For Passover, a dispatch from the Chinese city of Harbin, where Jews once flourished—and melted away

By Dara Horn [View this email in your browser]( There is no better Jewish story than the one we are about to read tonight. But as far as modern tales go, this one comes very close. There is a tourist-industry concept, popular in places largely devoid of Jews, known as the “Jewish Heritage Site.” One of the most revealing and alienating of these attractions is Harbin, China, a city founded by thousands of Russian Jews fleeing anti-Semitism to build the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Today, it is home to a world-famous ice festival, 10 million Chinese people, 700 hungry tigers, and exactly one living Jew. This Passover, as you recreate the original Jewish exodus, Tablet is proud to present acclaimed novelist Dara Horn’s (nonfiction!) dispatch from frozen Manchuria, where she traveled in search of Jews frozen in time, the Modern Hotel’s original ice cream, and great cities that melt away. —Alana Newhouse CITIES OF ICE By Dara Horn One of my strange and vivid memories from my first trip to Israel, when I was 9 years old, is of a brief cartoon I watched at the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv. The cartoon described the travels of Benjamin of Tudela, a 12th-century Spanish Jewish merchant who documented his six-year journey traversing the known world, across the Mediterranean to Turkey, Israel, Egypt, Babylonia, and Persia, and reporting on India and China, and sharing crowded boats and wagons in-between. The Diaspora Museum has since been revamped and rebranded as the Museum of the Jewish People, but in 1986 it was a dark and openly depressing place, its dour displays all leading to a “Scrolls of Fire” atrium describing how hapless Jews were expelled or burned alive. But the cartoon was bright and curious. Benjamin was a ridiculous bowling-pin figure with googly eyes, bobbing across the screen and cheerfully reporting on thriving Jewish communities around the world—the Jews in France who inexplicably lived in a castle, the Jews in Babylonia who had their own googly eyed king, the Jews in Yemen who joined local Arab armies and stampeded with them in a cloud of dust, the Jews in Syria who pacified wiggly eyebrowed assassins with free silk scarves. For reasons I could not articulate at the age of 9, I was utterly enchanted. I feel that same enchantment now when I am seduced by the travel industry’s branding of the world as an amazing place full of welcoming people who beneath it all are actually the same. My personal experience as a tourist in over 50 countries has contradicted this hopeful messaging entirely—in reality, the more time I spend in any place, the more I notice the differences between myself and the inhabitants, and the more alienated, uncomfortable, and anxious I become. Yet colorful photos of exotic places on TripAdvisor lure me every time. So it is not surprising that I was eager to make my way to a city called Harbin in a remote province of northeastern China, south of Siberia and north of North Korea, where the temperature hovers around minus 30 Celsius for much of the year, and where every winter, over 10,000 workers construct an entire massive city out of blocks of ice. I’d seen photos and videos of the Harbin Ice Festival, which dwarfs similar displays in Canada and Japan by orders of magnitude, its enormous ice buildings laced through with LED lighting and sometimes replicating famous monuments at or near life size. It attracts over 2 million visitors a year, because it’s the kind of thing that needs to be seen to be believed. As I considered whether a trip to Harbin was worth it, my mindless travel-industry scrolling took me to a list of other local tourist attractions, including synagogues. Yes, synagogues. Plural. And then I discovered something deeply strange: The city of Harbin was built by Jews. Only later would I discover that the ice city and the Jewish city were actually the same, and that I was being actively lured to both, in ways more disturbing than I could have possibly imagined. Like a googly eyed Benjamin of Tudela, I had to go. Copyright © 2019 Tablet Magazine, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you signed up at our website, www.tabletmag.com. Our mailing address is: Tablet Magazine P.O. Box 20079New York, NY 10001 [Add us to your address book]( Want to change how you receive these emails? You can [update your preferences]( or [unsubscribe from this list](.