 1-904955-00-2 Tientsin by David C. Hume, Publisher: Iumix Limited, 2001 ISBN 1-84320-012-0 My China: Jewish Life in the Orient, 1900-1950 by Yakov Lieberman, Publisher Gefen Books 1998 ISBN965-229-171-4 The Tarasov Saga by Gary Nash Publisher Rosenberg Publishing 2002, ISBN 9781877058011 Secrets and Spies by Mara Moustafine, Published by Randon House 2002 ISBN 1 74051 091 7

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There is also the book written by Anna Song called The Jews in Tianjin published in 2007 (ISBN 978-7-201-05417-9). However, there was no English translation of this book available when I started writing my story. There are many references in this book to the Toper and Sitsky families – mainly because I gave Anna copies of our family photographs and details of our life in Tientsin.

In 2010, Anna Song brought out another book called The Heavenly Ford - The Jews in Tianjin. (ISBN 978-7-201-065595). This book is written in the English language. So most of the material presented in her earlier book became available to all English readers. This new book also includes some new research done by Anna on the Jewish community in Tientsin. As in the earlier book, there are many references to the Toper and Sitsky families. She included many photos and some certificates that I gave her. This book was published well after I commenced my account.

Other relevant books that cover the historical aspects of North China in the 20th century include the following:

 The Fighting in North China, by George Gipps. London, Sampson Low, Marston and Co., 1901  Guide to Tientsin, presented by the Astor House Hotel Ltd  Map and Short Description of Tientsin, by Noah Fields Drake, (1900)  A Little Tragedy at Tien-Tsin, by Frances Aymar Mathews

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 Passage Through China: The Jewish Communities of Harbin, Tientsin and Shanghai by          

Beth Hatefutsoth, The Nahum Goldmann Museum of the Jewish Diaspora, Tel Aviv (1986) Twilight in Tientsin, by David DeSauld Chinese Jews by William Charles White, First published 1842, 2nd Edition University of Toronto Press, 1966 The Workers of Tianjin, 1900-1949 by Gail Hershatter, ISBN 0-8047-1318-9, Stanford University Press 1986 Fred C Roberts of Tientsin: Or For Christ and China by Mary Isabella Bryson, London: HR Allenson MDCCCXCV The Tientsin Massacre by George Thin, William Blackwood and Sons, MDCCCLXX From Tientsin to Peking: With The Allied Forces (1902) by Fredrick Brown, Charles H Kelly 1902 The Jews of China; Ed. by Jonathan Goldstein (1999) Pub : ME Sharpe ISBN 0-7656-0103-6 The China Times Guide to Tientsin and Neighbourhood by Mrs Burton St. John 1908 Revolution & Tradition in Tientsin, 1949-1952 by Kenneth Lieberthal, Stanford University Press 1980, ISBN 0-8047-1044-9 Wanderers and Settlers, The Shifting Boundaries of the Russian and Jewish Communities of Harbin and Shanghai, 1966 Honours Thesis of Catherine Nolan, University of Melbourne

The following websites are additional sources of information on the history of Tientsin, and on the Jewish communities in Tientsin and Harbin: China Times guide to Tientsin and neighbourhood, published in 1908 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924099092516 Jewish Communities of China published by Igud Yotsei Sin - Association of Former Residents of China in Israel http://www.jewsofchina.org/ Jewish Genealogy website – on this website under the section called Official Documents, there is information and pictures on the Sitsky family in Harbin. http://www.shtetlinks.jewishgen.org/harbin/index.htm Just before and during our visit to Tianjin in April/May 2006, a series of stories about us appeared in the local newspaper City Express. Included in the reports were photos that I previously sent to Anna Song. Finally, I would like to mention that a short story was broadcast on Tianjin Television at the end of April 2006 – the story was about our return to the city of our birth. The coverage included some background family information, interviews with Larry and me, and a look at 38 Harbin Road. The story also covered our visit to the historical part of Tianjin.

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