Valpo Students Educate an International Audience

When Christian Yoder first attended the spring 2020 course “Historical Theatre: The Shanghai Jews,” she was not expecting to create something that would touch an audience overseas. Yet after months of researching, interviewing, and navigating a pandemic, “The Singer of Shanghai” premiered on YouTube, garnering attention that has since grown to international levels. On January 31, 2023, students of Broughton High School in Edinburgh, Scotland will perform the piece, and that performance may just be the beginning of the production’s global impact. 

“In my mind, it was just a small class project for a small class in Indiana,” Christian says. “I know that in the past ‘The Singer of Shanghai’ has had a huge impact on the Valparaiso and refugee communities, but to me it’s crazy that something I had worked on as a class project is becoming something that will be performed internationally. That’s not something I ever would have expected going into that class.” 

“The Singer of Shanghai” is the story of the Abrahams, a family of Jewish people living in Germany on November 9, 1938 — the night of Kristallnacht, or “the night of broken glass.” The coordinated wave of antisemitic assaults and arrests by the Nazi party resulted in the arrest of Ida Abraham’s husband and brother, and a brick through her window that would shower a baby Harry J. Abraham’s crib in broken glass. The play follows Ida as she struggles to free her family from concentration camps, obtain passage out of Germany, and make a new life in Shanghai, China, one of the only places that was accepting Jewish refugees at the time. 

“No one I’ve talked to has said ‘oh yeah, I wanted to go to Shanghai looking for adventure.’”  says Kevin Ostoyich, Ph.D., past recipient of the Dixon W. and Herta E. Benz Fund for Faculty Support and professor of history. “At the time when Jews were looking for a place to escape, the rest of the world closed their doors.”

Professor Ostoyich began teaching history in the form of theater production in 2017 after struggling to find a way to engage students with the material at a deeper level than lectures and reading could accomplish. 

“How could I get them to connect with the humanity in history? It’s one thing to learn the facts — the dates and things — but I felt there was a barrier in terms of the degree to which students could connect,” Professor Ostoyich says. “I thought about how actors prepare for roles, in that they embody a role, and wondered if students could start interacting with history the way actors interact with their roles.”

2017 was also the year that Professor Ostoyich first interviewed Harry J. Abraham, a refugee from Nazi Germany who would have a profound impact on him as both a historian and a human being.

“He wanted me to spread a particular message about Kristallnacht,” Professor Ostoyich says. “He’s afraid that people get so bogged down in the details of the Holocaust that they forget to ask the big questions about this history. The hard questions. The questions that he wants us to explore are why people looked away, why they were indifferent to the suffering of the Jews, and why more people didn’t rise up, in Germany and around the world, to help the Jews. It was there for the world to see, it was in the newspapers, but people chose not to see.” 

Professor Ostoyich, with the help of Kari-Anne Innes, then the arts and entertainment administration director at Valparaiso University, put together a course where students would synthesize their research into performance art, creating a space for them to step into the shoes of the people they were studying. 

“The Singer of Shanghai” was produced in the course’s third year at Valpo, and would run into a unique roadblock. Months into researching and writing, the COVID-19 pandemic began, and the class was required to continue remotely from various parts of the country. Determined to make their work public, the class found a creative workaround.

“Even with COVID, we really wanted to tell the story because we felt it was something that was really important, and that people needed to hear. It’s not a very well-known history,” Christian says. “We felt that doing a radio play would be the best way to reach the most people, since everything was so digitized.”

“Even now, we’ll get messages occasionally from Harry J. Abraham’s family just expressing their gratitude for working on the play and telling his story,” Christian says. 

Months after the premiere of the play, Professor Ostoyich was contacted by one of his Edinburg-based fellows on the International Advisory Board for the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum in Shanghai, interested in spreading the story of the Shanghai refugees to Scotland. What started as a simple recorded interview with Ostoyich to show in classrooms eventually led to a production of the Valpo-created performance. 

The global life of the production has grown from there. Professor Ostoyich is currently working with Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich to publish the play, which would open the doors for more groups around the world to perform it. He and Innes have been working to ensure that these international performers understand the scope and context of the piece, adding a new introduction and a litany of footnotes to the original script. 

“The goal is for this to be something that was created at Valpo, but then has no end,” Professor Ostoyich says. “It’s out there for other students to perform and spread awareness of this little-known history of the Holocaust. It’s a story that shows that the Holocaust is not just something that pertains to Germany and Poland. It has a wide scope, and touches just about everybody in the world.”

Professor Ostoyich wants the play to inspire questions like those Harry J. Abraham asks that everyone consider; questions that pertain to culpability, empathy, and what we can and should do to help our fellow man. 

“What happens when you have situations like this, where people are looking for a place of refuge, what do you do? At this time, the world decided to be indifferent — and rather cruel — by closing their doors to the Jews,” he says. “What do we do when we encounter discrimination in our own lives? Do we walk away? Do we confront it?” 

For Christian, she hopes that people take a greater interest in the untold parts of history, as well as their own past.

“There are people that have lived through this, that still have these stories,” Christian says. “Listen to your family about the stories of their histories, because you might learn surprising things. Really take the time to listen to people if they have a story they want to share.”

The full production of “The Singer of Shanghai” can be viewed here, and currently sits at over 1400 views.