Books of Historical Interest
Scoll Down for A Contrary Journey and Finding Home
In 1999, I was in Budapest, preparing a photographic exhibition about the vanished Jews of Eastern Europe, when I heard about the Kunmadaras pogrom: In May 1946, Holocaust survivors were accused of kidnapping Christian children and using their blood for kosher sausage. Grabbing iron bars, garden tools, any weapon they could find, the town's residents went on a rampage, murdering Jews and pillaging their homes and businesses
How could such an absurd accusation have been levelled after the war? I was determined to discover the answer.
A Hungarian village on the Great Plain: a microcosm reflecting this country’s history from early tribal invasion, to Soviet subordination, to European Community membership. Here, peasants, herders, party girls, former nazis and lapsed communists share gossip as well as love stories; and unscrupulous leaders, totalitarian or freely elected, decide behaviour. And while fully embracing the new consumer society, there remains one constant: hatred of the long-vanished rural Jew.
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Velvel Zbarzher, proponent of the Jewish Enlightenment, rebel, and glittering star, spent his life singing to poor workers and craftsmen in Eastern Europe’s fusty inns. But by the time he died in 1883, modernization hadn’t brought an end to anti-Semitism.
Armed with a useless nineteenth-century map, a warm but lumpy coat, and a healthy dose of curiosity Jill Culiner trudged through the snow in former Galicia, the Russian Pale, and Romania looking for Velvel, the houses where he lived, and the bars where he sang. But she was also on the lookout for a vanished way of life in Austria, Turkey, and Canada.
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The Fusgeyers were the thousands of Jewish Romanian men and women who, unwilling to tolerate anti-Semitism, left their country on foot between 1899 and 1907, and headed for North America. Destitute but resolute, they supported themselves by giving theatrical performances or selling stories and poems. In North America, some worked as peddlers, shopkeepers, café and restaurant owners, actors, and writers in the famous Yiddish theatre; others helped build the railway west, worked in the gold and silver mines, or created the Jewish agricultural communities.
Walking in their footsteps across Romania, and following the immigrant trail across Europe to America, Jill Culiner’s Finding Home is a detailed account of Romanian Jewish history, and a touching reminder of the courage of our ancestors.
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