Paperback edition: $19.95, 177 pages, 12 pages color photos, 2001, ISBN 962-7872-17-2

A fascinating insight into a distant world at a point in history which so few of us can know first-hand. In Strangers Always: A Jewish Family in Wartime Shanghai, she told us what it was like to live in a city under Japanese occupation. As a White Russian, and thus stateless, she was one of the small minority of Westerners who were not interned and thus could report from a rare perspective.

Her second book is actually a "prequel" to the first, leading us up to that war. She and her mother and sister sought to escape the increasingly difficult conditions that prevailed in Shanghai in the summer of 1939 by vacationing in Japan. Although she was only 14 years old, Rena was a bright and perceptive onlooker and through her eyes we are able to see the gradual build-up for the war that is sure to come. Based on her extensive newspaper clippings and a diary she had meticulously kept over sixty years ago, Rena was able to reconstruct her observations and emotions as she saw the gentle, pleasant and peaceful Japanese being goaded on to war by their all-pervasive government.

Rena is a born story teller and we are soon caught up in her life and that of her family as they share their many experiences with their new Western and Japanese friends. Interspersed with her narrative are letters from her troubled father back in Shanghai, as he and his Jewish colleagues struggle to find solutions to the problems caused by the influx of 18,000 desperate and penniless European refugees fleeing the Nazis. Moving back and forth between the two disparate worlds, the book gives the reader a seldom seen insight into a confluence in pre-World War II history. Rena's lively and gripping tale will not only entertain you but will leave you a bit wiser on the history of an era.

Rena Krasno was born in Shanghai, China in 1923, the daughter of stateless Russian Jews. She is a professional simultaneous interpreter in four languages who has worked with UNESCO, the Olympic Committee, the International Labor Organization, and other international organizations. She is the author of Strangers Always: A Jewish Family in Wartime Shanghai as well as several children's books, including Kneeling Carabao and Dancing Giants: Celebrating Filipino Festivals and Floating Lanterns and Golden Shrines: Celebrating Japanese Festivals.

Rena can be contacted through e-mail: rena@renakrasno.com


Reviewers comment on Rena's earlier book, Strangers Always:

"An engrossing and evocative eyewitness account of the author's own and her family's experiences. The accounts from her diary present a unique description of daily life in the Jewish community, especially in the time of the Japanese occupation of Shanghai. It is an unusually competent combination of solid history and personal experience."
------The Jewish Times

"A remarkable combination of personal experiences and short essays on the history of Jews in Shanghai, life under foreign occupation, and cultural encounters."
------Library Journal

"The most vivid account I've read of the life and times of the Russian Jewish community under Japanese occupation."
------Frederic Wakeman, Director, Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley

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