Ten Green Bottles - Hardcover

Spellbinding . . .evocative . . . remarkable achievement. China experience.....sets this book apart "Publisher's Weekly" Riveting . . . moving and memorable "Kirkus Reviews" Kaplan's prose is simply stunning . . . Kaplan's descriptions bring wartime Shanghai, its people and smells, to life . . . Although nonfiction, "Ten Green Bottles" reads like a novel. Kaplan captures the mood and feelings of her mother experiences as if they were her own. "Canadian Jewish News" Kaplan writes in the first-person voice of her mother . . . a decision that gives her book an emotional power and vivid immediacy. "Maclean's" Her powerful, harrowing story grips the reader. In an odyssey of horrors that takes place over a decade . . . what shines through is the family's indomitable will to survive. "Ottawa Citizen""

Nini Karpel was a Vienna-born Jew and though she was proud of her heritage, she always considered herself Austrian first, Jewish second. But when the Nazis invaded Austria, the Karpels quickly became foreigners in their own homeland. Marginalized and tormented, Nini realized that their only chance of survival would be to flee. With her ailing mother and young brother, Nini lead the family 7,000 miles across the sea to Shanghai. The Jews living in Shanghai, a city occupied by the Japanese, were relegated to a ghetto called Hongkew when Japan entered World War II. Facing poverty, disease, and savagery unlike any that they had ever known, Nini held the family together against all odds. Ten Green Bottles is the true story of one family's struggle to overcome suffering of biblical proportion. This fascinating biography explores an aspect of the Jewish experience in WWII scarcely ever discussed.