2024 Independent Publisher Book Awards, Gold
Medal Winner
American Bookfest 20th Annual Best Book
Awards, Winner
2023
Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards, Finalist
When
Semyon Kaspé and Lydia Shapiro parted on a street in the city of
Harbin after a night of music and merriment on August 24, 1933,
neither could possibly anticipate the dark sequence of events that
loomed ahead. They would set the Manchurian Jewish
community on edge, arouse worldwide opprobrium and leave behind a
mystery that was never fully solved.
The abduction of young Kaspé that night became a watershed event in
the history of the so-called Empire of Manchukuo, a large region
forcibly severed from northeast China two years earlier and declared
independent by the Japanese Army. It played out against the backdrop
of an explosive mixture of nationalities, religions and ideologies
and pulled in an improbable cast of Jewish merchants, Japanese
military men, White Russian thugs, French diplomats, Chinese judges,
an Italian spy-for-hire and even Pu Yi, the deposed Emperor of
China. The case would help unmask Manchukuo as the Japanese puppet
state it was.
Part
cold-case thriller and part social history, the true, macabre tale of Semyon Kaspé is told in the context of the larger story of the lives
of the 20,000 mostly Russian Jews who had called this northeastern
Chinese city home at the
beginning of last century. It recounts the factors that led to their
arrival and their hasty exodus, despite a grand Japanese plan to
keep them there and use them for their later conquest of Asia. And it
posits a solution to the mystery of who ordered the
kidnapping, which has puzzled historians
for decades.
Book Launch Video
Watch the video of the launch of Murder in Manchuria ,
co-presented by the Museum of Chinese in America and the Museum at
Eldridge Street in New York City on November 15, 2023: