Edokko: Growing up a Stateless Foreigner in Wartime Japan

Edokko means child of Edo, Tokyo’s former name. The author’s parents Constantine and Lydia are musicians and Russian Jews who meet and marry in Berlin, Germany, after fleeing the pogroms in the Soviet Union. With Nazism on the rise they move to France, then Palestine. They decide to join Lydia’s father in China before before settling down in the relative safety of Japan, where Isaac son number four and author of this memoir is born in 1931. Isaac grows up speaking fluent Russian, Japanese, English and French. After Japan bombs Pearl Harbor, foreigners are banned from the Yokohama shore and the Shapiro’s and their five sons are forced to move to Tokyo, where they suffer endless strategic United States bombing campaigns. When 14-year-old multi-lingual Isaac watches the Americans come ashore, a few stare right at him and he stares back. The U.S. Marines end up poaching him from the U.S Army and hire him as an interpreter. A United States Marine colonel paves the way for Isaac to immigrate to the United States. He becomes a United States citizen in 1951, serves in the army and graduates from Columbia Law School and the Institute of Comparative Law of the University of Paris. This is a true story. Holocaust/WWII memoirs by seasidepress.org