The Lion Book Shop & Circulating Library, Moulmein Road, Shanghai

Posted: May 5th, 2024 | No Comments »

I recently found time to closely read Rachel Meller’s family memoir of the Shanghai Jewish refugees, The Box with a Sunflower Clasp. Every new book on the Jewish ghetto gives you a few more slithers of information you didn’t know before. For me, particularly, in Meller’s book it was the Lion Book Shop.

The Lion Book Shop was a second hand bookshop and circulating library (allowing everyone to borrow books at a very low cost, partly because the owner bought in cheaply pirated copies of many books to keep costs down) run by a German Jewish refugee, Bruno Loewenberg. I think it opened in 1938. The shop and library was in a multi-tenancy house at 328 Moulmein Road (Maoming Road North) in the International Settlement/corner of Bubbling Well Road.

In 1943 Loewenberg had to close the Moulmein location and moved to several new locations in the heart of the ghetto – 605 Tongshan Road (Tangshan Road) and 52 Chusan Road (Zhoushan Road). Loewenberg survived the war and made it to America – his whole incredible story is one of the major narratives in The Box with a Sunflower Clasp.

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