TY - JOUR
AU - Mihăilescu,, Dana
AB - Abstract From 1900 to 1907, a so-called fusgeyer phenomenon was the most salient characteristic of Jewish emigration from Romania, given the high number of impoverished, desperate Jews who were on the brink of starvation and started to go on foot in the attempt to leave the country. My essay considers the literary representation of this fusgeyer movement over time as a conduit upholding transcultural networks of memory work in the United States. To that end, I will examine the representation of fusgeyers in the literature produced by immigrant fusgeyers to the United States immediately after emigration (M. E. Ravage’s 1917 An American in the Making: The Life Story of an Immigrant and Jacob Finkelstein’s 1942 “Memoirs of a Fusgeyer from Romania to America”) and in the literature created in contemporary times in the United States (Stuart Tower’s 2003 historical novel The Wayfarers). In my analysis, I rely on Astrid Erll’s demonstration that literature can be a powerful conduit of cultural memory by its use of “four modes of a ‘rhetoric of collective memory’: the experiential, the mythical, the antagonistic, and the reflexive mode.” I will show which of these modes of rhetoric apply to the literary works I consider and how they highlight a dynamic movement toward a transcultural type of rhetoric shaping Jewish memory forms in contemporary US literature. Between 1880 and 1924, approximately 2.5 million Jews from Eastern Europe left the region and settled in the United States, becoming known as the great wave of Jewish migration. Interestingly, in the first decade of the twentieth century, Jewish emigration from Romania increased more rapidly than that of any other country of Jewish mass migration, leading Joseph Kissman to apply the designation of “Rumanian exodus” to it (Kissman, “Immigration” 161) since nearly thirty percent of Romania’s Jewish population immigrated to America between 1881 and 1914 (177). The specific character of the great wave of Romanian Jewish emigration in the early twentieth century, in comparison to neighboring Eastern European countries, was imposed on the whole movement by one group of migrating masses that marked the beginning of the exodus. This involved bands of fusgeyers, or wayfarers, that began to migrate after the economic depression of 1899, especially until 1907 (Kissman, Shtudyes 28). As also indicated in the memoirs of the best-known leader of Romanian Jews, Wilhelm Filderman, thousands of Jews organized themselves in groups, and, because they lacked money to pay for a train ride, they started on foot primarily toward the port of Hamburg in order to get a passage across the ocean, especially to the United States or Canada (Filderman, Memoirs and Diaries: Volume 1 88). Drawing on the pamphlets, poems, and texts produced by these emigrating groups that appeared in the Romanian and international press at the time, several scholars have offered a good overview of the fusgeyer movement.1 This phenomenon of “walking groups” was one of the most salient characteristics of the Jewish “emigration fever” from Romania, given the high number of impoverished, desperate Jews on the brink of starvation, resulting in a “dramatic note” that “impressed and aroused excitement among all the Jews in the country” (Feldman 63). Yet the fusgeyers were not poor peddlers, as the previous migrants were, but young and healthy individuals that were artisans, workers, and, to a lesser extent, clerks (Kissman, Shtudyes 28). They drew widespread international attention, especially from the spring of 1900 onward (Matikainen 69). They finally just walked up to the border with Austria-Hungary and then took the train because Austrian-Hungarian officials had introduced new measures that only those with train tickets could enter their country, in response to the growing numbers of stragglers and beggars on their roads (Culiner, “Fusgeyer”). According to Israel Bar-Avi, even if the result of disparate groups of people in despair, this mass exodus of Jews from Romania drew inspiration from Theodor Herzl’s idealistic Zionism by borrowing its “notions of self-determination, Jewish dignity and activism against unfair treatment. It was a thrust, the first [peaceful] Jewish revolt against inequities” (8). The most pressing reasons for the formation of the fusgeyer phenomenon was the bad harvest of 1899 and the Iaşi pogrom from 16 May of the same year (6-7).2 As a result, people started to thoroughly organize themselves as “military-like groups” and flee on foot in early spring 1900 (Culiner, “Fusgeyer”). They primarily left from Moldova, the region with the largest Jewish population in Romania. The first fusgeyer group was formed in Bârlad in May 1899 by a young man named Ginsburg. He drew ninety-four people, who adopted the name of “Drumeţii din Bârlad / The Wayfarers of Bârlad” and soon gained fame and inspiration for others throughout Romania (Kissman, Shtudyes 29). The total number of fusgeyers is not precisely known but does not represent more than a few thousand (31), with a group usually ranging from forty to three hundred people (Matikainen 69), although the number would sometimes reach five hundred or even over a thousand people if several groups united on the way (Bar-Avi 53). Bar-Avi notes that the first press mention of fusgeyers appeared on 18 February 1900, in Bucharest. On that occasion, after remaining unemployed, some roamers formed two groups, one of 130 people, the other of sixty-five people willing to go on foot from Moldova up to Burdujeni (the border town with Austria-Hungary), asking for help on their way. On 25 February 1900, a second press article mentioned the formation of a walking group of sixty families in Focşani, and on 17 March 1900, the previously mentioned first walking group of Bârlad got coverage, followed by an abundance of similar endeavors.3 Nine fusgeyer groups were mentioned in the local Jewish and foreign press—namely, “Drumeţii” (The Wayfarers of Bârlad); “Pietonii” (Bucharest Wayfarers); Artisan Wayfarers of Bucharest; Painters and Dyers of Bucharest; Students, Workers, and Clerks of Galaţi; “Led Ehad” (One Heart) of Galaţi; “The Wandering Jew”; “Fix”; and “Yeziath Rumania” (Romanian Exodus).4 Sometimes Jewish girls organized themselves in separate groups, only one being mentioned by name in the press at the time, “Bat Ami” (Kissman, Shtudyes 31; Wischnitzer 83). The fusgeyer movement later gained renewed attention due to children’s and especially grandchildren’s growing interest in their family genealogies in the United States. For example, in 2000, Jay Friedman managed to trace the documents of how his grandfather, Isidor Friedrich Botoşăneanu (who renamed himself Werther Friedman), arrived in the United States on 3 January 1903, after initially walking from Pungeşti, near Iaşi, in Romania to Hamburg in 1900, when he was around sixteen years old (Friedman 29). Isidor did so as part of a “fusgeyer” group and “wrote most of his group’s ‘newspaper,’ . . . actually a series of pamphlets promoting the emigration of Jews to the US” (Friedman 30). The literary representation of this fusgeyer movement over time represents a conduit upholding transcultural networks of memory work in the United States, following Astrid Erll’s emphasis that memory is fundamentally “transcultural”: it involves movement and traffic between individual and collective levels of remembering, circulation among social, medial, and semantic dimensions across and beyond boundaries (“Travelling” 11). From this perspective, it helps to emphasize and scrutinize the representation of fusgeyers in both the literature produced by such immigrant fusgeyers to the United States (for example, M. E. Ravage’s 1917 An American in the Making: The Life Story of an Immigrant and Jacob Finkelstein’s 1942 Yiddish-language “Memoirs of a Fusgeyer from Romania to America”) and in the literature created in contemporary times in the United States, such as Stuart F. Tower’s 2003 historical novel The Wayfarers. Erll has demonstrated how literature can be a powerful conduit of cultural memory by its use of “four modes of a ‘rhetoric of collective memory’: the experiential, the mythical, the antagonistic, and the reflexive mode” (“Literature” 390). These modes of rhetoric can be applied to literary works about the fusgeyer movement in America, and they help to highlight a dynamic movement toward a transcultural type of rhetoric in contemporary US memorial literary culture. In particular, the focus on the fusgeyer movement in US literary works spanning from the early twentieth century through contemporary times allows us to decode certain mental, discursive, and habitual paradigms that were formed in long historical processes—via transcultural memory practices. These practices comprise the plethora of shared memories that have emerged through various experiences and events characterizing Jews’ lives at the turn of the twentieth century and around World War II, including deportation, economic interests, and voluntary or forced migration. Early Literary Representations of the Fusgeyer Movement by Inside Members: M. E. Ravage and Jacob Finkelstein Of the authors under consideration, two were Romanian Jews migrating to the United States in the early twentieth century and part of fusgeyer groups. Such was the case of Ravage. Born Marcus Eli Revici in 1884, in Bârlad, Romania, he spent his childhood in nearby Vaslui, emigrated to the United States in 1900, and initially lived on New York’s Lower East Side, where he Americanized his name to Max Ravage. In 1927, he moved to France and remained there until his death in 1965. The publication of his autobiography An American in the Making was highly successful and launched his career as a freelance writer and journalist. The first part features the author’s life in Romania before emigration. Parts Two to Four present Max’s trajectory in the United States from his emigration in 1900 until his college years in 1907. In a revised edition from 1936, Ravage added a fifth part focusing on his disappointment after returning to Vaslui in 1920. Cristina Stanciu has particularly lauded the autobiography for its exemplary contribution to the American immigrant narrative genre by offering an alternative to the rags-to-riches type of the American Dream characteristic of many other immigrants’ autobiographies from that period. Stanciu notes that Ravage penned his “coming-of-age” story “as a public intellectual, a secular Jew, and an American multilingual author” (8). This autobiographical character of his work highlights the experiential mode of a rhetoric of the Jewish collective memory of the fusgeyer movement: it represents the past “as a recent, lived-through experience” via “a first-person narrative, thus indicating life-writing” (Erll, “Literature” 390). Structurally, Ravage’s memoir conjoins the mythicizing mode of rhetoric with the antagonistic mode. It initially suggests the discriminatory atmosphere from Romania in chapter 3, fittingly titled “Exodus,” by invoking the myth of America as the “promised land” in the wake of his cousin Couza’s visit. Couza brings extremely favorable tidings of the country of his migration, the United States: “There was a country somewhere beyond seas where a man was a man in spite of his religion and his origin” (Ravage 25). Here, the positive myth of America for hard-working and suffering Jews is referenced through a “we-narration” that creates a collective identity for this ethnic group (Erll, “Literature” 391). After Ravage describes this physical return of his relative and the deplorable economic situation of Romania, he turns to emphasizing the spread of “America fever” among Romanian Jews, first in Vaslui and Bârlad and then in Iaşi, Dorohoi, Turnu Severin, Brăila, and Galaţi. This drew more and more Jews to praise emigration, the rich being the first to sell all their belongings and leave by the end of April 1900 (Ravage 27-28). Ravage also explains how the anti-Semitic Romanian authorities favored this enthusiastic trend in 1900 by allowing Jews to get passports very easily, “at the minimum of cost and almost no trouble at all” (28). The more impoverished Jews initially attempted to find ways to get to America by writing letters to extended family members that were already there, as they first needed to get enough money for the departure of one or two family members who would later call the rest of their kin. Unfortunately, they hardly ever got a response back. When an answer reached them, they learned that their relatives did not have an easy time in the new land. Rather than believe them, the local Jews stuck to the idealistic image Couza had provided and considered the answers as those of “selfish ingrates, whom prosperity had rendered unsympathetic with their own kind” (30). In fact, most Romanian Jews were drawn together by an “emigration fever” (Feldman 65) that was promoted by many Jewish relief agencies emerging across Europe. They wrote not only to family members that had previously emigrated but also to trustworthy, well-known Jews such as Moses Gaster, who had an influential position among the Jewish leadership of Europe.5 In their letters, they asked for practical information about which would be the most desirable destination for them among the United States, Canada, Argentina, Palestine (Feldman 67), Anatolia, or Cyprus (Wischnitzer 84). In this skeptical context, Ravage notes that the youths came up with the solution: “The youth—the fantastic, impractical youth—seeing the muddle their elders were in, took matters into their own hands, and one fine morning Rumania awoke to hear the startling news that the Walking Movement had begun” (30). Ravage narrows down the we-narration of his antagonistic mode of rhetoric by further distinguishing between the generation of active, retort-minded Jewish youths making up the fusgeyer movement and the old generation that was more hesitant, passive, and resigned. Ravage connects the difficult economic and civic situation of Jews in Romania with the rise of fusgeyer groups. In the chapter “To America on Foot,” he explains how such a group appeared in Vaslui in mid-May 1900. The group is constructed on the model of the first fusgeyer group from Bârlad, of whom they hear from a woman doing business there. She informs them that “a band of young men had formed themselves into an organization for the purpose of walking to America” (31). Ravage takes part in the birth of this Vaslui group, the “To-America-On-Foot Society,” and they first meet in Monish Bachman’s grain shed, which was used for theatrical performances. Therein, they elect Bachman’s son Yankel as president and Ravage as commissary-general, in charge of purchasing supplies and apportioning rations (31-32). Some twenty-five youths between fifteen and eighteen years old found the society, and they are presented as similar to a parliament in their establishment of goals. Despite some suggestions of keeping it secret from parents and starting on foot right away, they decide to inform the community of their plans and benefit from their advice and support. This, however, leads to Ravage’s failure to remain part of this group, given his parents’ opposition. His father’s arguments are Ravage’s previous clumsiness, when he almost drowned bathing their horse; his being the youngest son, whom his mother needs close by; and the bad crops of the previous year, which resulted in the family’s lack of money to subsidize “any kind of a journey, however inexpensive” (33). There is also his mother’s heartfelt plea invoking the death of his only sister Annie three years before, her “logic of bereavement” making him succumb to his parents’ views (33-34). As a result, the author does not join the first fusgeyer group leaving Vaslui in early May 1900. He comments that those who finally leave with this first contingent number around forty, including men older than those who initially started the excitement, underlining its existence at the crossroads of two directing forces. One is the real necessity to leave because of economic downfall or precarious material conditions: “The majority of those who composed the reorganized group were preparing to walk to America out of real necessity, not for adventure.” The other is the primacy of an idealism running through the entire community, first related to “the heroic pathos” associated with having such chutzpah as to leave on foot and, second, with “the missionary zeal” associated with America (34). By the time they left, they established this walking group movement as a national organization with branches all over Romania, in places where Jews resided. They also affiliated themselves with “the great charity alliances of Vienna, Berlin, Paris, and London,” becoming “a world movement, with agencies in the principal capitals of Europe and even in New York itself.” Ravage attributes this enthusiasm to the arrival of newspapers in Vaslui; created by the group members themselves, they were actually propaganda pieces idealizing America as a utopian land: They were filled with poems and passionate eloquence, words of cheer and hope, eulogies of the land of our aspirations, which for some reason or other was continually referred to as Jerusalem, encouragement to those who were left behind, and praise to the Almighty for delivering his people from the bondage of the modern Egypt (Rumania). (35) Nevertheless, the group neglected practicalities, as Ravage never heard them attempt to use any maps for determining the route to follow. Instead, “the broad, magnificent idea of the thing . . . occupied all minds” (36). Seeing this first group depart while he is left behind, Ravage dubs this one of his “saddest experiences of childhood.” Once again, he emphasizes the idealism and romantic adventure as major motivations for wanting to be part of this group: I have sometimes debated with myself whether it was really the enthusiasm for America and the vague yet marvelous things she meant to me, or whether it could have been that fascinating uniform of my fortunate boy friends and the romantic glories that I saw lying so near before them that made my heart ache when I heard that bugle sound and beheld those feet lifted for the march. (37) In his memoir, Ravage therefore constructs his impetus and young person’s enthusiasm to join the fusgeyer movement as springing from its romantic, utopian, mythical undertones rather than from the anti-Semitism and generalized discrimination of Jews at the basis of its formation. This fits the general profile of Jewish fusgeyer emigrants to the United States between 1881 and 1914 as “young, healthy people” full of “idealism and youthful romanticism” who bonded together (Kissman, “Immigration” 163). These people were “young and restless,” getting away from the domination of family, community, and tradition (Gartner 18). Yet, when he finally left as part of the second group, in June 1900, he persuaded his father with arguments relating to the root cause for starting the movement. These arguments included the economic precariousness of Jews in Romania, their lack of better prospects, the bleak future awaiting him—that of being drafted in the army like one of his elder brothers—and his having abandoned education because of the family’s poverty. The antagonistic mode of Ravage’s narrative finally constructs the enemy of Romanian Jews as Romania’s mainstream official measures against them rather than the generationally differing attitudes within the Romanian Jewish community. To that end, he gave to his father a series of concrete illustrations centered around “the discriminations of the Government against us,” which include the enumeration of educational, religious, and economic restrictions targeting Jews (Ravage 38). This was an accurate record of the proliferation of discriminatory laws against the Jews in Romania from the second half of the nineteenth century until the aftermath of World War I.6 Ravage mirrors the two main motives for emigration that some Jewish letters to Gaster from 1900 also invoked: “[T]he economic crisis in the country” and “the policy of oppression and discrimination” of the authorities against the Jews (Feldman 66). Following this situation, a group of fifty Jewish families from Craiova decried how this was not simply the result of a temporary economic meltdown but of having “to suffer further pain from co-nationals because of the race that sets us apart, because of the precious condition of being a Jew” (70). Similarly, thanks to insisting on dire practical aspects of a nonexistent future for the Jews of Romania, Ravage’s parents agreed to let him join the second group of Vaslui fusgeyers, who left in June 1900. In practice, he joined them later, as his parents gave their accord after the group had departed, and his father used his influence to get his son admitted to the group on reaching Galaţi. As a result, Ravage never got the genuine experience of fusgeyers because in Galaţi they had determined it was better not to continue on foot to European ports, as they might have trouble being allowed in the new countries. Instead, they amassed all the money they had and took a steamer to Vienna, then went “by rail through Germany as far as Rotterdam, at the expense of the Verband des Deutschen Juden and the Alliance Israélite, and from Rotterdam they would sail for New York” (Ravage 42). Ravage’s representation of his personal experience of the fusgeyer movement via the experiential, mythical, and antagonistic modes of rhetoric foregrounds its character as a potent, peaceful force in the hands of the Jewish youths. Its goal was to raise the discriminated Romanian Jewish community’s courage to leave behind their land of birth for a utopian land they created thanks to their writings, the “goldene medina” of the United States. This rhetoric of collective memory succeeds in presenting the movement to the American audience as an authentic phenomenon resonating with the cultural-memory image of it promoted by the Jewish and Western Gentile mass media at the time (Kissman, Shtudyes 33), Jewish immigration information bureaus, and aid agencies from the United States and Europe (Alroey 14). In its representation of the Jewish fusgeyer phenomenon as a peaceful resistance movement against discrimination, the narrative also becomes a mode of premediation to be later repackaged in other literary works and media and in connection to future events impacting the Jews, especially those of World War II.7 Most of the time, as in the case of Ravage, the actual walking was finally left behind. Instead, the transcultural network of various Jewish migration bureaus and aid organizations throughout Europe and the United States (most famously the Jewish Colonization Association, known as ICA, and B’nai Brith) facilitated their passage to the new land at low costs while helping with accommodation and food on the way (Kissman, “Immigration” 172). This was recorded, for instance, in a letter Elias Schwarzfeld sent from Paris on 14 June 1900 to Gaster, in London, touching on the fusgeyers and expressing how he had already helped the Bârlad group, in Romania, after they crossed the border and arrived at Western harbors (Eskenasy 359). The same contours of the fusgeyer movement through experiential, mythical, and antagonistic modes of rhetoric are also pinpointed by Jacob Finkelstein. In May 1942, Finkelstein won one of the prizes for the best Jewish immigrant story in the United States on the theme “Why I left Europe, and what I have accomplished in America,” as part of a competition organized by the scholarly journal YIVO Bleter.8 He was awarded the first prize for his Yiddish-language autobiographical account, “Zikhroynes fun a Fusgeyer fun Rumania kayn Amerika (Memoirs of a Fusgeyer from Romania to America),” which was published in the YIVO Bleter in 1945. Jill Culiner translated the approximately twenty-page account into English in her travelogue retracing the fusgeyers’ itinerary, Finding Home: In the Footsteps of the Jewish Fusgeyers (2004). Culiner used Finkelstein’s memoir as a series of epigraphs to the various chapters mapping the group’s passage through various cities on their way out of Romania.9 Born in 1878 on a farm in the Russian-occupied territory of Bessarabia, Finkelstein later settled in Bârlad, Romania, where he joined a Jewish amateur theatrical group that gave the money it earned from performances to charity. When life became increasingly intolerable in Romania in 1899-1900, members of the theatrical group started talking of the freedom they would find if they could emigrate to America. Soon, they became the Bârlad Fusgeyers, the first group of fusgeyers who set out toward America, on the last Sunday of April 1900. Written later than Ravage’s account and during World War II, Finkelstein’s account also uses an antagonistic rhetorical mode to suggest that the intolerable life conditions of Jews in Romania from the beginning of the twentieth century were the trigger of the fusgeyer movement: In the beginning (after coming to Romania from Bessarabia), I managed to get work and was not badly paid. But in 1898 and 1899, troubles arose and life became intolerable for Jews. Every chance to earn a livelihood was closed to them. In the ’90s an anti-Semitic agitation began in which the government had a hand. Land agitators began to appear and held popular meetings that always ended with a parade through the streets and shout of “Away with the Jews to Palestine.” During such demonstrations the Jews used to shut and bolt gates and doors to avoid a pogrom. (Finkelstein qtd. in Culiner, Finding 50) Here, given the extremely precarious time of writing, as World War II was in full swing, Finkelstein adds a new angle for considering the fusgeyer phenomenon, in comparison to Ravage. He openly associates it with the generalized anti-Semitism that took hold of Romania at the time by repeatedly using the very word “anti-Semitic” in relation to how his group of fusgeyers emigrated. In his city-by-city presentation of the group’s passage out of Romania, he mentions how the fusgeyers were heralded and helped with food and shelter by the Jewish communities of the cities they passed through, getting money for their theater performances, songs, and brochures, with some Gentiles also treating them well, as also indicated by Kissman (Shtudyes 32-33). However, in sync with Kissman’s assessments, he also balances this romantic, heroic allure of the group with the fusgeyers’ simultaneous suffering from many unfriendly and suspicious attitudes held by peasants and town officials. For instance, the police commissioner of Râmnicu Sărat confiscated the fusgeyers’ passports and asked for a guarantor that they “behave well” before allowing them into the city (Finkelstein qtd. in Culiner, Finding 109). Later, in Predeal, “The anti-Semites … had already written in the newspapers that our whole story was a bluff, that we had no intention of leaving Romania but that we went from city to city to beg and they thought we should be turned around and sent back to where we came from” (151-52). Overall, Finkelstein’s representation of the fusgeyers’ passage out of Romania uses a we-narration specific to the antagonistic mode. This constructs an image of fusgeyers as celebrities drawing attention from all sides, for good or bad, and resulting in a mythical mode that focuses on the importance of the Jewish collective over both the United States, the utopian land of their emigration, and Romania, the dystopian birthland left behind. For Ravage and Finkelstein (who were part of walking groups at the turn of the twentieth century), the experiential, antagonistic, and mythical modes of rhetoric are the means to suggest the rise of the fusgeyer movement and people’s excitement around it. The two authors use the alluring aspect of the fusgeyer movement to expose the spread of anti-Semitic and discriminatory measures against the Jews in early twentieth-century Romania that made them relate staying there with certain loss. In response, they fully embraced emigration as the only solution of succor and the occasion to create a romantic, heroic, celebrity-like aura for them on arrival in North America. This self-representation would make them cherish their life stories as being of importance for others in the new location, too. To that end, they balanced the Romanian Jews’ despair for the terrible conditions of their life with an insight into their cerebral and well-planned journey to the United States. Their narratives become forms of premediation to be later used in other literary works for recounting the Jews’ suffering both in the early twentieth century and during World War II. The Fusgeyer Movement as a Form of Contemporary Memorial Culture: Stuart Tower’s The Wayfarers Unlike Ravage and Finkelstein, who were directly involved with fusgeyer groups, Stuart Tower was a Jewish American author with an indirect connection to the movement. Tower was born in 1929 in Quincy, Massachusetts, earned a degree in education psychology, and died in March 2017 in California. He was two generations removed from the fusgeyers: his father was born in 1900 in Russia and immigrated to America in 1913, marrying an American-born Jewish woman (Tower, Wayfarers 564). Besides The Wayfarers (2003), Tower also published the collection of poems Hear O Israel (1983); Withered Roots: Remnants of Eastern European Jewry (1994), a collection of interviews with aging Holocaust survivors from Romania, Russia, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, and Slovakia; and the novel Branko (2013). Although published with a small, independent, and rather obscure publisher established in Florida in 1999, Lighthouse Press, The Wayfarers has been present in important bibliographic, commercial, and social cataloging channels (for example, Worldcat, Amazon, and Goodreads) and was well disseminated in Jewish communities throughout the United States. The author was invited to launch and discuss it, alongside its continuation, the 2013 novel Branko, in well-known synagogues such as New York’s Temple Emanu-El.10The Wayfarers inspired renowned klezmer artist Yale Strom to create the string quartet musical performance Di Fusgeyers (2005), including some of the emigrating groups’ songs.11 It must have also, at least in part, prompted the playwright Barbara Kahn to produce (in 2008) and stage (in 2009) the play Walking from Rumania: A Journey to Freedom in 1899 at the Theater of the New City, imagining the case of women-only fusgeyer groups composed of Jews and Roma (Pierre), organizing themselves in their native small town of Adjud, in the Moldova region, in order to reach Bârlad and join the walking movement. It has also been mentioned on travel forums such as TripAdvisor in discussions held by travelers undertaking heritage tours, which have become a fixture for post-World War II Jewish American generations and made famous especially by the publication of Jonathan Safran Foer’s historical novel Everything Is Illuminated in 2002, just a year before Tower’s The Wayfarers. Much like Foer, Tower presents the fusgeyer movement as a transgenerational phenomenon whose relevance for the present relies in its connection to later discriminatory events that have befallen the Jews. Unlike Foer’s praiseworthy aesthetic construction in Everything Is Illuminated, Tower’s book has value not so much as a literary artifact but as an example of contemporary memorial culture. The novel is divided into three parts. The first one, titled “The Quest,” establishes the transgenerational approach to the fusgeyer movement at the core of the narrative. This is the story of a search for how Sholem Leib Friedman arrived in Quincy, East Boston, in 1904 with help from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, as one of the fifty-five fusgeyers on board the ship Cincinnatus. Like Ravage in An American in the Making, Sholem singles out Romanians’ discriminatory attitudes as the main reason for emigration and couples it with a lingering sense of homesickness: “He would never forget the impoverishment, the relentless government-sponsored anti-Semitism, the boycotts, the deadly pogrom mentality spilling over from Russia . . . but still he missed Romania, he did” (11). In the narrative, Sholem’s son, seventy-year-old Nathan Friedman, initiates a search for his father’s story in 1982, in Beverly Hills. His search features Americans’ interest in genealogy research and places it in connection to the fusgeyer movement. This was specific to Nathan’s generation, who came of age in the 1970s in the United States, “an era devoted to diversity, the elaboration of ethnicity and the exploration of one’s heritage” (Flanzbaum 99). It was spearheaded by the success of Alex Haley’s multiple award-winning miniseries Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1977), based on the eponymous memoir published the previous year as an effort to trace his family’s African lineage (Nelson 23). Especially from the 1990s onward, after the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Cold War, this interest in genealogy began to include return trips to parents’ places of origin in Eastern Europe, to which it became easier to travel. By the twenty-first century, “the desire to return to origins and to sites of communal suffering has progressively intensified,” rekindling “desires for reconnection with lost personal and familial pasts” (Hirsch and Miller 3). Most recently, in the 2010s, such reconnection has become such a popular pastime for Americans that PBS produced the four-season documentary television series Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (2012-17), presenting celebrities’ confrontations with “the book of life,” a compiled record of their ancestral histories, lineage, and familial connection with world history obtained by professional genealogists. Likewise, in Tower’s novel, Nathan is immersed in “genealogical and historical research” (Tower, Wayfarers 12) that he started in 1982, in order to find the story of his father’s belonging to the fusgeyer movement. This includes the acquisition of maps and documents about the ship Cincinnatus, on which seventeen-year-old Sholem came to East Boston (16-17). His aim is to trace his father’s footsteps by going to Bârlad—the place from which Sholem left as part of a fusgeyer group in 1904—alongside his forty-four-year-old son, Herb, and sixteen-year-old grandson, Eric. Nathan’s wife foreshadows the trip as a “mashiganah [fool] mission,” since he might very likely find only dead ends. For Nathan, it becomes significant as an opportunity to see Bârlad and the surrounding Romanian countryside, locations where parts of his roots are (14). Once Nathan gets to Romania in 2000, he foregrounds its backward look, exemplified by pot-holed roads and a continuation of the communist police state logic even in post-communist times (23-25). He sees the policemen as part of a “controlled socialism” in which “[t]hey continue to suspect foreigners, particularly those from the West—and most especially Americans—of trying to plant the seeds for yet another revolution” (25). On meeting the rabbi of Bârlad, Nathan learns that his father’s brother, Yaakov, was a good friend of the rabbi’s father and that Yaakov and Sholem indeed left Bârlad as part of a fusgeyer group because of “the deplorable conditions” of life in Romania (35). The rabbi explains how this fourth Bârlad fusgeyer group was well-organized, hardly included anyone over thirty years old, and was made up of sixty people, of which six were women. Their aim was to make their walking an event by which the rest of the world could learn of the terrible conditions of life in Romania and Eastern Europe, more broadly. To that end, [t]hey would march to America, so to speak, with flags flying. A Romanian flag and the new Zionist flag with a blue Mogen David, drums beating and bugles blasting. A statement—a protest we would call it today. Against the planned pauperization of the Jewish communities in Poland, in Russia, in the Balkans, in the Baltic. Against the citizenship restrictions, against all anti-Jewish laws in every one of these countries, against the very effective boycotts of Jewish businesses, Jewish tradesmen. And, of course, against the rash of pogroms over the previous twenty years, from 1881 onward. (39) Meanwhile, the idealized view of their new location was also part of their journey since “[t]hey were going to America. To another world. Di Goldeneh Medina. The Golden Land! America! America!” (46). This utopian imagination of the fusgeyers (one already specified by Ravage in conjoining the mythical and antagonistic modes of rhetoric) is this time constructed in hindsight by the intertextual reference to a short story by Delmore Schwartz, a member of the next generation, with parents from Romania. In this story, “America! America!” (1948), Schwartz singled out this sense of open embrace of the United States by the early twentieth-century Eastern European Jewish immigrants, a sense that was lost on their children, who focused on alienation instead (Mihăilescu, Regimes 58). This imaginative connection to the fusgeyer movement is undoubtedly related to historical accounts that have shown how the walkers’ leaflets, posters, and pamphlets usually used pieces created not by fusgeyers themselves but by the intelligentsia who were not actually emigrating (Kissman, Shtudyes 30).12 Their aim was to “arouse support and compassion in public opinion—Jewish and non-Jewish—and to encourage the Jewish population to help the emigrants on their way” (Feldman 64). Yet Tower’s novel does not remain at the level of idealization of the new country of residence or propaganda for providing immediate support for the emigrants. Instead, it offers a longue durée approach that connects the terrible plea of the fusgeyers to what happened to the Jews who stayed in Romania during the rise of fascism. He connects this to the use of the false claims of a Jewish world conspiracy from the anti-Semitic fabricated text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was at the basis of right-wing theories and was first published in Russia in 1903, printed in the United States by Henry Ford in the 1920s, and later used by Hitler himself for writing Mein Kampf (1925). This recirculated text transformed Jews into the perpetual “enemy—the world’s most popular scapegoat” (Tower, Wayfarers 41). The strategy at work in Tower’s novel is that of a reflexive mode of rhetoric in which intertextual references to other pieces of literature and moments in history “draw attention to processes and problems of remembering” via “the montage of different versions of the past” (Erll, “Literature” 391). Part 2, “. . . Out of the Land of Egypt . . .,” focusing on the actual journey out of Romania by the fourth fusgeyer group from Bârlad in 1904, especially highlights the reflexive mode of rhetoric. This part presents the high level of fusgeyers’ planning with regard to food, living provisions, and medicine. They established a scheduling committee (Tower, Wayfarers 52), a diplomatic committee, a medical committee (57), a defense committee (61), an education committee (70), and financial arrangements with the help of international organizations such as the Jewish Labor Alliance and B’nai Brith, who acquired special rates for ship fare following the visit of the first American Consul, Benjamin Franklin Peixotto, to Romania in the 1870s (68-69). Tower’s novel further reproduces the main aim of this fusgeyer group once they left Bârlad. They meant to warn the international, especially Western, world about the unacceptable, unlivable conditions Jews faced in Romania: They are telling the world—yes, the entire world—that conditions here in Romania are totally unacceptable. Inhumane. Deplorable. As the American Secretary of State recently wrote to King Carol and the other signatories of the Berlin Treaty, this treatment is an international wrong. An international wrong, no less! And your children, as their preceding Fusgeyer groups did, are marching out of here, across the surface of Europe, demonstrating to the world that if they cannot enjoy a reasonably secure future here, then they will go elsewhere—to America, to Australia! There will continue to be a drain of the young, the youth of Europe, of Romania. As many of you now know, there is no stopping this avalanche. God bless our Fusgeyers, and God bless you who have given us our Fusgeyers! Omayn! Amen! (75) Through such intertextual and transhistorical references, Tower’s novel constructs the fusgeyer movement as a specific form of Jewish resistance at the beginning of the twentieth century, in opposition to tyrannical societies such as those of Romania or Russia. The main method he uses is that of foregrounding the movement as “a site of memory,” not so much referring to “what one might cautiously call the ‘actual events’ but instead to a canon of existent medial constructions, to the narratives and images circulating in a media culture” (Erll, “Literature” 392). Tower associates the groups of fusgeyers to religious connotations of Jews’ unfair persecution via the choice of title for this part, placing them at the level of the biblical Egypt that held Jews as slaves. Rather than using this as a mythical and allegorical mode of rhetoric, though, Tower’s novel uses remediation of familiar images or iconic figures of Holocaust tropes from media culture for the contemporary American audience of his book.13 Through this strategy, he suggests that the resistance of this group consisted of the peaceful international spread of discourse that would otherwise fail to circulate at this time. The fusgeyers’ discourse further reveals the generalized forms of anti-Semitic discrimination that made the lives of Jews a nightmare. The last chapter from part 2, “Pesach-Sighet,” particularly underscores the use of intermedial dynamics of memory via recourse to remediation in order to provide a powerful representation of the fusgeyer movement. This chapter focuses on the Bârlad fusgeyer group that had just crossed the border into Hungary and spent the Pessach celebration with the Jewish community of Sighet. Tower creatively introduces the figure of Eliezer Viesel, a journalist and author from Sighet with whom Sendher, the writer of the fusgeyer’s travel diary, exchanges ideas (Wayfarers 124). A clear reference to the renowned Holocaust survivor and author from Sighet, Elie Wiesel, this imaginary heterological construction envisions how Wiesel would have written had he been born a generation earlier. The 1904 Viesel is a regular contributor to the Budapest Weekly Jewish Times and writes a novel about the Jews of Transylvania. He tells Sendher how he recently interviewed a Jewish woman, Chasia Zitovitz, who had been living incognito in nearby Munkach since 1881, after the assassination of the Russian Tzar Alexander II by a group known as “the People’s Will terrorists, the narodnaya volya, and [who had been] one of the six Jews involved” (125). As the Jewish connection triggered the unprecedented anti-Semitic wave of measures against Jews in the Pale of Settlement and neighboring countries such as Romania and Austria-Hungary, the woman carried “a deep-seated feeling of guilt that the ensuing rampage of pogroms, wanton killing of Jews, the boycotts, the anti-Jewish legislation—were incited by her deeds and those of her group” (126). This is an anxiety that Viesel dismisses as misplaced, calling her merely “an idealist, a young revolutionary” caught in a change of policy on the part of the Russian authorities that “was on its way, regardless” (127). This echoes the real Wiesel’s handling of the guilt of Holocaust survivors such as himself in his interviews and novels as a byproduct and not a cause of destruction, suggesting how the Nazi perpetrators were the genuine moral initiators of Jewish extermination and destruction. In the early twentieth century, the initiators were the tyrannical Gentile rulers of Eastern European countries who used nationalistic self-interest as the basis of ruling their respective communities. This superimposition of early- and mid-twentieth-century forms of anti-Jewish discrimination further connects at the end of the chapter with the Rabbi’s explanation to Naftali in Bârlad, in the year 2000, that these are just remnants of information he has kept as an oral tradition. He has done so because even if his father kept the letters and travelogue notes sent to him by the fusgeyers, they were destroyed during World War II when the Romanian Iron Guard known as legionnaires (Romanian fascists) orchestrated the Iaşi pogrom in June 1941. The Rabbi explains how, during the Iaşi pogrom, the Romanian legionnaires burned the letters and notes from the fusgeyers when they ransacked the synagogue he was serving; they acted with violence in response to his plea for showing mercy to the Jewish community and thereby signaled their complete power over local Jews (133). Tower’s remediation uses tropes closer to the present in order to facilitate the readers’ access to a more distant past. This integration of media from a more recent time into an earlier period creates an effet de réel by indexically linking a well-known, globally accessible historical event for the Jews and its most popular representation (the Holocaust) with a more distant, less-known historical event and its more obscure representations (the fusgeyer movement). For the contemporary reader, this heterological method of imagining another possible trajectory as a detour of history transforms the fusgeyer movement into a transcultural rhetorical tool representing further conundrums for the Jewish community of Romania during World War II, later under communism, and beyond. Importantly, in order to function as such a tool, the author must construct the fusgeyer movement via easily recognizable Holocaust tropes that have become globally accessible following what Hilene Flanzbaum calls the “Americanization of the Holocaust” from the 1980s onwards. The fusgeyer movement therefore becomes imbued with characteristics that are immediately familiar to readers following the globalization of Holocaust memory. As a trope for the globalization of Holocaust memory, Tower makes use of the figure of Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and activist who, by the turn of the twenty-first century, was widely popular and well-known in all significant areas of American life: literary, political, and popular culture. Elie Wiesel is mentioned as such in the metanarrative in chapter 12 of Tower’s novel, describing the fusgeyers’ road to Vienna, in which Naftali is presented as an avid reader of Viesel’s oeuvre and his Sighet connection (213). During this part of the novel, once again, the Bârlad Jews that have remained in situ speak about how the majority of Romania’s Jews have left for Eretz Yisrael and give further reasons, especially connected to the Holocaust and the Bucharest pogrom from January 1941. Yet, for a long time, neither the generation of Holocaust survivors nor that of their predecessors were prone to address this dark past. Instead, “Sveig, nisht fur di kinder, has been our guiding admonishment” (219).14 Gradually, this plea of silence is superseded by a belated attempt to speak, especially thanks to Steven Spielberg’s establishment of the Shoah foundation, which sent interviewers to Bârlad around 2000 to take Jewish survivors’ testimonies (220). As a rhetorical tool, this use of the fusgeyer movement extends the problematics of anti-Semitism back in time, to the early twentieth century, and forward in time (following a connection made possible by an event from the future). It thereby broadens the ethical urgency of uncovering the grassroots histories of suffering and discrimination for contemporary readers by branching out connections with problematic situations around the world from both the distant and the recent past. Strengthening the transcultural function of the fusgeyer movement for contemporary readers, part 3, “Encounters,” connects the passage of fusgeyers to Western Europe and the United States. For example, in Vienna, the fusgeyers meet with Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau, the leading proponents of Zionism. They agree to Nordau’s writing an article in which he will mention the fusgeyers for drawing Jewish and non-Jewish attention to the need of the youth not only to go west but also to form their own state for taking care of Jews’ problems (248-49). Rather than competition, cooperation and mutual help are highlighted in this encounter. Tower’s connection between fusgeyers and Zionist proponents reflects what actually occurred at the time, as the Zionist press organ Die Welt often mentioned the plight of the fusgeyers. Herzl himself was mentioned in the 26 May 1900 issue of the journal, having sent the wayfarers a telegram from Bârlad in which he promised to help them on arrival in Vienna, while he advised others not to set off, as the Austro-Hungarian government would take measures against them, and he could not prevent them from doing that (Bar-Avi 57). Furthermore, fusgeyers get help searching for jobs in America from Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (Tower, Wayfarers 445-46). In this part of the novel, competing projects and aid and rescue operations from the people they meet on the way become fundamental for their safe arrival and new start in the United States. This follows a similar pattern to the aid and rescue operations helping the Jews of Romania, especially those deported to Transnistria, during World War II.15 Furthermore, in Sendher’s report of their journey to the Bârlad Rabbi, Viesel’s name reappears: he is mentioned for writing a laudatory article about the fusgeyers, in Hungarian, in the Budapest Weekly Jewish News, which was to be translated into Yiddish for the Romanian Jewish community papers and into English for the American press (192-93). This mirrors Elie Wiesel’s well-known Holocaust memoir, first published in Yiddish in Argentina in 1956 as a 250-page account titled Un di velt hot geshvigen (And the World Kept Silent) (Anderson 6), followed by a brief version published in French as La Nuit in 1958, and its English translation, which appeared in the United States as Night in 1960. The multilingual dimensions at work here—that have involved, in Wiesel’s case, different emphases carefully chosen for various immediate audiences—highlight various approaches and life-framing possibilities connected to specific language choices. This strategy once again positions the fusgeyer movement as a transcultural rhetorical tool that underscored the various conundrums that Jews had to face and had specific coordinates in the various locations they traversed. Conclusion Ravage’s, Finkelstein’s, and Tower’s works demonstrate how, in the United States, there is a dynamic literary representation of the fusgeyer movement from the early twentieth century to the early twenty-first century. This provides us with schemata by which we create images of the past that might shape our experiences and memories. In Ravage’s and Finkelstein’s narratives from the early and mid-twentieth century, the cultural memory of the fusgeyer movement was constructed on the basis of binary, utopian-dystopian types of representation sometimes involving the use of premediation. In Tower’s twenty-first-century novel, the cultural memory of the fusgeyer movement is based on nuanced and media-conscious reflective forms of representation functioning through remediation and highlighting the Jewish question in Eastern Europe over time by constant reference to Holocaust tropes. For Ravage and Finkelstein, who were part of walking groups at the turn of the twentieth century, the experiential, antagonistic, and mythical modes of rhetoric are the means to suggest the rise of the fusgeyer movement and the excitement around it as co-referent with the urgent need to expose the spread of anti-Semitic and discriminatory measures against the Jews in early twentieth-century Romania. These contours develop in autobiographies with a historical focus. In Tower’s historical novel, the fusgeyer movement becomes a transcultural rhetorical tool in which the use of reflexive modes, remediation, and return narratives as transpersonal connections to the past highlights transgenerational, transcultural transmission as an ethical commitment to revisit events of past suffering and forms of anti-Semitism. It functions as a commemoration of those who died and an awareness of past and present wrongs that should be redressed with urgency (hence the connection to the Holocaust). These narratives integrate media tropes from another time into an earlier period via remediation by indexically linking a well-known, globally accessible historical event for the Jews and its most popular fictional representations (the Holocaust) with a more distant, less-known historical event and its more obscure fictional representations (the fusgeyer movement). Their use of remediation “tends to solidify cultural memory [of historical events], creating and stabilizing certain narratives and icons of the past” (Erll, “Literature” 395). In the context of the American cultural memory networks in which the Holocaust has become the dominant trope exploited by popular culture, the fusgeyer movement becomes a potent premediating event for decrying anti-Jewish discrimination during World War II and, more broadly, anti-immigrant/anti-refugee feelings.16 For instance, the blurb of Tower’s 2003 novel contains an endorsement for its “plain old-fashioned captivating story-telling” in “today’s fast-paced, electronic society” by none other than Steven Spielberg, whose movie Schindler’s List (1993) solidified the central place of the Holocaust in American culture.17 Likewise, Ravage’s memoir was reprinted in 2009 by Rutgers University Press, as part of the Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the Americas series aiming to expand and deepen the sense of American literatures as multicultural and multilingual and to broaden the sense of America as a complex site for the creation of (trans)national, global narratives. In this case, the book’s blurb foregrounds how “An American in the Making contributes to a broader understanding of the global notion of ‘America’ and remains timely, especially in an era when massive immigration, now from Latin America and Asia, challenges ideas of national identity” and in which the Trump administration challenges refugees from Mexico and Central America. The positive outcome of the fusgeyer movement and, more broadly, of the great wave of Jewish migration from Eastern Europe between 1881 and 1914 resided in the fact that over eighty percent of the three million Jewish immigrants chose to come to the United States primarily because, as historian Lloyd P. Gartner has shown, this was the age of “free human movement,” implying nearly “unhindered departures” from Eastern Europe and largely “unhindered entrance” to America. The Jews chose the United States in overwhelming numbers for its large-scale economic development and its “liberal and constitutional, often democratic regime” (16). However, during this time, there were also certain efforts involving Jewish agencies in Europe and the United States that worked to restrict the mass exodus of fusgeyers from Romania by convincing those who could not earn a living and were threatening to become public charges in America to remain behind and helping them to reestablish themselves in their old homes (Stern 133; Kissman, “Immigration” 171; Wischnitzer 84-85; Szjakowski 49). This largely open-door policy was curtailed by strict changes in American immigration legislation after 1921-24, and especially after 1929, with severe restrictions on Jewish (and European) migrants (Brinkmann 60-61). Sadly, in our age, various refugee individuals and groups must face the challenges of more restricted forms of migration that sometimes involve family separation and limit their rights of access and equal opportunity in the United States and elsewhere. Notes Research for this paper was supported by a grant from the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research, UEFISCDI, for grant no. 5 / 2018, PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2016-0091, Transcultural Networks in Narratives about the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. Footnotes 1. The major Romanian-language Jewish newspaper Egalitatea widely covered the fusgeyer movement in 1900. The early studies of lawyer Joseph Kissman (a native of Romania born near Gura Humorului in 1882, later a representative of the American Joint Distribution Committee in Czernowitz in 1920, who finally emigrated to America in 1936 as the fascist regime was taking control of Romania) and of rabbi, historian, and philosopher Meyer Abraham Halevy (a native of Romania born in Piatra Neamţ in 1900, a founder of the Romanian Society of Judaic Studies, and a regular writer for various Jewish publications in Romania, who moved to France in 1957) have delineated the main characteristics of the fusgeyer movement. Mark Wischnitzer also briefly touched on the fusgeyer movement from Romania in his study To Dwell in Safety: The Story of Jewish Migration since 1800 (1948). The more recent works of cultural historians Israel Bar-Avi, Elyahu Feldman, Satu Matikainen, and “the “fusgeyer” encyclopedia entries of Brigitte Mihok and Jill Culiner have further developed these pioneering scholarly endeavors. 2. See also “Gaster’s Letter to M. Schwarzfeld, Bucharest, 8/21 March 1900” (Eskenasy 355). Most relevantly, in his book Evreii din România (1866-1919) (2006), Carol Iancu reproduces the 29 May 1899 report of France’s viceconsul to Iaşi, Lucien Piat, in which Piat describes the Romanians’ anti-Semitic actions that involved the ransacking of local Jews’ shops, the attack on their homes, the beating of Jews found on the way, and the killing of at least two of them. At the end, Piat included the manifesto of the National Committee of Students from Iaşi asking the rest of the citizens to join them on 16 May 1900 in the Sidoli Circus Room to take measures against the Jews, who were considered the enemies of Romanians. The manifesto also included a xenophobic and anti-Semitic plea for union, by following in the footsteps of “the old city of Romanianism, Bârlad, the first one that blew the bugle for the great fight to defend our national rights against the Jewish swarms” (my trans.; Iancu 331-32). 3. Bar-Avi mentions the approximate dates throughout the year 1900 for the formation of Jewish fusgeyer movements in various cities from Romania, as recorded in the press (52). His list shows how the majority of fusgeyer groups were formed in cities from the region of Moldova, the region with the largest Jewish population from Romania, but they also spread to a few cities from the regions of Dobrogea and Muntenia, proving the success of the movement and the growing despair of Jews throughout the entire territory of Romania. 4. These groups are mentioned by Adolphe Stern in the diary entries for the year 1900 from volume two of his memoirs that documented the Jews’ terrible plight from the late 1840s until the 1930s (130-32); see also Kissman (Shtudyes 31; “Immigration” 165) and Wischnitzer (83). Stern’s memoirs were published at different moments in time: volume 1 first appeared in 1915 under the title Din viaţa unui evreu-român; volume 2 was initially published in 1921 under the title Însemnări din viaţa mea; and volume 3 was at first published as a seventy-installment series in Renaşterea Noastră from 1929 to 1931 and in full format only posthumously, in 2001, when Hasefer publishers put together in one series all three volumes of Stern’s memoirs under the title Din viaţa unui evreu român. 5. A linguist by profession, Moses Gaster was the Hakham of the Sephardic community from London after being expelled from Romania in 1885 for allegedly being a member of an irredentist society. Romanian Jews considered him a trustworthy source for getting help. 6. In-depth analyses of the anti-Jewish laws implemented in Romania from the 1860s to the 1920s can be found in the following studies: Gaster (664-74), Kissman (Shtudyes 26-28; “Immigration” 160-63), and Mihăilescu (Eastern 18-25, 51-54). 7. The definition of premediation, alongside that of remediation, was first developed by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin in Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999) and then related to cultural-memory practices by Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney in Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory (2009). Erll and Rigney explain it as follows: “Premediation refers to the cognitive schemata and patterns of representation that are available in a given media culture . . . and which already preform the events that we later remember through remediation” (8). 8. For all the details of this 1942 competition, see Jocelyn Cohen and Daniel Soyer (4-15). Although mentioning Jacob Finkelstein’s account as the only one published in YIVO Bleter and one of the mere four that were published in various forms (17), Cohen and Soyer do not include it in their collection of nine English-translated stories of the over two hundred entries in the contest. 9. All quotations from Finkelstein’s originally Yiddish-language narrative will be given by using the English-language translation of Culiner and referencing them as reprinted in her book Finding Home: In the Footsteps of Jewish Fusgeyers (2004). Born in New York, Culiner was raised in Canada and belongs to a more remote generation than that of Eastern European Jewish immigrants to North America, as her paternal grandfather was born in shtetl Svyniukhy in present-day Ukraine in 1884 and emigrated first to the United States in 1907 before moving to Canada. 10. See, for instance, the announcement of the book launch and discussion at New York’s Temple Emanu-El on 13 October 2013 (Merrimack Valley Jewish Foundation) and at Temple Beth Torah (Ventura, California) on 15 October 2015 (Temple Beth Torah). 11. In collaboration with the Consulate General of Romania from Los Angeles, Yale Strom performed the Di Fusgeyers string quartet inspired by Stuart F. Tower’s The Wayfarers on 4 December 2005. For details announcing the event, see KlezCalendar (2005). 12. For example, the song of the Buzău group was composed by Jewish poet and writer Barbu Lăzăreanu, and the song of the Bârlad group (“Drumeţii”) and other poems, such as “Balada Ceainei,” “Evreul,” “Cu Emigranţii la Gară,” “Spre Răsărit,” and “Soare Nou,” were composed by the poet A. Axelrod (I. Luca). These songs and poems are reprinted in Bar-Avi (158-59). 13. Remediation is “the representation of one medium in another” (Bolter and Grusin 45), refashioning the old medium but with “the new medium remain[ing] dependent on the older one in acknowledged or unacknowledged ways” (47). 14. This phrase is Yiddish for “Keep quiet, don’t say a word, do it for the children” (my trans.). 15. For a historical account of aid and rescue operations helping the Jews of Romania during World War II, see Filderman (Memoirs and Diaries: Volume 2 179-81, 343-44, 481-88, 509-10) and Lazăr and Benjamin (259-90). 16. Apart from Tower’s novel, another recent novel touching on fusgeyers is Joyce Reiser Kornblatt’s The Reason for Wings: A Novel (1999). This book primarily focuses on a family’s arrival in Argentina and various generations’ struggles with the shadow of the Holocaust in Latin America and passingly mentions some characters pertaining to a fusgeyer group from Romania. 17. 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TI - The Jewish Fusgeyer Migration Movement from Early Twentieth-Century Romania as Transcultural Rhetorical Tool in US Memorial Literary Culture
JO - MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
DO - 10.1093/melus/mlz063
DA - 2020-03-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-jewish-fusgeyer-migration-movement-from-early-twentieth-century-RNBKDsP0Pp
SP - 139
VL - 45
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -