Velvel Zbarzher: Jewish Bard

March 12 2021

The Old Country? How did it smell? Sound? Was it as unified and cosy as the proponents of Heritage Travel would have us believe? Was there really a strong sense of community? Did Chagall’s phantom figures tap their toes to the familiar tunes of Fiddler on the Roof? Or was it another place altogether.

In nineteenth century Eastern Europe, Jewish life was ruled by Hasidic rebbes or the traditional Mitnagdim, and religious law dictated every aspect of daily life. Secular books were forbidden; independent thinkers were threatened with moral rebuke, magical retribution, expulsion and excommunication. But the Maskilim, proponents of the Haskalah or Jewish Enlightenment, were determined to create a modern Jew, to found schools where children could learn science, geography, languages and history.

Born in 1826 in Zbarazh, Galicia (now Ukraine), Benjamin Wolf Ehrenkranz received a traditional Jewish education, and all expected he would become an important rabbi. However, after obtaining forbidden Haskalah literature, he hid under the synagogue steps, pursued secular studies in secret. Sensing a change in his son, Velvel’s father decided to arrange a marriage: a wife and children would surely tie this wayward son to home and duty. But only a few days after the wedding, Ehrenkranz abandoned his bride, his home, and headed for Romania.

Now an exile, he changed his name to Velvel Zbarzher, began writing politically incorrect poems, singing them in bars and wine cellars, gaining a vast, loyal audience of workers, craftsmen and intellectuals. Hard-drinking, outspoken, he shared what he earned with the poor, but his direct attacks on the Hasidim and the anti-Semitic Romanian government resulted in banishment and itinerancy.

By the time Velvel died in Constantinople in 1883, the Haskalah had triumphed, and the modern Jew had been created. But modernization and assimilation hadn’t brought an end to anti-Semitism. New movements to promote social equality appeared—Zionism, Anarchism, Bundism—and they travelled to the New World along with a love of Yiddish literature and theatre.

A Contrary Journey with Velvel Zbarzher, Bard

will be published by Claret Press in October, 2021

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Born in New York, raised in Toronto, Jill Culiner has been living in England, Turkey, Germany, Hungary, and France. A social critical artist, narrator, writer, and photographer, her exhibition of the lost Jewish villages, La Mémoire Effacée, toured France, Canada, and Hungary under the auspices of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and UNESCO. She can be found at http://www.jillculiner-writer.com

A Contrary Journey with Velvel Zbarzher, Bard, by Jill Culiner (Claret Press, 2021)

Jewish Life in Nineteenth-Century Eastern Europe

Jill Culiner gives us a romantic mystery and a trip through time. We see the shtetl as a vibrant place of life through the eyes of the unjustly forgotten Hebrew and Yiddish poet, Velvel Zbarzher. Beautifully written and a tribute to a man who seems lost to history, I was mesmerized by what I read. Being a rebel is not easy and facing exile makes it that much more difficult. I cannot help but wonder how many others suffered the same fate and are lost to us.

Reviews by Amos Lassen

In Finding Home: In the Footsteps of the Jewish Fusgeyers, author Jill Culiner has uncovered a largely forgotten corner of Jewish history, The Fusgeyers (the Yiddish word for 'foot-goers' — wayfarers) were Jews who fled persecution in Romania in the early 1900s in order to find refuge, ultimately, in the New World. One hundred years later, Culiner retraces their steps in search of remnants of this lost epic journey. Culiner is a keen observer of eastern European culture, and her acerbic wit and stunning lyrical style have created a compelling chronicle of loss and discovery. Her encounters with the past and the present of the Jewish presence in Europe are both chilling and illuminating.

Rick Kardonne Jewish Tribune

Culiner is a witty and prophetic writer, investigating those stories not spoken of, and the stories that have been hidden amidst a cultural landscape for a century. She holds no punches and takes the wisdom she has accumulated in her life and reflects a mirror towards the past, ultimately opening up a Pandora’s Box of questions. Possibly the most breathtaking paragraph I’ve ever read is when she arrives in Nuremburg and discovers a single piece of Jewish archival history not destroyed. She needs information on the Fusgeyers from 1901, and like a living miracle she finds that exact information within the only eight pages that have not been ruined by history in the Nuremberg archives. As if this were out of a well-timed fictional novel, if Culiner needed a sign that she had to tell the story of the Fusgeyers, nothing could have been more plainly laid out for her than those eight pages.
Culiner’s innate skill as a storyteller, seeker of truth, and photographer of life, has made Finding Home possibly one of the best books written in the last decade. Even if you are not of Romanian or Jewish heritage, read Finding Home, as it may unlock the key to much of your own personal history.

Kindah Mardam Bey, Lucid Forge

Part storyteller, historical researcher, a bit of the medicine sideshow, and just a touch of the actress from the Kabuki theatre tradition, Jill Culiner is a fascinating speaker. Finding Home is a very interesting read, and a remarkable experience. Culiner regales the reader with her adventures as she walks through each of the communities in Rumania and then travels by train or car to those in Europe or Canada through which Finkelstein traveled. I encourage you to take similar adventures; they foster journeys of the spirit and soul.

Ellen Fine, Mass-Pocha

Jill Culiner has written a significant and often gripping account of her personal odyssey. She traverses Jewish history and geography from the towns and shtetls of Romania, through some of the major cities in Europe, to the Canadian cities, towns and settlements where Jews wandered. In the many places she visits she recounts not only her immediate impressions but often brings in important elements of Jewish history. She has introduced a new way of looking at history.

Abraham Arnold, Jewish Historical Society of Western Canada

Interview with author Jill Culiner by Kindah Mardam Bey

To walk in the footsteps of our ancestors is to learn who we are as human beings. Take this literally and you have found Jill Culiner’s travels in her first non-fiction novel Finding Home: In the Footsteps Of The Jewish Fusgeyers. In 2001, Culiner decided to travel the path of the Jewish Fusgeyers (Yiddish term foot-goers or wayfarers) who were Romanian Jews that fled persecution in the early 1900s in order to find refuge in countries such as Canada, US and England. Finding Home is a vivid story that heralds back to some of our world cultures most basic truths and often unprogressive changes; I wanted to converse with Culiner about her journey one hundred and one years after the Fusgeyers, but along the same roads.

You were a photographer before you became a writer, how did telling the journey through the lens differ from writing about the experience?

How is it possible to compare those two forms of expression? I can't. I find writing richer – for me, at least – than photography. You can add emotions, thoughts, history. True, photography can be a very powerful medium, but I found it wasn't quite enough for me. I wanted all the words that accompany a picture. I guess the best bet is to do both at once.

How was it to write about such a personal experience that might have possibly paralleled your grandfathers, for your first book?

As far as paralleling my grandfather's experience goes – I didn't. My grandfather came from the Ukraine, but the Fusgeyer movement was uniquely Romanian. My grandfather probably never heard of Fusgeyers and the only thing he had in common with them is that he walked to a border of what was once the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In fact, hundreds of thousands of Jews left Russia in this same way because they were either fleeing military duty or because it was impossible for them to get passports. But still, they were not Romanian Fusgeyers. Fusgeyers trained themselves in long-distance walking, they put on plays, wrote newspapers, had choral groups. They were protesters and, as such, were very visible. They wanted to attract international attention to the injustices of the new Roumanian government in 1900.

What was it like to walk the same journey as your ancestors most likely did? Did you find that the experience had explained a lot about your family history, traditions and even secrets? Was this a cathartic experience for you?

Unfortunately, no one in our family talked about the past. No one passed on interesting stories about the Old Country. My grandfather mentioned his life in New York and Canada, but not in great detail. He wasn't much interested in chatting to mere girls anyway. I would love to have learned some family secrets – especially murky, embarrassing, highly unsavory ones - wouldn't we all? But I guess I never will. Perhaps my family was too dull to even have them.
Even if my ancestors didn't walk through Romania, the Fusgeyer's journey is certainly part of Jewish history; for that reason, doing it was very exciting. Imagine reading in Jacob Finkelstein's tale that he and his group stopped by a river some three hours out of a certain town, and then, one hundred and one years later, walking out of that same town and finding - at exactly three hours distance – that same river. Experiences like that are truly rewarding. Looking for the fields where the Fusgeyers might have slept, seeking out the Jewish areas where they stayed in towns, those were equally challenging. And equally satisfying when found.

You came across a stark change of culture compared to the memoirs of Jacob Finkelstein, what were the most shocking changes? Were you prepared for this aspect of your journey? What did this teach you?

No, I suppose I wasn't at all prepared for the total destruction of the architecture of Romania – much of it done in the communist era, but still going on. I was especially dismayed to find the wonderful, traditional houses being covered over with cement, their little windows being replaced by huge PVC horrors. One should be proud of the old houses; they are an irreplaceable part of our heritage. Some people in some countries do manage to be proud of their architecture: the Swiss, for example, many Americans and the English.
I suppose another thing that shocked me was the terrible pollution, seeing the ubiquitous sweating, smoking piles of rubbish everywhere – plastic, shoes, tires, animal corpses etc.
But did these changes teach me anything? Well, I suppose they taught me not to be surprised or shocked. That this is modern life.

Where were the most obvious similarities in culture whether Romania, Canada, or anywhere else on your journey, between Finkelstein’s version of the past and your journey of the present?

Europe and Canada were so different one hundred years ago that one can't compare Finkelstein's world and ours. Canada, Germany, Hungary, Austria – all these countries are very much the same nowadays. Remember Finkelstein's description of London? It was a shocking den of iniquity, as far as he was concerned. But he saw that impoverished, filthy, miserable London, the one that Charles Dickens wrote about. Now, that same city is expensive, chic. And what about the fevered gold and silver mining towns of Canada with their slums, their poisoned water, suffering immigrants, death, and violence? Now those towns are sleepy places, as comfortable as woolly socks.

The physical and emotional essence of the journey is exhausting on any level, what did you discover when taking this journey in your fifties, as opposed to if you were in your twenties, thirties, or forties?

Well, in my twenties I didn't even know that you could cross countries on foot, avoiding roads, taking only ancient green lanes. In Canada, if we don't want to walk on highways, we have to go to national parks. But when I hit Europe, I discovered the footpaths that go from village to village, city to city. That's when I started walking – but I was already in my thirties. I haven't stopped walking since 1976 – and have gone all throughout Europe. The walk through Romania certainly wasn't emotionally exhausting (except when a cold beer wasn't available after hours of hot sun.) Of course, feet get sore, your legs get tired – but that happens at any age. I am sixty-one years old now, and I am no more fatigued by huge treks than when younger. You just put one foot in front of the other and keep on going.

A male friend came with you on your journey across Romania. You originally rejected the idea, but he insisted and you reference that his presence became a safety precaution. What are your thoughts on how western females perceive women around the world, and the freedoms we have that many don’t?

Yes, my crony, Yves. Actually, I was going to do the walk anyway and the whole project had little to do with him. He claimed it was a dangerous thing to do and tried to discourage me. In the end, when he saw I was determined, Yves decided to come along – to save me from myself, so to speak. I had walked with Yves for years – but nowhere near such great distances. He complained bitterly in Romania; he really doesn't like walking all that much, and he certainly wasn't fond of thirty kilometers a day.
As far as women's freedom goes, in Romania, women are as free as anywhere else in Europe or North America. But that wasn't, perhaps, your question. I think that western women are now learning about how women live in other countries through documentaries, films, plays, books, news articles, and of course through contact, in multi-cultural Canada. And there is more and more international protest at the great lack of freedom and injustice in some places. Protest helps, of course. A little bit. But the world is so big, the injustice so great, it's hard to have much effect – especially when women themselves oppress other women in the name of tradition.

You found an astonishing document in Nuremberg relating to the Fusgeyers, did finding this document solidify to you the relevancy of telling the story of the Jewish Fusgeyers?

I was determined to tell the tale. Had I found nothing, I would have told it. For months before, I went to bed early every evening with a Yiddish grammar book to learn that language so I could translate Finkelstein's manuscript. When you do things like that, you know you're going to write a book. It was simply satisfying to find evidence of the Fusgeyers in Nürnberg. More than satisfying, of course. Exhilarating. But it didn't change my determination.

In Regina, towards the end of your journey, ‘sat in the snow’ in a graveyard stating ‘I found you!’ Did you feel relief, or loss, or perhaps both?

When I found my Romanians in the Jewish graveyard out in the middle of nowhere, I climbed the fence, sat myself down in the snow, and prepared to have a chat. It was the end of a journey and I felt a great sense of triumph; here were some of the very people I had been tracking across Europe and Canada. I also felt extremely frustrated and sad – I'm sure you can understand this. I wanted information from them; I wanted to hear their stories. I wanted them to paint a picture of the Old World for me. I wanted to share our experiences. But all of them had been dead for over half a century at least; that rendered conversation quite impossible.

Why do you think this is a valuable story to tell? How is it relevant to today?

It is a valuable story because so many people want to know about how their ancestors lived, what their story was. Not only my grandparents but also the grandparents of so many people refused to talk about the past. Therefore, many people are thirsty for stories. And perhaps it can make people more sensitive, more sympathetic to the newer immigrants, those of today who come with different experiences – experiences that are certainly not less interesting.

What was the greatest piece of advice you were ever given on, or about your journey?

Goodness! I can't think of anyone who gave me positive advice. Some people told me I was crazy. Others said it was a subject of no interest to anyone and that I should do something else with my life, something useful. And pretty well everyone said that it would make a truly boring book.

Besides your own of course, what is your Favourite book?

That's a dreadful question. There are far too many of them. What I find curious is that wonderful ones can arrive at precise moments in life – moments when their wisdom is needed. When that happens to me, I read the book over and over again until I almost have it by heart.