Ten Green Bottles:
Vienna to Shanghai – Journey of Fear and Hope
Vivian Jeanette Kaplan

To Nini Karpel, her Vienna of the 1920s and ’30s seemed a romantic confection, but the undercurrents of conflict and hate in the former imperial capital surfaced when Hitler took power in neighbouring Germany. Anti-Semitism, which Nini and her friends believed had disappeared from ­socially advanced ­Vienna, became widespread. The Karpels and the other Jews were tormented and disenfranchised. Heartbroken at leaving the city they loved, Nini and her family sought ­refuge in Shanghai, one of the few places that would accept Jewish refugees. They found themselves in another world, of opium dens and decadent clubs in the midst of a war raging ­between China and Japan. Ten Green Bottles is told by Nini’s daughter Vivian Jeanette Kaplan through the eyes of her mother. It is a true story about the fierce perseverance of one family, who overcame sufferings of biblical proportions.

Vivian Jeanette Kaplan was born in Shanghai, where her parents were married. When she was two years old, her parents arrived in Canada, settling in Toronto. Ten Green Bottles, which tells her own true family saga, is her first book.

Ten Green Bottles won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Biography/Memoir in 2003. In Italy it won the ADEI-WIZO Award, presented in Florence in 2007.

For further information about Vivian Jeanette Kaplan and Ten Green Bottles, click here to visit the author’s website.