Shalama: My 96 Seasons in China - Jean Hoffmann Lewanda - ★★

AUTHOR: Jean Hoffmann Lewanda

GENRE: Historical Fiction

PUBLICATION DATE: October 15, 2024

RATING: 2 stars.

In a Nutshell: Officially, a historical fiction based on the life of the author’s mother. However, the writing is heavily non-fiction in style and not character-focussed. This might work better as a memoir but after some finetuning of the presentation.

Plot Preview:

1928. Harbin, China. Born to a Russian Jewish family who emigrated from Europe to Harbin a few years earlier, Shalama is intimately familiar with life in a city filled with European Jewish and Russian immigrants fleeing various pogroms. As Harbin, known as the ‘Paris of the East’ is a thriving village-turned-town thanks to these new citizens, it feels more like a white community than a Chinese town. When the Japanese come to Harbin in the 1930s, Shalama’s family moves to Shanghai, where she becomes a typist after her schooling, and marries an Austrian Jew named Paul. However, there are still some changes to come in Shalama’s life when the Communists take over the country.

This novel covers the time period of 1922-1954. The ’96 seasons’ mentioned in the title refers to the 24 years Shalama spent in China since her birth, beginning 1928. The years prior to this are covered in a couple of chapters, offering a background of the family tree. (Too many characters pop in at this point; just go with the flow.) The main story comes to us in Shalama’s first-person perspective in flashback from the “present” time of 2003, when an older Shalama is speaking with her granddaughter about her life story. The period from 1954 and beyond is not much focussed on, with us getting a brief and quick overview of all that took place in that interim.

The introductory note reveals that the author had written her father's memoir in 2021. Having presented her father’s story to the world (he was a Viennese who fled to China in 1938 at age 19 to escape the holocaust), she felt like her mother’s life story also had a uniqueness to it. This led to a 90-minute interview with her mother, which the author combined with online research and earlier anecdotal memories to fill in the gaps and form the complete picture. However, unlike her father who had kept many journals and records of his life, her mother had no written records to offer concrete support to her life story. So the author decided to present this as a historical fiction work. This, I feel, proved to be the undoing of this ‘novel’.

There is no doubt about the author’s talent for research. Most of us historical fiction readers wouldn’t even have heard of Russians and Europeans escaping to China. The perspective of a white living in China when the country itself was undergoing so many changes offers much fodder for a book, whether factual or fictional. So I do agree that there was tremendous potential in this story.

However, the writing approach in this book tilts heavily towards the factual. The first quarter of the book appears more like a Wikipedia entry or a history textbook than as a fictional character’s personal narrative. I struggled a lot to immerse myself into this story, partly because it was more like a (dispassionate) memoir than a historical fiction as promised. That said, even a memoir includes the writer’s emotions. This book, however, contains too much of fact-dumping and not enough of feelings.

Most of the book is written in the form of “This happened, then this happened, then this happened,…” It felt like I was listening to a one-sided monologue with someone telling me… no, not their life story, but the events that occurred during their younger years. Hardly anything felt heartfelt because there were no heartfelt moments. We readers have heard many times that showing works better than telling when it comes to fiction; this book proves it. For the first time ever, I missed inner monologues.

There are hardly any scenes where characters actually converse with each other. The few conversations that pop up feel fake because they are filled with dialogues that no one would say to their friends and family in real life. Dialogues should be used to show a genuine interaction between two or more characters, and not as a convenient way of adding historical awareness to the reader.

All this is even stranger when we remember that the narrative is in first person. This writing should have made us connect to Shalama’s inner thoughts more accurately, to feel her joy and pain and fear. But it is so journalistic in tone that it makes Shalama sound like an observer of her own life than an active participant. The irony is that at times, she tells us the emotions of the other characters she is interacting with, whether they are laughing or concerned or angry or disappointed. But her own feelings mostly stay unrevealed. To be fair, the writing improves a teeny bit in the second half, but by then, I had already lost my interest.

The settings of historical China and USA also don’t come alive. We get place names but no descriptions at all. I couldn’t visualise a single location in the story, and as I am quite a visual reader, this further reduced my ability to be captivated by the proceedings.

The 2003 timeline was *slightly* better for me. Being presented in interview form meant that Shalama’s responses included her opinions. These were the only chapters where we could see Shalama the person. However, there’s one writing issue here as well. The very first chapter begins with Shalama’s first-person POV and jumps without warning to a third-person perspective, which is then retained throughout the 2003 timeline.

Coincidentally, this is the second time within a month that I have tried a historical fiction book written by a nonfiction author who ventured into fiction territory. And both books didn’t click for me because the factual flavour dominated the writing more than the fictional one. I'll be quite wary of nonfiction writers attempting fiction, at least historical fiction, now onwards.

On the positive side, I love the decision of using many Yiddish words in the writing, giving it a genuine feel. The meaning of these words is given in hyperlinked notes, so it is not just very useful to those of us who don’t know Yiddish but also very convenient to navigate on the Kindle. The factual aspect of the story is obviously great; I learnt a lot about the history of Russian Jews in China and the socio-political situation of those years. The events, not often explored in historical fiction, are very troubling at times. The afterword by the author is also insightful, and reveals more of the background to this book. There are also some family photos included at the end.

On the whole, this book wasn’t for me. Perhaps, it would click better with those fond of history or historical memoirs, or with those fictional readers who are more particular about facts than about getting to know characters and settings better. I am fussy about writing styles, so if a style doesn’t click, I simply can’t enjoy a book.

2 stars. (My rating in memoir-type stories is always for the writing and not for the life of the person.)

My thanks to Earnshaw Books for a complimentary copy of “Shalama: My 96 Seasons in China”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn’t work out better.