Finding Home: in the Footsteps of the Jewish Fusgeyers With Jill Culiner
Wed, 21 Sep 2022 18:30 - 19:30 British Summer Time (UTC+1)
Tickets here.
Come along and hear this fascinating story chronicling a forgotten part of Jewish history with author Jill Culiner.
About this event
The Fusgeyers were the thousands of persecuted Romanian Jews who, between 1899 and 1907, were determined to leave their country on foot and head for North America.
Destitute but resolute, they supported themselves along the road by giving theatrical performances, or selling stories and poems.
Although the Fusgeyers planned to walk all across Europe, they were stopped at the Austro-Hungarian border, and could only continue their journey by train.
This holiday season, give to:
Truth and understanding
The Media Line's intrepid correspondents are in Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Pakistan providing first-person reporting.
They all said they cover it.
We see it.
We report with just one agenda: the truth.
Some settled in countries along the way — Austria, Germany, and England — where they became peddlers, sweatshop workers, shopkeepers, café and restaurant owners, or actors and writers in the famous Yiddish theatre.
Those who arrived in Canada helped build the railway west, worked in the gold and silver mines, or created the first Jewish agricultural communities.
The Fusgeyer movement might have been forgotten if Jacob Finkelstein, a Fusgeyer from Barlad, hadn’t written a short memoir of the journey. Finding a copy of his story at the YIVO institute in New York, historian Jill Culiner translated it from the original Yiddish, and decided she would also walk across Romania, then continue by train along the former immigrant trail until she reached the Canadian prairie.
This is her story and theirs.
Originally published by Sumach Press, Toronto, Finding Home in the Footsteps of the Jewish Fusgeyers won the Joseph and Faye Tanenbaum Prize in Canadian Jewish History, and was shortlisted for the ForeWord Magazine Prize Book of the Year Award.
About the speaker:
Writer, social-critical artist and photographer, Jill Culiner has crossed much of Europe on foot. Her exhibition of WWI and WWII, La Mémoire Effacée, toured France, Canada and Hungary under the auspices of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and UNESCO.
Her book, Finding Home in the Footsteps of the Jewish Fusgeyers, won the Joseph and Faye Tanenbaum Prize for Canadian Jewish History, and her recent biography of a remarkable Yiddish and Hebrew poet, A Contrary Journey with Velvel Zbarzher, Bard, on which this talk is based, was published by Claret Press, London, in September 2021.
Please note that this event will be delivered via a Zoom webinar.
All those who book will receive the LINK TO JOIN 48hrs before the event, and on the day of the event in an email from the library.