Rachel will talk about her book, The Box with the Sunflower Clasp-Uncovering a Jewish Family’s Flight to Wartime Shanghai, published in May of this year. It's a mixture of history and personal memoir that tells the story of her Viennese family’s time in World War II Shanghai.
Rachel Meller was never close to her aunt Lisbeth, a cool, unemotional woman with a drawling Viennese-Californian accent, a cigarette always in her hand. But when Lisbeth died, she left Rachel an intricately carved Chinese box with a sunflower clasp. Inside the box were photographs, letters and documents that led Rachel to uncover a story she had never known: that of a passionate Jewish teenager growing up in elegant Vienna, who was caught up by war, and forced to flee to Shanghai.
In her talk, Rachel will tell you some of what she discovered about her aunt and grandparents’ new life in their unlikely haven in Shanghai: a life of small joys and great hardship, surrounded by many others who, like them, fled Hitler and the Nazis.