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Statue serves as a tribute to the friendships forged in hard times
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A STATUE of a Chinese woman holding a parasol over a small Jewish girl clutching a teddy bear takes pride of place in front of the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum in Hongkou District.
Created by local artist Zhao Qiang, the piece evokes memories of the friendships formed in the city at a time of war and hardship.
For 65-year-old Israeli Sara Imas, the sculpture tells a very personal story.
“During the war, Jewish and Chinese people living in Shanghai made great friendships because they were all poor and had to cope with the same harsh conditions,” she said.
Now retired, the former representative for an Israeli diamond company was born in Shanghai in 1950 to a German Jewish father and a Chinese mother. Her dad, Leiwi Imas, arrived in Shanghai in 1939 after fleeing Nazi Germany. He was 43 and single.
At that time, the city was home to about 23,000 Jewish refugees, the vast majority of whom lived in Hongkou.
Imas started his life in Shanghai by opening a small bakery. His products sold well and as the years went by he steadily grew the business.
He also expanded on a personal level, by marrying one of his employees — Xia Guiying, a native of neighboring Jiangsu Province.
Despite his success in business, the marriage failed and the couple divorced. When her father died in 1962, Imas said her mother disowned her and she was left to fend for herself at the age of 12.
Four years later, at the start of the “cultural revolution (1966-76),” Imas volunteered to work in the countryside, but was rejected as local officials regarded her as a foreigner.
“Shanghai was my home,” she said.
When she was driven out of her late father’s home, she tried to reconnect with her mother, but once again the relationship failed, she said.
“She had remarried by that time and she and her new family didn’t want me around,” she said.
“When I was there at meal times, they served only vegetables, but if I was out, they had meat,” she said.
Lonely and alone, Imas sought the affection of a local man and the couple married. But that also failed, so she married someone else and had two sons and a daughter. When her second marriage collapsed, she decided to go to Israel.
Aged 42, she relocated in 1992 as the first immigrant from Shanghai after the two nations established diplomatic relationships.
She said she still has a photograph in her living room of the then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin welcoming her to the country.
Determined to succeed in her new life, Imas learned Hebrew and earned a crust washing dishes at a restaurant. Sometime later, she opened a restaurant selling Shanghai-style spring rolls.
“I always believed the bad days would come to an end,” she said.
After leaving the world of catering, Imas got a job at an Israeli court and then became the China representative for a diamond company. She moved back to Shanghai in 2003.
“I regard myself as a Shanghainese,” she said.
On her return, she also found a new love and today lives with her university professor husband in the Pudong New Area.
Though she has officially retired, Imas said she still works as a volunteer helping people cross the busy road outside her compound.
“I like to be able to contribute something to the city,” she said.
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