In December, they fled to Nice, France, then boarded a ship bound for Shanghai. There, after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Japanese troops ordered as many as 18,000 Jewish immigrants to an area called Hongkew, which Mr Abish described as a ghetto.
He recalled that as World War II drew to a close, Allied warplanes attacked Shanghai ports, warehouses and airports, and sometimes civilian targets, including an open-air market in Hongkew, where 250 people were killed, including 30 Jews. Weeks later, after the Japanese surrender, the US Seventh Fleet sailed into Shanghai to begin what turned out to be a fairly short-lived interregnum before revolutionary communist forces took power.
By the late 1940s, as the inevitability of Mao Zedong’s victory over the ruling Kuomintang became apparent, hostility towards foreigners increased. And in December 1948, the Abish family sailed to the newly established state of Israel, circumnavigating Africa and reaching Israel via the Mediterranean Sea to avoid a dangerous passage through the Suez Canal.
He traces this period in his memoirs, a story laid out on two intermingled tracks with chapters entitled “The Writer-to-Be” and “The Writer”.
“It’s a book about making a writer,” he noted in his interview with Tablet.
Abish portrayed his years in Israel as part of his literary evolution, remembering his time as a reluctant young conscript in an Army tank unit and then as a librarian at the American Library run by the now-defunct United States Information Agency.
“Is it inevitable that the aspiring writer, fickle, inconstant, even disloyal when it comes to getting an idea for a story, will see his former friends and loved ones as potential material for a future text,” he writes in a passage on a woman he called Allison. And later, in a passage about a woman named Bilhah, he asks, “Does the aspiring writer see love as the ideal text in the making?”
In 1957 the family moved on again and he arrived in New York; he became a US citizen in 1960. Over the next decade, he published a collection of poems, “Duel Site” (1970), as well as “Alphabetisch Afrika”. He also published three collections of short stories: “Minds Meet” (1975), “In the Future Perfect” (1977) and “99: The New Meaning” (1990).