Reviewed by Nicole Laskowski

Ursula Bacon is facing her past. In her memoir “Shanghai Diary,” Bacon takes readers back 50 years through a tale of genocide, hatred, survival and forgiveness. Bacon and her family were among the many Jews who in the late 1930s fled Nazi persecution.

The story may seem familiar enough. But Bacon and her family fled to the most unlikeliest of places. Because so many countries had shut their doors to Jewish refugees, Bacon’s family, along with 20,000 others, fled to Shanghai, China.

This is where Bacon’s story of resilience begins. She takes readers deep into the foreign culture she and her family face, a place where bartering is culturally necessary, indoor plumbing is a rare find, privacy is nonexistent, everything is for sale, and safety is highly questionable.  Bacon and her family not only struggle to provide for the basic necessities like food and shelter, they also discover that humor, music and tight-knit friendships are equally important for keeping the soul alive.

However, Bacon seems to have purposefully left out whole chunks of her past. This, of course, is a memoirist’s prerogative, but when the author defaults to an almost list-style to describe her situations, the story loses its vitality and richness.

Most obviously, she fails to bring to life the entire emotional side of the relationship that develops between her and the man she will eventually marry, Wolf Levysohn, another refugee living in Shanghai. Although she says again and again that she knew she would marry Wolf one day, Bacon does not explore this relationship.  That’s too bad, because it seems that falling in love – or, more broadly, forming an intimate bond in such devastating circumstances -- is the key to understanding how her family and others survived and thrived. 

Because she denies readers entrée into an important part of her life, the memoir sometimes feels hollow. At times driven more by dates and facts than insight, Bacon’s memoir ultimately leaves readers wanting more.