Rachel Meller was never close to her aunt Lisbeth, a cool, unemotional woman with a drawling Viennese-Californian accent and a cigarette in her hand.

But in her will she left her niece an intricately carved Chinese box. Inside the box were photographs, letters and documents that led Rachel to uncover a story she had never known: that of a passionate Jewish teenager caught up by war, and forced to flee elegant Vienna for Shanghai. Set against a backdrop of the war in the Far East, The Box with the Sunflower Clasp is a sweeping family memoir that tells the hidden history of the Jews of Shanghai. In conversation with Endless Flight author Keiron Pim.

An event from Jewish Book Week 2024