Helmi's Shadow: A Journey of Survival From Russia to East Asia to the American West

by David Horgan

Overview

Helmi’s Shadow tells the sweeping true story of two Russian Jewish refugees, a mother (Rachel Koskin) and her daughter (Helmi). With determination and courage, they survived decades of hardship in the hidden corners of war-torn Asia and then journeyed across the Pacific at the end of the Second World War to become United States citizens after seeking safe harbor in the unlikely western desert town of Reno, Nevada. This compelling narrative is also a memoir, told lovingly by Helmi’s son, David, of growing up under the wings of these strong women in an unusual American family.

Rachel Koskin was a middle-class Russian Jew born in Odessa, Ukraine, in 1896. Ten years later, her family fled from the murderous pogroms against Jews in the Russian Empire eastward to Harbin, a Russian-controlled city within China’s borders on the harsh plain of Manchuria. Full of lively detail and the struggles of being stateless in a time of war, the narrative follows Rachel through her life in Harbin, which became a center of Russian culture in the Far East; the birth of her daughter, Helmi, in Kobe, Japan; their life together in the slums of Shanghai and back in Japan during World War II, where they endured many more hardships; and their subsequent immigration to the United States.

This remarkable account uncovers a history of refugees living in war-torn China and Japan, a history that to this day remains largely unknown. It is also a story of survival during a long period of upheaval and war—from the Russian Revolution to the Holocaust—and an intimate portrait of an American immigrant family. David reveals both the joys and tragedies he experienced growing up in a multicultural household in post\-Second World War America with a Jewish mother, a live-in Russian grandmother, and a devout Irish Catholic American father. 

As David develops a clearer awareness of the mysterious past lives of his mother and grandmother—and the impact of these events on his own understanding of the long-term effects of fear, trauma, and loss—he shows us that, even in times of peace and security, we are all shadows of our past, marked by our experiences, whether we choose to reveal them to others or not.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781647790202
Publisher:	University of Nevada Press
Publication date:	08/17/2021
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	15 - 18 Years

About the Author

David Horgan is a writer and professional musician. His book of short stories titled The Golden West Trio Plus One received the Merriam-Frontier Award from the University of Montana. His stories and essays have appeared in a number of publications, including The New Montana Story, The Best of the West, Portland Review, Quarterly West, Northern Lights, and The Crescent Review. Born and raised in Reno, Nevada, he now lives in Missoula, Montana.

Read an Excerpt

Prologue / Kobe, Japan
August 1945

On a sweltering summer day, just before noon, a petite young woman sat in a crowded streetcar that rolled along the industrial waterfront of Kobe, Japan's main international seaport. The streetcar's progress was painfully slow. Mounds of rubble were heaped all around, the result of recent American carpet bombings that had killed thousands of people and destroyed large swaths of the city. Entire blocks down near the harbor had been leveled, and to the young woman, it seemed miraculous that the streetcar could even still operate.

Her hair was dark, nearly black, and although Kobe was the city of her birth she was not Japanese. Her name was Helmi Koskin, and she was Russian-Jewish, part of a small community of foreigners who had survived in Japan throughout the Second World War. She was on her way to one of the waterfront black markets where fresh fruit and vegetables, officially unavailable, might yet be for sale. She and her mother, with whom she lived in a small boarding house that her mother managed, had subsisted mostly on rations of moldy white rice and beans for the past four years of war.
Suddenly the streetcar lurched to a stop in the middle of a block, and the conductor gestured impatiently for everyone to get off. Helmi joined the other passengers filing into the street. It was probably just a blockage on the tracks. No one moved with any particular urgency. Weariness and resignation were in every face. Sirens had sounded several times in recent days, but no American bombers had appeared over Kobe for over a month. Everyone understood that Japan was on its knees. Tokyo, the capital city, had been ravaged repeatedly by fire-bombings, as had most other major cities. Word was circulating that a week ago some kind of new bomb - one bomb dropped from a single plane - had obliterated the city of Hiroshima, only 150 miles to the east. Another, three days later, supposedly had done the same to Nagasaki, a bit further away. In between these horrors, the Soviet Union, fresh from fighting the Nazis, finally declared war on Japan. Would Russians soon be dropping bombs too? No one knew what to believe anymore. As she stepped onto the sidewalk, Helmi looked upward at the hazy sky, wondering if Kobe's fate was also to be wiped off the map. But there was nothing in the sky and no sound of a plane.

Traffic all around stopped, and people had congregated on the sidewalk, maintaining an odd silence. Some gathered around a table set in front of a storefront, on which a large console radio had been placed. The radio suddenly crackled to life, as did the loudspeakers mounted on rickety poles that normally broadcast air raid sirens. There were no sirens now, just the crackling static, but everyone around her appeared intent on listening. Then a voice began broadcasting, tinny and peculiarly high-pitched. She strained to listen, but she could understand nothing. She had lived in Kobe long enough to learn conversational Japanese, but this voice spoke in an unfamiliar dialect. Whether a man's or woman's voice, she couldn't even tell. People all around glanced at each other with shocked expressions, but no one looked at her. The voice from the speakers went on for several minutes and then abruptly stopped, and all was quiet again. For a few seconds, nothing happened and no one moved, as if the world had been frozen. Then, slowly, people shuffled to life again on the sidewalks, cars and trucks and bicycles started moving up the street, and passengers made their way back to the streetcar. Faces remained stunned. Hardly anyone spoke. A few had begun to weep. She overheard a word, spoken in a whisper: Showa. This is what they called their Emperor. Was the voice his? What in the world could he have to say? As far as she knew, he had never before addressed the populace. Had he announced new restrictions? Would there be the great invasion of the mainland that many had feared?

It wasn't until later, when she finally returned home with a few meager vegetables, that she learned the news, from an English-speaking Japanese neighbor. Indeed it was the Emperor, speaking directly to his people for the first time in his life. His speech had a title, The Jewel-Voice Broadcast, and it had been delivered in the arcane dialect used for rare royal decrees. The message was simple: Japan had surrendered to America.

Helmi Koskin was twenty-two years old in 1945. She saw that everything now would change. It would be a different world, whether better or worse, she couldn't tell, although it was hard to imagine things getting much worse. She had long hoped for her life to be different. She had hoped to live in a place where she could feel she belonged. Her first languages were Russian and English, yet she had never lived in a place where these were the native tongues. Although her birthplace was Japan, her mother had raised her in Shanghai, across the South China Sea, under impoverished conditions. The Japanese had bombed their tenement there during the invasion of China before the Second World War even began. After fleeing back to Japan, they had endured more privation and more bombs. Their house was one of the few on their block still standing. They had no citizenship anywhere. They had no true home.

Throughout the war, the Japanese had relentlessly publicized that Americans were vicious barbarians and that if war ever came to the mainland people would be slaughtered mercilessly, tortured, eaten alive. Helmi Koskin never believed this. For as long as she could remember, she had harbored an image of America gleaned from books and movies and music, and from a few actual Americans. If America would stop raining down bombs, then she believed in her heart that things would get better. If the war was really over, then maybe she could finally find a place to call home.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

Prologue-Kobe, Japan, August, 1945 xv

Part 1 The Far East

Exile-Odessa to Harbin

Pogrom, Odessa, 1905 4

The Paris of the Orient, Harbin, 1920 10

Telegram, Harbin, 1926 20

Refugee - Harbin to Shanghai

Soothing the Barbarian, Shanghai, 1927 26

The Garden Bridge, Shanghai, 1931 32

Reno, Nevada, 1955 39

Shanghai, 2008 44

The Thomas Hanbury School for Girls, Shanghai, 1932 51

The French Concession, Shanghai, 1935 56

The War at the End of the Street, Shanghai, 1937 63

Mrs. Blacksill's School, Kobe, 1937 71

The Fourth Floor, Shanghai, 1938 76

The Next World, Shanghai, 1939 82

Reno, Nevada, 1956 89

Stateless - Shanghai to Kobe

The Thomas Cook and Son Travel Service, Kobe, 1939 92

Stateless, Kobe, 1941-1943 98

Fire from the Sky, Kobe, 1943-1945 106

Immigrant - Kobe to America

Sentimental Journey, Baguio, Philippines, 1945 114

The Counter Intelligence Corps, Kobe, 1945 118

The Quota System, Kobe, 1946 125

Passage on a Freighter, Kobe, 1946 127

Part 2 America

Family - San Francisco, Reno

The Evangeline Hotel for Women, San Francisco, 1946 134

An Invitation, San Francisco, 1947 138

Over the Mountains, San Francisco and Reno, 1947 143

Outside the Rail, Reno, 1947 148

The Loud-Mouthed Bishop, Reno, 1948 151

Mother-in-Law, Reno, 1948 156

The Little Theater, Reno, 1949 163

The Second Son, Reno, 1951 170

Reno I

The Eternal Fires of Hell 180

The Chesterfield Girl 187

Howling in the Night 193

Black Sunday 199

The Empty Chapel 210

The Old Man at the Window 221

The Kitchen Table 224

The Silver Fox 226

Mazel Tov 232

Reno II

Freedom 236

The Rest Home 239

The Next Life 245

Helmi's Shadow 256

Epilogue-November, 1946 262

Acknowledgments 265

Bibliography 267

About the Author 270

Editorial Reviews

Horgan’s departure from overused views of Reno as “the sin city” and of Nevada in general as “the sin state” and his emphasis on the daily struggles of immigrants who manage to overcome hardships and prejudice to succeed in the Silver State place his book close to other remarkable memoirs on immigration in Nevada, such as Robert Laxalt’s Sweet Promised Land (1957) or Emma Sepúlveda-Pulvirenti’s From Border Crossings to Campaign Trail: Chronicle of a Latina in Politics (1998).”
—David Rio, Western American Literature

“An inherently astonishing, engaging, and informative blend of family history and memoir, Helmi's Shadow: A Journey of Survival From Russia to East Asia to the American West is an extraordinary and memorable account that is especially recommended for community, college, and university library Jewish Biography & 20th Century History collections.”
—Midwest Book Review

“While this book serves as a haunting memoir, it also quickly becomes a fascinating history of the conflicts between China and Japan, of life in Russia, and, of course, events in the Second World War. Horgan’s research is meticulous and enticing, with detailed maps and rare photos which deliver rich substance to his warm, inviting narrative.” —Billings Gazette

"Helmi’s Shadow is an absolute candy fix for politophiles and historophiles. . . . Quick, colorful chapters give the reader vivid pictures of harsh times of long ago." 
—New York Journal of Books

“More than the lyricism of Bogard’s prose and the beauty of Rogers’ photography, the book can be taken as a wakeup call to get out there and be alone with the night—if we can find one without the neighbor’s spotlights.”
—Youth Services Book Review

"Helmi's Shadow accomplishes that near-miracle of the best literature: It makes the world new. David Horgan has excavated the story of an amazing woman, his late mother, with such rigor and insight that her personal journey becomes a way for the reader to re-see 20th-century global convulsions, and experience them in an intimate and sensory way. This beautifully written, riveting account is a treasure and an illumination."
—Dierdre McNamer, author of Red Rover

“This is a story that might have been lost about a woman who might have been lost. It is the double account of a life lived through statelessness and war and of the detective work it took to retrieve that life. David Horgan skillfully weaves together a family saga that runs from the Pale of Settlement to Reno, Nevada, and an account of his own journey back from Reno to Russia, Shanghai, and Kobe, Japan. The elements of his story are at once the episodes that make up his mother’s life and a mini-history of the 20th century. Unraveling one life, Helmi’s Shadow finds a thread that takes it across half the globe.”
—Michael North, professor of English, UCLA,  author of Reading 1922 and Camera Works
 
"Helmi’s Shadow is a vivid family narrative that illuminates large historical issues, beginning with pogroms in Tsarist Russia, continuing with a series of exile experiences in China and Japan, and culminating in the simultaneously upraising and uprooting experience of immigrant life in post-World War II America. David Horgan has written a mighty book on a mighty theme."
—Richard Drake, Lucile Speer Research Chair in politics and history, University of Montana

"The story is gripping, and Horgan is an outstanding writer. Given that so much of the literature on Jews in Shanghai is devoted to the refugee community that arrived between 1937 to 1941, the history of the Russian Jews is still, for the large part, overlooked and unknown. Moreover, the depiction of the lives of two Russian Jews living in Kobe, Japan during the Second World War adds to our knowledge of Jews in Asia. I would recommend this book in a heartbeat."
—Kevin Ostoyich, professor of history, Valparaiso University

From the Publisher