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Author: Mike Blumenthal

Princeton resident and former U.S. Treasury Secretary W. Michael Blumenthal discusses and signs copies of his new historical espionage book "City of Masks: A Novel of Shanghai."

At this event, W. Michael (Mike) Blumenthal will recount stories from his remarkable life, the history of wartime Shanghai, and how his experiences inspired his new novel "City of Masks." Blumenthal was a Jewish teenager who fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1939 and spent eight formative years in Shanghai. Now, drawing on his firsthand experiences, he brings that turbulent city to life in a story of espionage, survival, shifting loyalties and moral choices.

About the Book (from the publisher): 

World War II–era international Shanghai is a city of refugees, grifters, gangsters, and spies.

Obermann, on the run from the US, is one of them, quickly enmeshed in a deadly game of hide-and-seek with Green Gang gangsters. Recruited by the OSS for an underground role in an ingenious plot to sabotage the local German–Japanese Axis war effort, he is on his own in a perilous kabuki dance of pretense and deceit, navigating the local Nazi leadership and the Japanese Kempeitai hot on his heels.

A daring prison escape of Allied POWs goes off the rails, and when the OSS plot is betrayed, it’s up to Obermann and Steffi, a mysterious Jewish refugee, to save it from disaster.

In a thrilling, last-minute, desperate effort, Obermann and Steffi must find a way to warn the Americans while saving Shanghai’s Jewish refugees from the Nazi Holocaust.

About the Author: 

W. Michael “Mike” Blumenthal, was the United States secretary of the treasury in the Carter administration from 1977 to 1979. He served as an ambassador and deputy special trade representative for trade negotiations under presidents Kennedy and Johnson. From 1997 to 2014, he was the founding director and chief executive of the Jewish Museum of Berlin.

Born in Germany, he survived the Holocaust in a Shanghai ghetto and immigrated to the United States in 1947. He went on to earn several advanced degrees, including a PhD in economics from Princeton University. His published works include two nonfiction books—"The Invisible Wall: German and Jews" and "From Exile to Washington: A memoir of Leadership in the Twentieth Century"—as well as his 2024 novel, "The Payday Conspiracy."

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