Jewish Refugee Poetry in Shanghai

Within the larger context of the Holocaust narrative, the Jewish experience of exile in Shanghai, China provides many examples of the impact of forced migration. This study of the poems written by Jewish exile writers and refugees in Shanghai from 1938 to 1948 discusses the notion of refugee literature as a form of minority literature, the meaning of political writing and cultural-geographical spaces in displacement and the collision of cultural values, the function of language in identity crises, the articulation of cultural differences, and the struggle to survive under extreme deprivation. This theoretical analysis, based on Homi K. Bhabha’s theories on cultural phenomena, backed up by the observation of the survival trajectory of the Jewish refugees in Shanghai, shows that the moments and processes of social, cultural and political confrontation and convergence between races, religions and ideologies achieve a crucial understanding of the location of culture, revealing distinctive images of marginal and under-represented communities. Furthermore, this study also shows that the history of the 20th century was a time of social, economic, and political displacement. Observations made by this historical witnessing force upon us a realization that the transnational fusion of narratives of migration, refuge and exile offer another approach to re-reading mainstream cultures. Cultures not only recognize themselves in being forced to contrast themselves with “otherness”, but also by confronting their own “otherness” as an initial part of “self.”