My Jewish Grandma Fled the Nazis to Shanghai. I Wrote a Musical About Her Experience. (heyalma)
July 10, 2024
It always stung when my Grandma Rose asked me, “What’s your backup plan?”
I was a teenager, growing up in Las Vegas and performing operatic arias that I would go on to sing into my late 20s. My blood curdled at my grandmother’s suggestion that my career might not pan out, and I would respond, defiantly, “There IS no backup plan!”
Well, I stuck with music. And years later, I wrote and produced a musical based on my grandmother’s harrowing journey to America that she never told me about.
It all started in early 2015, when my dad Googled his mom’s name. She had died more than a decade earlier, and his search produced something he never could have imagined.