Opus for Shanghai’s Jews Composer tells their WWII history, offers a sneak peak at rehearsal

By Carl Zebrowski Editor

Ever since finding out about the Jews of WWII Shanghai, the Beijing-born composer Wu Fei would occasionally obsess over the community. Who were they? What might have happened if they’d remained? How might Chinese and Jewish music have come together?

The thoughts eventually inspired a musical composition. “It was 16 or 17 years brewing,” she told a Lehigh Valley Jewish community audience at Lehigh University’s Zoellner Arts Center on February 8. Then suddenly she had a finished piece for chamber orchestra: “Hello Gold Mountain.” “It basically took me two hours to write,” she said.

By the time Fei could walk, her parents had decided she would be trained in music, and at age 5, she began taking lessons. She attended the China Conservatory of Music for high school and from there went on to study music and composition as an undergrad at the University of Texas and grad student at Mills College in Oakland, California.

Fei remained in the United States after school her schooling. That’s when she found out about the Shanghai Jews. Exploring in a library, she came upon the 2002 documentary “Shanghai Ghetto” on VHS cassette. She watched it and her years-long journey began.

As the documentary pointed out, Shanghai had become almost unique as a haven for Jews fleeing Europe during the Nazi era. “It was one of only two cities in the world that would accept them without a visa,” Fei said.

The Jews lived in the city alongside Chinese who had fled their homes elsewhere during the Japanese invasion in the late 1930s. When Japan’s army moved in to occupy Shanghai in 1941, it rounded up the Jews into a one-square-mile ghetto. There the three cultures mixed and mingled.

“Shanghai was a very metropolitan center of entertainment in the ’10s and ’20s,” Fei said, and that legacy continued. “It was really vibrant at the time.”

Many of the Jewish refugees were skilled performers on classical instruments such as piano and cello. “The musicians started giving lessons,” Fei said.

She wondered what might have been if most of the Jews did not leave for San Francisco soon after the war. “What music collaborations could have happened?” she asked.

“Hello Gold Mountain” answers that question as a musical “what if” whose title refers to the translated Chinese name for San Francisco: Old Gold Mountain. The composition premiered in 2019 in Nashville, where Fei lived and still lives, and featured Fei on guzheng (Chinese zither) and Shanir Ezra Blumenkranz on oud (a lute-like Jewish on instrument) — an instrumental pairing that was both a symbolic and literal uniting of the two music traditions.

After Fei finished telling the Lehigh Valley audience about the Jewish community and her composition, she offered a sneak peak at rehearsal for the orchestral performance of the piece scheduled for the coming weekend. As in Nashville, Fei and Blumenkranz were united at the front of the stage, this time with the Lehigh University Philharmonic behind them. At times they stood out as soloists and at other times they blended in.

The give-and-take between Fei, conductor Paul Salerni, Blumenkranz and the other musicians fascinated audience members. They’d witness something like Salerni speaking to the trumpets: “Come in with da da da daaah, da da da!”

Blumenkranz set down his oud at one point and stood up. He clapped his hands and danced in place as he pushed for a more upbeat tempo. The