The New York Times: An Oratorio About Shanghai’s Jews Opens in China at a Difficult Time

The New York Times
By Keith Bradsher and Javier C. Hernández

“Émigré,” a new oratorio about Jewish refugees who fled Nazi Germany for Shanghai in the late 1930s, begins with a song by two brothers, Josef and Otto, as their steamship approaches a Chinese harbor.

“Shanghai, beacon of light on a silent shore,” they sing. “Shanghai, answer these desperate cries.”

The emigration of thousands of Central European and Eastern European Jews to China in the late 1930s and early 1940s — and their survival of the Holocaust — is one of World War II’s most dramatic but little-known chapters.

In “Émigré,” a 90-minute oratorio that premiered this month in Shanghai and will come to the New York Philharmonic in February 2024, the stories of these refugees and their attempts to build new lives in war-torn China are front and center.

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