SHANGHAI: Leiwi Imas chose to stay in China when most other Jewish refugees left after World War II.
By doing so, he began a legacy that continues to this day, in a remarkable tale of one Jewish family's connection to China's business hub that spans seven decades.
The businessman, customs officer and ex-president of the Jewish Club in Shanghai died peacefully in a downtown villa in 1962.
His daughter, Sara Imas, grew up among her Chinese peers without a Chinese passport, speaking only Mandarin with a local accent.
After living through upheavals in Chinese history, including the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), and failing to find love despite three failed marriages to local men, she migrated to Israel in 1991 at the age of 41 and made a living selling spring rolls.
Once there, the Jewish woman, who lacks a college degree, demonstrated an amazing ability to provide for herself and family:
She learned to speak fluent English and Hebrew, found a job in an Israeli court, sent her three children to Israeli colleges, returned to Shanghai 10 years later as the chief representative of a diamond firm to the Greater China area, and married a local government official.
"Don't ask me how it all began," Sara Imas quoted her father as saying every time she asked him where they were from.
Neither Sara nor Leiwi's Chinese wife know much about the first four decades of his life in Germany.
But a long scar on his thigh told the story of the end of Leiwi's time in Europe. He got it crossing a border fence between Germany and Poland in 1939, at the age of 43.
He arrived in Shanghai the same year, among the more than 20,000 other displaced Jews that floated into the city between 1937 and 1939 escaping Adolf Hitler's Holocaust. He sold his gold watch and opened a small bakery on the city's Fuxing Road.
Despite finding a job with the local customs office in the early 1940s, the bakery continued to do business.