Finding Home

Culiner's cultural commentary is evocative and unflinching. She explores the issues of Jewish identity and a Jewish presence in history. Culiner also examines history as a whole and the changes and sometimes eerie similarities within the last one hundred years. An all but destroyed part of Jewish history, the Fusgeyers' is a heroes' journey of epic proportions that only traveling in these ancestral footsteps, as Culiner did, would render such examination and palatable results.

Much of Culiner's life observations are seen through a lens, as she is a photographer first and foremost. Finding Home is full of stunning pictures, both archival and from Culiner's journey. In keeping with the older pictures, Culiner meticulously reconstructs her pictures with a slightly out of focus lens so as to make her pictures similar to the historical ones she finds along the way.

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.

Silence dogged Jill Culiner's Finding Home project from the start. Her grandfather, one of the Romanian fusgeyers — Jews who trekked on foot out of the country to escape persecution in the early 1900s — wasn't talking. And when she discovered Jacob Finkelstein's detailed memoir and travelled to Romania to retrace his route, literally walking hundreds of miles, almost all vestiges of the fusgeyers — and all Jewry for that matter — had vanished.

But what she did learn reveals a microcosmic slice of Jewish emigrant life. The fusgeyers, theatre artists, gave performances in the villages they visited to raise money for their trek. The fact that they were on foot made their poverty plain — often a problem at borders. Finding Home also uncovers the extent to which Romania's Communist regime paved over just about everything and how corruption has seeped into almost every facet of post-Communist life. The poverty, the mistrust, people's desperation — it all gives the impression that post-Ceausescu Romania is in deep trouble.

Culiner's photos, purposely blurred so she can twin them with the archival shots she uncovered, don't really work. But Finding Home is a fascinating account of how the hatred of Jews was manifested in Romania and, not incidentally, Canada. Read this and be reminded that Adolf Hitler did not invent anti-Semitism.

...Finding Home: In the Footsteps of the Jewish Fusgeyers [is] fascinating — not only [due to its subject], but because [Jill] Culiner has a professional photographer's eye, and a gifted writer's ear...

In her wonderfully detailed, descriptive style, supplemented by a great sense of humour, she ... vividly recalls the many colourful characters she met [on her journey]. With her own fluency in French, Hungarian, Yiddish and other languages, she also captures their style of conversation.

This personal account of one woman's attempt to uncover an era in Jewish history is a masterpiece that's part travel writing, and part history. Culiner's photographs are fuzzy and dreamlike, reflecting the nature of her [trek]. Finding Home . . . is an absolute gem.