Monday, 30 November 2009 (Updated!)

There are just about three more weeks left to us in Shanghai.

It's hard to believe we will be leaving here in just three weeks and one day. There's still a lot to be done before we leave.

This past Saturday, we took a tour of sites relevant to the history of the Jews in Shanghai. This was a really excellent tour, and we recommend it highly if you ever make your way to Shanghai. Here is the tour's web site:

http://www.shanghai-jews.com/

There were three waves of Jewish immigration to Shanghai. The first wave, in the early to mid 19th century brought a small number of families of Sephardic Jews from Iraq to Shanghai via India. Some of these families became extremely wealthy and influential in Shanghai and other cities of China. The second wave brought Russian Jews escaping the pogroms to Shanghai in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This wave largely settled in the Hong Kou district. The third wave consisted of European Jews escaping the Nazis. If you could obtain exit papers, you would leave Europe by a Mediterranean port, transit the Suez Canal, cross the Indian Ocean and reach Shanghai. Shanghai, like Casablanca, was an "open port" where stateless persons could freely enter. The Japanese occupation did confine stateless persons to a few blocks of Hong Kou, and the immigrants of the third wave had to live in very cramped conditions.

Pictures from the tour are here.

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I promised to share the movements of the Sonatina I've been working on as they come out. Well, I just finished the second movement — a Chaconne. If you aren't familiar with the chaconne form here's a link to the wikipedia page for it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaconne

If you go there, be sure to read about the passacaglia form while you're at it. One person's chaconne is very often another person's passacaglia, and if you insist, my Chaconne can be either. The .m4a (for iTunes) is here; the .mid (for QuickTime) is here.

One more movement to go!