Finding Home
In the Footsteps of the Jewish Fusgeyers
by Jill Culiner

excerpt

Introduction

My round-bellied paternal grandfather told incomplete tales, heavily laced with brag and impossible to confirm. Greedy, even desperate for images of another world, an elusive 'Old Country' far from domestic Toronto's dull predictability, I begged for details. Received a pittance, most often a dismissive chuckle. My grandmother was even less forthcoming. A specialist in shrugs, she would only murmur, "That won't interest you." I had, therefore, to content myself with shadows.

Born in 1884, in the shtetl of Svyniukhy, Ukraine, my grandfather grew up in an inn built by his great grandparents. At age twenty-one, he was inducted into the Tsar's army, an event tantamount to a death sentence. It was time to leave Russia. In 1905, abandoning hearth, wife and a father who cut the collar of his coat (a sign of mourning), my grandfather set out, on foot, with a couple of friends. They crossed the border into what was then Austrian Galicia, trekked to Vienna, went on to Trieste, and suffered a thirty-day boat journey to New York.

Since he was irritatingly vague when it came to details of this trek, I could only imagine what he stubbornly omitted. Later, when cynicism developed and he presented me with no new images, I began to doubt the tale's veracity. What choice did I have? Even when he was in his nineties and I begged, prodded and grilled him, his answers remained vague. They had wandered for two years, had gone from shtetl to shtetl, had taken on odd jobs to earn sustenance, had hitched rides in peasant's horse-drawn wagons.

Like many Jews who came to Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when he arrived in Ontario my grandfather had joined other immigrants in laying track for the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway. Then he set up a general store where railway workers could obtain supplies and find accommodation in a small straw-filled barn. This success story he told with gusto. But the trek? That walk through a world that no longer exists? No, of that he said nothing. Would not satisfy my curiosity.

Only years later did I learn that my grandfather had not been the only person to claim he had walked across Europe. Tales of grandparents walking to the ports (or even to Paris, Berlin and Strasbourg) have been passed down in many families, have become part of Jewish lore. But who really walked? And how far? These questions are impossible to answer. On the roads, there were those fleeing pogroms and persecution, those escaping military service, those who were hungry and desperate, those too poor to pay for train tickets. All certainly went some distance on foot; when they reached cities, Jewish aid agencies sent them further (and sometimes back) by train. But the most admired, the most well-known wanderers of all were those who participated in an organized movement of pedestrians: the Romanian Fusgeyers.

Persecution in Romania: The Roots of the Jewish Exodus

Until 1940, the heart of the Yiddish-speaking world spread over Poland, western Russia (now Ukraine and Byelorussia), the Baltic countries, Bessarabia, eastern Hungary and Romania. Here is where the uncountable number of shtetlach could be found. Neither towns nor villages in their own right, the shtetl was the Jewish section of a village or town: a village within a village; a village within a town.

Jews had long resided in the Romanian principalities of Walachia and Moldavia, probably arriving on the heels of the Romans as purveyors to the army and as soldiers. But, with the spread of Christianity, this Jewish presence stimulated hatred, suspicion and banishment. As in other European countries, when state coffers were empty, Jewish money became an object of pursuit; blood libels — Jews were accused of killing Christian children and using their blood for ritual purposes — were instigated and these resulted in pogroms.

In 1819, Russia occupied the principalities of Moldavia and Walachia, which had long been under the orders of the Turkish sultan, and conditions for Jews worsened. In 1858, after the Peace Treaty of Paris concluded the Crimean War, Moldavia and Walachia were finally united and, in 1866, a new constitution was produced. The seventh article of this constitution stated that Romanian citizenship would be restricted to the Christian population only. Romanian Jews were 'foreigners' and anti-Semitism was an acceptable part of Romanian national identity.

[...]The 'Sanitary Laws' of 1885 and 1893 declared that Jewish pharmacists could no longer acquire or manage pharmacies. Jews could no longer work in psychiatric institutions, they could not be received as free patients in hospitals. To clear areas of their presence, Jewish houses were demolished under 'sanitary orders.' Laws against peddling were put into effect and the definition of the word 'peddling' was stretched to include shop owners as well as market sellers. Individual cities were allowed to create their own economic restrictions: in the Romanian city of Botosani, Jews were banned from selling soda water, spice bread, certain cakes and sugar and to transport baker's bread. In Iasi, Jewish women were forbidden to sell sugar, flour or goods manufactured by them and their families for the market. The laws of 1898 barred Jews from upper and agricultural schools. Although 'allowed' to attend schools of commerce, arts and trade, a quota was imposed; only one-fifth of the available places could be occupied by 'aliens'; tuition for 'aliens' was so exorbitant, it precluded their attendance.

As 'foreigners' Jews could not vote; unable to obtain or renew licences, the inn-keeping families — men and women and children — were expelled at bayonet point and their stocks were liquidated. Jews could neither own nor cultivate land, farmers were no longer authorised to employ them; they were expelled from villages on the slimmest of pretexts. Eventually, 20,000 Jews found themselves on the streets of Romania and dying of starvation. There were many suicides in Iasi, Bacau and Roman, and letters flowed into charitable agencies:

I am in the greatest misery with seven children and because of the impossibility to earn money, I am condemned to die of starvation. I hope you will come to our aid.

I am begging you with tears in my eyes. I am a poor tailor with six children and I am unable to earn enough money for our daily bread. Please have the goodness to come to our aid and protection because I am starving to death with my children.

I am a worker without work. I don't have daily bread to offer. My children scream for bread and there are days when I don't come home out of pity for the children, I can't see this pain.

In 1899 and 1900, harvests were poor and a severe depression gripped the country. Anti-Semitic decrees were applied with new severity and anti-Jewish speeches were delivered in parliament. Riots took place in several towns and, encouraged by the anti-Semitic prefect Cananâu, a pogrom broke out in Iasi. "For several hours there was fighting, merciless blows, pillaging, and devastation, all under the paternal eyes of the police authorities and the army, which interfered only to hinder the Jews from defending themselves."

One destination of Jews leaving Romania was Israel (then Ottoman Palestine) where Romanians founded two of the oldest villages: Rosh Pina and Zikhron Ya'akov. London and Paris with their large Jewish communities also attracted many. But most immigrants dreamt of a new start in North America: between 1871 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, almost 30 percent of Romanian Jews migrated to Canada and the United States.

Leaving the country en masse, Jews sold their possessions and travelled at their own expense by train and ship. The impoverished and desperate attempted to reach the Austro-Hungarian border on foot, but the risks were great. Unprotected, alone, victims of a hostile population and the anti-Semitic police, Jews were rounded up, accused of being peddlers, beaten, thrown into prison or 'deported' (probably murdered) and never seen again. There was only one solution: those wishing to cross Romania on foot had to do so in groups.

The Fusgeyers and the Jewish Pedestrian Movement

After 1899, those who organized themselves into groups to walk across Romania called themselves Fusgeyers (pronounced Foosgayer — this is the Yiddish word for foot-goers, pedestrians or wayfarers). Fusgeyers were healthy, professional men and women: trades people, artisans, workers and students who trained in long-distance walking and vowed to share their last morsel of bread with one another. Groups organized themselves in cities all across Romania — Bârlad, Adjud, Iasi, Roman, Bacau, Bucharest, Galati, Braila, Ploiesti, Râmnicu Sarat — and they named themselves accordingly: 'The Bârlad Fusgeyers,' 'The Foot Wanderers from Roman' and 'One Heart of Galatz.' Others were organized by profession: 'The Painters and Dyers of Bucharest,' 'Students Workers and Clerks of Bucharest,' but there were also 'The Wandering Jew' and groups composed entirely of women — one was called 'Bat Ami'.

It is unknown how many Fusgeyer groups existed, how many participants there were in each (although most ranged from between forty and three hundred walkers), or how long the Fusgeyer movement existed; the American Jewish Yearbook of 1903 mentions that, of the two to three hundred Jews leaving Romania each week, many were planning to go on foot.

The routes that Fusgeyers took across Romania varied; some crossed in a southeasterly direction, at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, and turned northwest after Ploiesti, following the main road to the (former) border crossing at Predeal. Others travelled over Bukovina (Austro-Hungary) to Brody in Austrian Galicia. Once across the Romanian border, Jewish aid associations provided funds for the train journey to the ports of Hamburg and Rotterdam. Although the original idea had been to cross all of Europe on foot, the Austro-Hungarian government, long overwhelmed by stragglers and beggars on their roads, passed laws allowing only those with train tickets over the border.

Members of those Fusgeyer groups who could afford to do so, wore uniforms. Others sported distinguishing caps or straw hats and leather peasant sandals (apintosh or opinci). They carried lanterns for walking at night and marched into towns with an organized, military-like pomp. It was, no doubt, this display of dignity and courage that roused the admiration of the populace; careful to circumvent towns where officials were said to harbour anti-Semitic feelings, Fusgeyers recounted how impoverished Romanian peasants waited for them along the road, offering water, bread, food, tobacco, wine and blessings for a safe journey.

The Walk

During the Second World War, the Yiddisher Visnshaftlikher Institut (the Yiddish Scientific Institute known as YIVO), relocated from Vilnius, Lithuania, to New York City in the face of Nazi persecution. YIVO had been collecting, publishing and sponsoring books on linguistics, folklore, literature, history and psychology since its inception in 1925, but the scholars were now being murdered and the collection of manuscripts, photographs and folklore was being destroyed. In New York, the Institute began reconstructing its collection and reviving its Yiddish periodical, the YIVO Bleter. In 1942, the Bleter offered a prize for the best immigrant story; the winner was Jacob Finkelstein, writer of 'Zikhroynes fun a Fusgeyer fun Rumania kayn Amerika' ['Memoirs of a Fusgeyer from Romania to America'].25]

Jacob Finkelstein was born on a farm in the (former) Russian territory of Bessarabia in 1878. He settled in the city of Bârlad, where he joined a Jewish amateur theatrical group that gave money it earned from performances to charity. When life became increasingly intolerable in Romania in 1899-1900, members of the theatrical group talked of the freedom they would find if they could immigrate to America.

I first found excerpts from Finkelstein's article in Irving Howe's World of Our Fathers, and I wrote to YIVO, asking the archivist to send me a copy of the entire memoir. It took a while before I could translate it from the original Yiddish (it is probably the only existing document written by a Fusgeyer) but, when I finished, I was obsessed by the idea of crossing Romania on foot, of following in the footsteps of the Bârlad Fusgeyers.

I wanted to see low-lying houses, hear bitter-sweet Romanian melodies and discover places as yet untouched by mass culture and tourism. I wanted to waste what talent I had in disreputable Romanian inns. Perhaps — just perhaps — if I crossed Romania on foot, if I passed through small villages, talked to people, then I would be able to find hints, vestiges from the past in this less developed Eastern European country.

The quest could, of course, be futile. As a photographer, I have walked through much of Europe in search of vanished shtetlach and I know the impossibility of recapturing what, after the destruction of the Jewish community, no longer exists.

Departure

Jacob Finkelstein and the Bârlad Fusgeyers started marching across Romania on the last Sunday in April 1900. Although I fully intended to cross Romania alone, Yves Besnard, a French walking companion, listened to my plans with trepidation. He, quite definitely, had no desire to tramp two or three hundred kilometres across country, but the idea of a woman walking alone and sleeping in Romanian fields irked him. It was a cranky idea. A frankly dangerous one, he said. But he was unable to dissuade me. So, he decided to tag along, to save me from all manner of mad, dangerous and lewd individuals I'd be bound to meet along the way. He knew little of Jewish or Romanian history but, for survival's sake, graciously applied himself to learning Romanian.

We agreed on a plan. He would take the train from Paris to Budapest, catch another heading towards Romania. I, staying at this time in eastern Hungary, would wait for his train in the little garden beside the train station of Karcag (almost all train stations in Hungary and Romania have charming little gardens on one side). When his train arrived, he would wave and I would leap on it. We would continue on over Transylvania by rail and once we arrived in Bârlad, we would follow the itinerary of the Bârlad Fusgeyers as closely as possibly, walking by day, stopping and sleeping in fields when they had done so. In cities where the Fusgeyers had been housed by the Jewish community, we would treat ourselves to a hotel. At the former border at Predeal, I would continue on alone, following the former immigrant trail through Budapest, Vienna, Nürnberg, Frankfurt, Rotterdam, London and Liverpool, searching through the archives of those cities for any record of their passage. I would go further too just as long as there was a trace to follow in North America.

In the spring of 2001 we started out. I had photocopies of old maps of Romania found in the Toronto Reference Library and Finkelstein's article in my backpack. My translation of his work is an amateur, imperfect one and I apologize for all liberties and errors. Neither am I a historian. This is merely the adventure of an idle wanderer, one who 'passed through' and searched.

If my grandparents had refused me images and landscapes, I would now find my own.