Writing a non-fiction book about the Hungarian Rescuer of Shanghai Jewish Refugees (Book)

Type of Abstract (select): Book Presentation

Abstract (max. 250 words):
1938, Shanghai. Drained by Western colonization, China is suffocating in Imperial Japan’s grip. Its government fled to the mountains; the foreign elite is being evacuated on ships. The East Asian metropolis is flooded by destitute peasants chased by the frontlines and Jews who left everything behind in Hitler’s Europe. Paul Komor, the Budapest-born China Hand businessman who had been assisting his needy compatriots for decades, is now deprived of his precious citizenship by Hungary’s antisemitic legislation. While his national identity is questioned, he builds on his family’s charity traditions, and with the American JDC’s first female overseas social worker, they organize aid for Shanghai’s nearly twenty-thousand Jewish refugees. Situated in a seemingly “exotic” and “far” East, the events described in this non-fiction book deal with sensitive questions such as East-Central European Jewish assimilation, Hungarian nationalism, the agency of Hungary’s wartime government, and the relationship of the emigrant communities with their homeland. Punctuated with underground crime, love affairs, and political intrigue, the story takes the reader to the twilight of the colonial world before the dawn of New China.

This presentation introduces the recently published book A cserben hagyott hazafi. Zsidómentés a háborús Sanghajban (Budapest, Könyv Népe: 2023), currently rendered in English as “Patriot Left Behind. Rescuing Jews in Wartime Shanghai,” a non-academic work by an academic. Using multilingual archives from three continents, this rigorously researched non-fiction is based on parts of the author’s doctoral dissertation he submitted at New York University.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Mátyás Mervay is a New York-based Hungarian historian of China and Central Europe. His dissertation “Habsburg Refugees in China: Postimperial Diaspora, Diplomacy, and Orientalism in the Republican Era (1918-1949)” focuses on displacement, humanitarian assistance, and diaspora formation in a twentieth-century Sino-Central European foreign relations context. He earned his B.A. in History at the ELTE University (Budapest) and his M.A. degree at Nankai University (Tianjin, China), where he majored in Modern Chinese History. He has published academic and public history works in English, Mandarin, and Hungarian. Mátyás regularly teaches modern East Asian history, currently at Yeshiva and Princeton Universities.