Being Jewish and Becoming Chinese:
A Portrait of Israel Epstein

By Patricia Laurence

Five years after Mao's death, the Communist Party in China delivered the verdict that his crimes during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution had been thirty-percent wrong. Responsible for famine, economic waste and the death and hardship of millions, it seems a mild sentence. But as a recent article in The Guardian asserts “he was the man who laid the platform for today's China”: rail networks, higher literacy rates, women's rights to education and divorce, and better healthcare. As the PRC enters the global financial world with lightning speed, complex feelings about Mao and his historical role in China remind me of an interview that I had with Israel Epstein, a well-known reporter in China at the Friendship Hotel in Beijing in 1995. The end of my interview is where I begin. "I'm very interested in origins," he said as I was about to leave. "Where do you and your family come from?" I told him that my grandparents came from what used to be Austria-Hungary, and that I was not born--but became--Jewish after my marriage. He looked at me slyly, smiled, and said, "and I became Chinese."

Israel Epstein died at the age of ninety in 2005. Pursuing what it meant to be a “true believer” in the Chinese revolution, a prominent Communist, and to “become Chinese,” I sought the famed reporter while on a research trip to Beijing. His apartment was in a labyrinth of lovely buildings with muted red and green upturned roofs, a hotel and apartment compound used by the many Soviet experts in China in the early 1950's, and foreign experts and visitors today. It was designed by the much-admired Chinese architect Liang Sicheng, and built by Chinese workers. Wandering around this compound in the evening, map barely visible, I knew I was in foreign space. Edmund Jabes' Book of Questions --a book that seems to me quintessentially Jewish--was in my backpack, counterpoint for my questions and Epstein's about the meaning of his being Jewish in mainland China: a country that had welcomed persecuted Jews in flight during the Holocaust.

"You need space to read the world. Readability depends on distance," says Edmund Jabes in His Book of Questions.

I met Epstein in his tidy, brightly-lit living room lined with books, newspapers and pictures of him shaking hands with history—Mao, Edgar Snow, Soong Ching Ling (Sun Yat Sen's widow). Somehow history and commonality were joined in the man. Eighty years old in 1995, short, genial, with the look of Wallace Shawn, at times, Epstein was a well-known war reporter and author of several books on China's history and growth. His most recent, at the time, was Woman in World History: Soong Ching Ling (Mme.Sun Yat Sen), whom he had met during his political activities in the thirties, and who arranged for his meetings with Mao and Zhao Enlai that, he said, changed his life.

His parents "never having been comfortable in what was then czarist Russia," left just before the 1917 revolution to join another—in China. His father was a staunch socialist who had been jailed, and his mother spent time in exile in Siberia. Russian Jews, they had been formed in a political crucible, and had nurtured in Epstein his belief in "the idea of THIS Revolution, the Chinese." He grew up in a colonial environment in Tientsin but because of his parents' inspiration and the Chinese leaders he met, he developed a strong sympathy with the Chinese people and their revolution.

Curiously, he spoke with a British accent. He attended an American grammar school for six years and then a British school in China, and spoke only English. As for Chinese, he said, “no, not a word” until I was an adult. It was a “totally encapsulated society…. The Chinese had to learn a foreign language to function in the foreign concessions.” Though his parents spoke English quite well, they spoke mainly Russian at home. “They were fairly cosmopolitan” but, he acknowledged, “they spoke Yiddish to each other but I never really learned it.”

“I think most of the foreigners not including my parents didn't consider themselves in isolation despite the encapsulation I describe.” They were, he said, “living on the peak of existence. Especially the British.”  I reminded Epstein that they called Shanghai, "twelve miles of foreign settlement," and he agreed that Tientsin was similar. Foreigners were about 2% of the population but foreign concessions occupied 80% of the city's area. The foreigners generally spoke of the rest of Tientsin as if they were talking about a Chinatown in China. The foreigners were "it," and the rest was a ghetto—though they were actually in their own. There were, Epstein explained, two types of Chinese who lived in the concessions. One was very rich and the other was servants and shopkeepers who served the foreigners.

In school, they weren't taught Chinese, “not even as subject, not even an hour a week or anything like that. And, of course, nothing about Chinese culture and history. “We knew all the names of the presidents and the kings of England dating from 1066 on…and another fairly big chunk of time on India since it was the jewel in the fair crown.” But little on China. “There we were in China yet China was a long way off.”

His family, though, was different. From the beginning, Epstein said, “My parents were not like that. They weren't in favor of colonialism. And they didn't allow me to use contentious expressions for the Chinese as my schoolmates did. So we weren't normal.”

"You can retrace a road in your mind or your veins" Reb Zam.

Tienstin was a place with originally eight or nine foreign concessions, each of which had its own little municipality. When Epstein was growing up, there were about five left, but originally there were the British, French, Japanese, Italian, German, Belgian, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and, briefly, an American concession established about 1860. But the American concession “turned into an administrative thing and was abandoned. There was an American presence, a garrison, American naval presence in the ship, Ashville , and, of course, the American consulate.

"Everybody's existence," said Epstein, "everybody who moves about is connected with history," like my parents coming to China. After World War I, the German concession was handed back to China when it joined the Allies. The street that used to be Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse was renamed Woodrow Wilson Street. "You can gather who was coming out at the top of the heap," said Epstein.

Epstein said at one point in the interview that :Everybody's existence, everybody who moves about--like my family coming to China--is connected with history, and I've made myself part of Chinese history.: He worked for local Peking and Tientsin newspapers and broadcasters, the United Press and the New York Times, and is best known here for a series of eyewitness accounts about Mao in Yanan where he delivered his literary talks and the communist-led guerilla warfare behind Japanese lines). His career spanned sixty-five years. He started as an apprentice covering local news in the foreign community as a boy of fifteen in Tientsin. There was coverage of sports, and their one Olympic champion from the community was Eric Liddle, featured in Chariots of Fire; another notable was Margot Fonteyn whose name at the time was Peggy Hookham who had been trained in ballet in by a White Russian teacher in Tientsin. He also discussed a schoolmate, John Hersey, who he's also proud of having encouraged. Later, he covered the Guomindang and the Communists at the front and behind enemy lines in guerilla country in the thirties and early forties during the period of China's civil war. He reported on China's resistance to Japan brutal sweep across China, 1937-45, staying in China when his parents emigrated to the U.S, "wanting," as he said, "to see the Japanese licked." He saw them he said "with their tails in the air and their tails between their legs." He was there when they came into Tientsin, Canton,and Guangzhou and in Hong Kong when the Americans attacked Pearl Harbor. "The war was wicked. Just like Hitler's. The atom bomb was wicked for other reasons. At any rate, it shortened it." He covered the establishment of the PRC in 1949 as did his friend, Edgar Snow, who published the classic Red Star Over China . He continued the coverage of the modernization of China until well into his eighties when he turned to writing his memoir.

"Quills are in some way kin to swords," says Rabbi Bettelheim.

He was also imprisoned for five years "for suspicion…for unspecified charges," he said, during the Cultural Revolution. He admitted it was “a long time. Good for my Chinese.” When I asked what the experience was like he said, “Oh I read a little bit [the few books allowed], and I paced the floor, and I read books in my head that I read before. What do people do in jail, you know.”  Epstein was a very well-read man. He was released from prison in 1973, four years before the end of the Cultural Revolution, with an apology from Zhou Enlai, and he had little to say about it, or Mao or Zhou's silence during his imprisonment.  "I believed everything would come out all right. Which it did.  I wasn't sure about how long it would take.” But he insisted that he didn't take it “personally. It was a real upheaval. Many people suffered.”  When I recited the millions of Chinese who were killed during Mao's Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, he acknowledged “all the vagaries we've had here, the Cultural Revolution, the ups and down, lefts and rights, zig-zags.” His reticence was abominable. He warned, however, that some of the young Chinese people had little sense of the past and “have a very exaggerated idea of the west as a place of universal prosperity.” What would Epstein think of the prosperity in new China, for example, the new Starbucks  (Xingbake in Mandarin) now plum in the middle of Beijing's ancient Forbidden City.

Loyal to China and the Communists to the end in spite of Mao's horrors, he became a Chinese citizen in 1957. When asked why, he said that he made the decision for several reasons. “One, this is home; the other is that I was stateless for a very long time given various historical vagaries. It's the logical thing. Besides I believe in this revolution.”

When I asked if Jewish customs were observed in his home, he replied, “No, not religious customs. We were very atheistic. Very secular. My father was a very well-educated atheist, a Yiddishist and anti-Hebraist. And he didn't approve of Zionism. He was a socialist. He was part of the Bund.” “Why were you named Israel?” I asked. He smiled, “Biblical.” His father was Jewish in a secular vein and Epstein explained the three distinct trends in China at the time: one of which was trying to assimilate, one was socialist and one was Zionist. When I asked about a religious strand, he answered, “Well, yes.” There was a synagogue at that time in Tientsin but he never attended.  “At first,” he said, “it was in rented quarters, but then the community built one. We had a so-called rabbi--not a real one--we were a community of about 3,000--we had a sufficient size to have one but we never did.”

"My father," he confessed, "would go to listen to the cantor at the window of the synagogue. But he wouldn't go in [laughter]. He liked that, he liked the singing. He liked the Kol Nidre and things like that." When I asked about his father's memory of songs and rituals, he said  "Oh yes, my father knew more about religion than our rabbi. He'd been brought up, I suppose, in an orthodox community in (then Russian) Lithuania. They weren't Hassidic, mystical."

"If I told you that a rabbi's chant during the service gives us back our land, would you believe me? Our world is a voice, a sob, a few holy words." Edmund Jabes

Epstein's own sense was of “being secular Jewish.” Some of his friends shared this sense but in the late thirties there were many Jews in China who were becoming Zionist. Epstein's father said of people who didn't know much about China that they were "living on the scraps of Europe." So they carried all their European views and differences into this little capsule in Tientsin. “So I knew all about this, what the difference was between being Zionist, Revisionist, General Zionists and all that, oh yes. The Jews had a little newspaper, a community paper, in Tientsin. Very parochial.”

"Every Jew drags behind himself a scrap of the ghetto, a scrap of rescued land where he takes refuge when alarmed," says Jabes.

I mentioned that I read that swastikas sometimes appeared on the rickshaws in the German concession during WWII. Epstein immediately drew the line: “That was the Germans not the Chinese. The first time I saw the swastika was in the German consulate in Tientsin. Of course I knew what it was. The Germans in a place like Tientsin were not much into Nazism. They were a merchant community.” Epstein said that the relations between the Jewish community and the Germans were “pretty good” until Hitler. He recalled a story of a German of aristocratic background who fell in love with a Jewish girl in Tientsin, and he ultimately committed suicide. But the Nazis, Epstein said, started to put their mark on the community. He remembered that in the mid-30s in sports, there was a very good Jewish player on the German soccer team and they put him out. “I came out of school in 1930. Very young. So we knew what was going on in Germany.”

"So we are brothers in our faces," Jabes.

"There was some anti-Semitism in Tientsin, but it was not Chinese, ranging from a sort of very cool anti-Semitism among the British, gentlemanly, but, nonetheless, there, to some very violent anti-Semitism among the white Russians, Russian emigres. But there was no sense of personal danger. I would say that the Jewish community didn't feel--having come out of old Russia--didn't find it very much out of the ordinary. Except that these people were not in control. There were no quotas or anti-Jewish laws or anything like that."

When I asked whether his sense of Jewishness grew in this enclave during World War II, he replied that he was, “of course, anti-Fascist and part of this was being Jewish. But it wasn't the only part.”

"He reads. `Jews go Home' scrawled in white chalk, in caps," Edmund Jabes.

"And so I was interested in the war. I didn't experience the war as a Jewish person. I mean, I wasn't in Europe. I wasn't in Germany. I was in China, and there was no anti-Semitism among the Chinese. In fact, most didn't know what a Jew was." When I said it was hard for a New Yorker to imagine such a world, he responded that “To the Chinese, there were two kinds of people in China, and the foreigners were very vaguely subdivided. There was a film made here in the 60's about an American pilot shot down by the Japanese and saved by some Chinese guerillas. And apparently the Chinese script writers were scouring their minds for an all-American name, and they came up with ‘Epstein.' So that's how little consciousness....That would do as if his name were Smith or Jones.”

Epstein said that he never personally experienced anti-Semitism during the war. “Not really as a Jew. We were in the intermediate stratum. We were foreigners. See the foreigners in China were divided into those who had extra-territorial privileges. You weren't subject to Chinese law. You were tried in your own courts either civil or criminal. In other words, you got away with murder both literally and figuratively. And the whole foreign occupation was based on that.  People who were from Czarist Russia (including the Polish part) had no extraterritorial rights after these were renounced by the Soviet Government. And the Germans and Austrians, through defeated in World War I, lost theirs. So if you were, as I was not, in these more or less privileged nationalities, you got home leave. In other words, you were treated as people who had come a long way to work in a difficult place and paid accordingly. You were paid more than the Chinese. So it was very stratified. Being Russian with extraterritorial privileges in China was more important than being Jewish--even during World War II.”

When I moved to the topic of the state of Israel, he noted that though it offered recognition to the PRC in 1949, it was not welcomed by the Chinese. China saw Israel, he said, as “a neocolonialist state” representing the interests of the “superpowers,” namely, the United States. He never mentioned Russia, another “superpower,” at the time, with a foothold in China, Africa or Central America.

I asked about the Tianamen Square tragedy and he remarked, "Well, I'm not so tragic about Tianamen. The west is, I know, but it wasn't so tragic when Chiang Kai-Shek was shooting people in the thirties. Of course, Tiananmen was a bad thing. I think these forces were bound to clash but it didn't have to take that form, and I don't think it will happen again. But I think in the west, it was a media event. This happened to be a time when the whole world press was here for Gorbachev and China was the center of attention: otherwise, you would have the normal number of foreign correspondents. So some people in the dissident camp thought that this was their big opportunity to make a dent.” He acknowledged that some Chinese leaders were having soul searching on the event. “At first, it was hands off the students: nothing was done. Then you have this country in which there was no experience or conception of crowd control because you weren't supposed to go against a gathering. There was no tear gas, no strategy...So when it finally came, it was bullets.”

Epstein went on to say that “now [1995] China is being slapped on both sides of the face. It's a sport. That's not to say things are perfect here: they aren't. But if your population is increasing, they say you're going to overrun the world; if you're going to have fairly severe family planning, then they say that you're slaying babies. If you're in economic difficulty, obviously, your economy doesn't work; if your economy begins to develop, you're going to develop into an economic superpower and then maybe a military superpower, so watch out. But you're also a great market with 1.2 billion consumers. And where the ideologues on the right would like to see this socialist country fall apart, the ones with investments here aren't so sure....”

He went on to sum up, “I saw the old China and the overthrow of three things. First, the new China is an independent country which she wasn't before; second, China's a united country which she wasn't; third, China is no longer feudal in its structure--there may be feudal thinking but there's no feudal economy.”

Moving backwards, I asked about the history of Jews in China, particularly those who lived in K'aifengfu who came from Persia in the second century and were called "T'ai Chin Chiao," meaning "those who extract the sinews."

Epstein corrected me and said that this was not the modern word for Jews. The old expression applied to the Jewish community in K'aifengfu, and that was actually one place where there was complete assimilation. The Jewish community was very small, and through intermarriage, the Jews disappeared. The modern word for Jew is ‘Youtai': it's really used as a descriptive word for the people from Judah. ‘Youtai.' The old word is never used now. Historical.”

A secular Jew formed in a different historical crucible in Asia, Israel Epstein is a revolutionary who fights with words. What is "being Jewish" in China? Is it in his anti-Fascism during the war; his abhorrence of violence against the Chinese by the Japanese, or the Chinese against themselves, or the government against the students at Tiananmen Square; his support for the underdog--the once feudal, often scorned and violated China; his pride in a nation that welcomed Jews in flight from the Holocaust, and that was never guilty of anti-Semitism; his memories of his secular Yiddish-speaking parents; or his image of his father standing outside the synagogue and listening to the singing the "Kol Nidre." But there is a serious split with the Jewish principle of “tikun olam”—healing the world--as Epstein never publicly acknowledged Mao's crimes against the Chinese people. He was a high-ranking Communist with enough status to meet with Mao in a cave in the thirties, with Soong Ching Ling, Edgar Snow, yearly with Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping: all part of the totalitarian government of China. Perhaps what makes him seem more Jewish than he acknowledged is his sense of being, at the same time, both an insider and an outsider in China: a Jewish state of being and mind. "My brothers turned to me and said, `You are not Jewish. You do not go to the synagogue.' I turned to my brothers and answered, `I carry the synagogue within me.'"

*Italicized portions are rabbinical observations and questions from Edmond Jabes, The Book of Questions, interspersed by the author into her interview.