'Emigr,' a musical drama about Shanghai's Jewish community during WWII, makes its US premiere

In the days after Kristallnacht in 1938, two German Jewish brothers flee their Berlin home for a place halfway across the world: Shanghai, where they join a community of thousands of other Jewish refugees — and confront a Chinese population devastated by their own war with Japan.

One brother, Otto, who had been a rabbinical student, is determined to preserve his Jewish heritage and lineage while living abroad. The other, Josef, a doctor, visits a traditional Chinese herbal medicine shop, where he meets and falls in love with a Chinese woman named Lina — much to their families’ dismay.

Josef and Otto’s experience in China is the core of “Emigré,” a new “semi-staged musical drama” that will have its U.S. premiere at the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center at the end of the month.

The plot and its characters may be fictional but the broad strokes of the story are very real: At the onset of World War II, around 20,000 European Jews fled to Shanghai, one of the few places at the time where immigrants could arrive without a visa. Much of that small but significant chapter of Jewish and Chinese history is preserved at the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum, which, as it happens, held a pop-up exhibition in New York last summer.

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