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To a young girl named Nini Karpel, Vienna in the thirties seemed a romantic confection. From schussing down snowy mountain slopes to talking politics in coffee houses, she cherished her birthplace itself as a living entity. But there were undercurrents of conflict and hate beneath the glittering facade of the former imperial capital, and these came to the surface when the Adolf Hitler came to power in neighbouring Germany.
Anti-semitism, which Nini and her idealistic friends believed had disappeared forever from their socially advanced Vienna, resurfaced, and things became much worse when Germany annexed Austria. In these brutal times her Jewish identity set her apart from other Austrians although her family was fully assimilated and proud to be Austrians.
They with the other Jews of Vienna were tormented and disenfranchised and robbed of any means to earn a living. Heartbroken at leaving the city she loved, Nini and her family had to abandon their homeland and seek refuge to save their lives.
Shanghai was one of the very few ports that would accept Jewish refugees without entry visas, and so Nini and her family left all that they knew to travel seven thousand miles to an unimagined place. They found themselves in another world, of opium dens and decadent clubs in the midst of another war that was raging between China and Japan. It was a city of immense wealth for the privileged few and unparalleled poverty for the masses, where disease ran rampant and dead bodies lay in the rat-infested streets.
As conditions deteriorated with the progress of the war, survival itself once again became the main concern, and the Karpels had to be resourceful and resilient in the face of the brutal Japanesee occupation.
Ten Green Bottles is told by Nini's daughter Vivian Jeanette Kaplan through the eyes of her mother. It is a true story that depicts the fierce perseverance of one family, victims of the forces of evil, who endured and overcame sufferings of biblical proportion to survive. It was a time when ordinary people became heroes.
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The Author
Vivian Jeanette Kaplan was born in Shanghai in 1946, where her parents were married. As her family originated in Vienna, her mother tongue is German. When she was two years old her parents arrived in Canada, settling in Toronto. She graduated from University of Toronto, where she studied English, French and Spanish. She is married and has three sons.
For a number of years the family owned and ran a lakeside lodge in Muskoka, north of Toronto. For twenty years Vivian had her own business, Vivian Kaplan Oriental Interiors, an import-export firm with interior design showrooms specializing in decor from the Far East. Ten Green Bottles, which tells her own true family saga, is her first book.
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