From Czernowitz to China and Beyond: A 20th Century Life

Wyndy Carr's review  

Goodreads Apr 25, The Berkeley Times, May 30, 2021

Whatta Gal! "It’s amazing how much one can learn from reading. You see how other people do something, whether right or wrong. Either way. It’s a fantastic thing. You can’t live without books.”
 

Margot Smith’s Mother, Ethel Liebman Wiesinger, (1890-1984) boldly narrates her own story in From Czernowitz to China and Beyond: A 20th Century Life. It’s something between Elie Weisel’s Night, War and Peace, People Magazine c. 1938-49 at the Beverly Hills Hotel, a Studs Terkel interview, City Lights and Gone with the Wind. 

 

Like the intrepid Margot, who earned a doctorate in Public Health from Cal in 1977 and raised awareness on California healthcare through research, videos/films and advocacy as well as four children in Berkeley since she moved here in 1967; her Mom fit definitely in my “Whatta Gal!” category. Of “another era,” quaint and embarrassing here and there, but chock full of smarts and chutzpah* as well, albeit hard won.
 

And what a life! World War I, the international enclave in Shanghai, weeks on ocean liners across the Pacific discussing Schiller with fellows 20 years older, The Boxer Rebellion and her analysis of the insurgence of Chinese communism: “the situation was so desperate that anyone with guts could rule…the ancient tradition of graft, protégés; not able men but favored men were getting the good jobs…”  

 

With additional material from her daughters about their lives in Shanghai, San Francisco, Hamburg and Los Angeles; I found her story frank, observant and astutely educational, especially in the "forgotten history" department. (Women's history, especially as entrepreneurs, Germany and Germans between the World Wars, the Austro-Hungarian empire, Jewish immigrants in America and international trade communities, Eastern Europe, Asia, the Opium Wars, European Imperialism....)

 

Born as a “surprise” last child of 11 in a well-off Jewish family in what is now Ukraine when her parents were in their 40s, Ethel Liebman Wiesinger says she was a “very pampered child … I was left alone…I was the toy of my parents…”  

 

However, “Every Saturday (the Sabbath) we had men from all stations in life come into our house…They were the most interesting nights because they would sit and talk…I was partly listening, partly inside and partly outside, and I was serving them with tea. I listened to the conversation from the time I was four or five years old up to the time that we left Austria (when she was 21)…”  

 

This ability to listen and really hear and consider what was going on in adult conversations gave her a lifelong advantage.

“I read books, which my mother did not do…. It was a house with reading and literature and art and music, and all these things were part of life…Education counted more than money…You considered education, you considered patronage; it was considered more glory than being rich. And I think the people were happier, too.”

I just love her voice. A real raconteur, looking back at every part of her life. "China was an exciting place. I was the only girl. I went to lots of parties and everyone wanted to dance with me. And I was so stupid to show off what I knew because I didn't know anything else to show off. I used to sit and recite poetry...There was a piano. And I could sing...all the German songs we sang in school...they were lonesome for them...I was the queen of Shanghai...how I impressed them was incredible."

 

Life in New York, being ostracized from her family for marrying a Christian, the Great Depression, loss, bankruptcy -- building her and her children’s lives back up again and again. A line on the back cover blurb says Czernowitz to China “tells of being married to a German entrepreneur in pre-revolutionary China and how politics affected her life” is only a shadow of her story, reflected in and reflecting the “world outside.”

 

Marital battles with Otto “lasted about three years" in earnest. Like Martin Niemoller and many Germans, “(he) …hailed Adolf Hitler for beginning a "national revival." But Ethel "packed up my clothes and went ....”  which was very daring for a woman with two children in 1933. She went from San Francisco to Los Angeles, he went back to Germany in 1938. 

 

She began running a gift shop where movie stars like Walt Disney, Fred Astaire, Al Jolson and Charlie Chaplin dropped in. “…they sat down and they talked and they laughed and they smoked cigarettes and it was fun. I was so interested…my place, where he (Disney, Shostakovich, Chaplin…) could be a plain human being.” In Beverly Hills and Hollywood, they did and did not pretend that war and suffering were a million miles away. They knew.

Naive, trusting, cultivated, privileged, but a gutsy gal who learned, loved and charmed friends, too: “you still have your own intellect; how you use your education and if you use it at all” she said in 1980. 

Wise words for survivors, recent graduates and rule-breakers in another disaster year, another rough world, for finding the rays of light. 

 

Whatta gal! 

 

Find From Czernowitz to China and Beyond: A 20th Century Life at Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore in Elmwood in Berkeley or through Regent Press. 

*“A Yiddish term meaning audacity, courage, or nerve.”