Chinese-written romance on Jewish Shanghai experience promoted at Frankfurt Book Fair

SHANGHAI, Oct. 15 (Xinhua) -- The English version of a Chinese-written novel on Jewish experience in Shanghai during the Second World War will be promoted at the ongoing 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair on Thursday afternoon at German time.

The book ranked first in terms of sales of both Chinese and English versions at the 2009 Shanghai Book Fair in August, which is a leading book trading event in China, according to the Shanghai Century Publishing Group, which owns the copyright of the two versions.

The group said the copyright of the book would be sold to Germany, Japan and India at the 6-day fair being held in Frankfurt, which is the largest international book fair in the world.

The book, named A Jewish Piano, is the first part of a serial epic under the title of Jews in Shanghai. It describes how a Jewish pianist from Poland and his Chinese girl friend fled Nazi holocaust and found shelter in Shanghai during the World War Two.

Shanghai accomodated about 30,000 Jewish refugees from the Nazi prosecution in the War, and thousands fled to other countries via the city. The Japanese invaders at the time restricted their residences to the Hongkou District, in northeastern Shanghai.

The author, Bei La, who was born in Shanghai in mid 1980s, sees her book as a legend about "love and tolerance". She, now a Canadian Chinese who has made some Jewish friends in Europe and the United States, said the book was also a memory about her hometown Shanghai.