Meet Your Neighbors update: A new book that’s “Part cold-case thriller and part social history”

Scott Seligman and two of his recent works, Murder in Manchuria and The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902.

When Scott Seligman, a “nice Jewish boy from New Jersey,” jumped from a career as a China expert to nonfiction writing in 2008, he set to telling stories about Jewish and Chinese history. He is merging the two interests in his latest work, which looks to be a page-turner.

Just look at this title: Murder in Manchuria: The True Story of a Jewish Virtuoso, Russian Fascists, a French Diplomat, and a Japanese Spy in Occupied China.

And the description of a story that Seligman says is “Part cold-case thriller and part social history”:

When concert pianists Semyon Kaspé and Lydia Shapiro parted on a street in the city of Harbin near midnight on August 24, neither could anticipate the dark sequence of events the coming months would hold in store. The kidnapping of Semyon that night would set the Manchurian Jewish community on edge, arouse worldwide opprobrium and leave behind an unsolved mystery. And it would pull in an improbable cast of Jewish merchants, Japanese military men, White Russian thugs, French diplomats, Chinese judges, an Italian spy-for-hire and even Pu Yi, the deposed former boy emperor of China.

The book’s official launch event is a virtual program co-sponsored by the Museum of Chinese in America and the Museum at Eldridge Street. Click here to register for the November 15th, 6 p.m. talk.

When we first introduced him to you more than a decade ago, Seligman already had three books under his belt. He has continued to publish and bring to light untold stories, many of them about the Jewish and Chinese immigrant experience.

Seligman’s award-winning 2020 book, The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902, is being released in paperback in November. This is the story of the mostly Jewish immigrant women who rose up in protest when kosher butchers raised the price of meat, making it unaffordable. And they were going up against more than the local butchers. “The true villains in the drama,” Seligman writes, were “a cabal of Chicago-based meat packers who had formed a ‘Beef Trust’ and were colluding to corner the national market for meat.”

The books are available in bookstores including Politics and Prose. Learn more about Seligman’s works and works in progress at SeligmanOnline.com.