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A Contrary Journey with Velvel Zbarzher, Bard a Nonfiction Biography by Jill Culiner ➱ Book Tour with Giveaway

  


 


A Contrary Journey

with Velvel Zbarzher, Bard

by Jill Culiner

Genre: Nonfiction Biography, History, Travel


Culiner's intrepid pursuit of the elusive troubadour and the lost world from which he emerged enriches us with a double depiction of the turbulent times and places of the bard's era and the galloping commercialization of our own. Like a chef who manages to document great recipes before they disappear, Culiner serves us an utterly delicious feast of flavours we do not want to lose.

Robin Roger, writer, reviewer, Associate Publisher, New Jewish Press 2016-18

Invited by Culiner to join her travels to find Velvel was a gift in isolated pandemic times. Part history, part biography and part literature, the writing poetically transfixed. Train rides, villages, and Velvel's life move between magical realism and extraordinary insights into Jewish history generally missing in heritage tourism.

Daniel J Walkowitz, Professor of History Emeritus, Professor of Social & Cultural Analysis Emeritus New York University, author of The Remembered and Forgotten Jewish World

A captivating romance, a thrilling mystery, a fascinating tour back and forward in time, and so much more. Culiner takes us out of the contemporary fast-paced, digital society and superbly redraws the varied contours of the shtetls of Eastern European countries of yore via one remarkable itinerant Jewish existence. The book brilliantly brings back to life the unjustly forgotten Hebrew poet and Yiddish melodrama author, Velvel Zbarzher, a significant precursor of Yiddish theatre that moved from Galicia to Romania, the Russian Pale of Settlement, Austria, and finally Turkey. A breathtaking read! 

Dana Mihailescu, Associate Professor of American Studies, University of Bucharest

What a beautiful book! The writing is clear and direct, the subject matter is interesting and important, and the characters are lively and realistically portrayed. In short, it's a good piece of reporting, and was entirely successful in wafting me to another time and place.

Barrington James, former foreign correspondent for the Herald Tribune and UPI, author of The Musical World of Marie Antoinette


The Old Country, how did it smell? Sound? Was village life as cosy as popular myth would have us believe? Was there really a strong sense of community? Perhaps it was another place altogether.

In 19thc Eastern Europe, Jewish life was ruled by Hasidic rebbes or the traditional Misnagedim, and religious law dictated every aspect of daily life. Secular books were forbidden; independent thinkers were threatened with moral rebuke, magical retribution and expulsion. 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.

Velvel Zbarzher, rebel and glittering star of fusty inns, spent his life singing his poems to loyal audiences of poor workers and craftsmen, and his attacks condemning the religious stronghold 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 modernisation and assimilation hadn't brought an end to anti-Semitism.

Armed with a useless nineteenth-century map, a lumpy second-hand coat, and an unhealthy dose of curiosity Jill Culiner trudged through the snow in former Galicia, the Russian Pale, and Romania searching for Velvel. But she was also on the lookout for a vanished way of life in Austria, Turkey and Canada.

This book, chronicling a forgotten part of Jewish history, follows the life of one extraordinary Jewish bard, and it is told with wry humour by award-winning Canadian writer Jill Culiner.


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Excerpt 1
How places and sounds have vanished, taken uniqueness with them. I’ve seen it happen. As a social critical artist and teller of tales in modest settings—front rooms, back kitchens, open fields, public halls, and many low bars—I’ve always chosen itinerancy over comfort and security. I’ve been shifting across the earth’s surface for well over half a century now and doing it on the cheap: no soulless or chic hotels, no tourist venues for me. Just sleeping in open fields, or cars, or crumbling castles, or down-at-heel inns; crossing much of Europe on foot; lurking in unsavoury places; tasting life in French, German, English, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Polish, Greek and Turkish villages.
And believe me, we’ve lost a lot: virtuoso spoon players in English miner’s pubs; Bulgarian store-front bars where women sang in high-pitched traditional tones while their moustachioed lovers watched with cynical eyes; grim Hungarian back rooms where Gypsies played cimbaloms, violins, violas, bass fiddles while garlic fried on a hot plate; German villages where roads were unpaved, the sun heated sweet straw, and ruddy folk squeezed accordions; Austrian country inns where stranger-hating men tickled zithers: dusty French towns undisturbed by tourism where house facades were neglected and hurdy-gurdies whined of fallow fields; wooden cottages on shore-lapping North American lakes where men sawed at violins and bears snuffled around the vegetable patch; seaside villages where frame houses sagged and wind-pushed screen doors made music of another kind.
Those spoon players, the fine moustachioed men, the singers with their high-pitched tones, and the hurdy-gurdies have all vanished. Lakes are churned by speeding boats. European towns are bland and tidy, housing developments have spread like relentless fungi, and traditional musicians have been humiliated out by youths screaming, ‘Get modern.’ 
Today’s cultural references demand a break with the past, and little has survived the onslaught of commercial noise, mass entertainment, bling, cement, and polyvinyl chloride. Reason and observation have been replaced by canned laughter, binge-watching, must-have products, and the star or victim of the moment. Gone are sounds, smells, and feelings. In their place are ‘historical’ reconstructions, touchy-feely interactive museums, atmosphere candles, world music, sound and light shows—all as authentic as any Disney creation. We didn’t value what we had, we didn’t cherish or preserve it, and we’ll never get it back, despite designer determination.

Excerpt 2

After the decline of Polish power in the nineteenth century, towns degenerated. Foreign travellers sneered at the heavy sour rye bread, the salt butter, the simple meals of eggs and fish, and at village wretchedness and low sanitary standards. But, this is a marshy country where folk were gnawed into misery by all manner of winged and crawling beasties; where, in the rainy season, horses sank to their bellies in mud and could only be pried out with heavy poles; where summer heat baked those same roads into hard miserable ruts, and winter drifts obliterated them entirely. True, cows, pigs, goats, fowl wandered where they would, and village streets were punctuated by reeking dunghills, slops, and sewage (those lacking primitive privies attended to their needs in the streets.) True, water could be deadly, and rivers were fouled by night soil. And yes, such conditions are inconceivable in the face of today’s fear of microbes, dirt, insects, birds, wildlife, odours, and even natural vegetation, but do you think conditions were better in western and southern Europe? In the new North American towns and cities? They weren’t. That’s just what life was like back then.

            Here’s what else it was like: there was a silence we don’t know today, a calm that admitted voices from a neighbour’s house, conversations on the street, taunts, laughter, sobs, the sagging sounds of those reeling tipsily along alleyways. There was the barking of dogs, the thud of horse’s hooves on dirt lanes, the jingle of decorative horse bells, the rumble of wagon wheels, the singing of so many birds,[1] the rustle of leafy trees. People hummed, sang, or whistled as they worked; peddlers blew whistles and called out their wares in a singsong. The streets were alive with hawkers willing to exchange salt, tobacco, matches, needles, and ribbons for eggs, meal, bones, bristles, feathers, fowl, pelts, mushrooms, and berriesThere was the clang of blacksmiths and pot menders, the rasp of sawyers, the hammering of carpenters and roofers, the terrified cries of animals being slaughtered in roadways, yards, or on doorsteps. And every Sunday, red-booted peasant girls and proud peasant lads would join arms, sing before the taverns and inns, stamp their feet on the earthen road, while musicians (blind musicians, Jewish klezmorim, pipers, or fiddlers) played until dawn.

            The aroma of sun-heated grain floated on the air, mixed with the perfume of flowers and ripening fruit. There was the hot reek of seeds being pressed for oil, and you could smell feathers, animals, blood, rot, dust, black earth, grain, snow, wood smoke, filth, corn, sun, rain, storms, and all the different seasons.

 



[1] According to the European Bird Census Council, the farmland bird population has declined by 53 per cent in some areas, and by 70 per cent in others.

Excerpt 3 

Outside, there’s a blizzard. Customs officials and train mechanics stamp their feet, trying to keep warm. Inside in this train carrying only a few passengers, life is pleasant, dreamy, and cosy. We aren’t advancing, merely jerking back and forth with a terrible grinding for, at the Romanian border, to overcome the differences in track gauge, wagons are lifted off one set of bogies and placed on another. This difference in gauge once slowed down panzer units dependent on ammunition and oil and helped prevent Hitler’s seizure of Moscow, but today, it’s a long, costly process. I’m one of the last travellers on the romantic-sounding Moscow-Sophia run. In two weeks, it will be cancelled, and no train will replace it.

After a final shudder of wheels and much thudding, we set off again, swaying through the soft white countryside, accompanied, since Czernowitz, by a narrow snow-covered Moldavian track. Forgotten, used only by farmers and shepherds today, a hundred and fifty years ago, despite its ruts, holes, and the frail horizontal poles bridging streams and quagmires, it might have been an important north-south way. Villages seem drowsy, empty. Swarms of starlings fill the air, fields maintain their long medieval swaths, and motionless shepherds are out on the frozen plain, timeless figures with crooks. Do they still follow the old custom of wintering where grasses pierce the snow? Apparently. Here and there are enclosures for their woolly creatures—odd-shaped reed-walled corrals. Close by are the modern shepherd’s huts: no longer made of stalks and thatch, these tiny one-room boxes have walls of corrugated metal, plastic sheeting, any old salvaged, knocked-together material. Iron pipe chimneys sprout from roofs. Bored sheepdogs, taking a break from rounding up their silly charges, happily chase our passing train.

I transfer at stations with the crenulated roofs of small castles or Moorish palaces, journey further with grizzled men sporting extravagant moustaches and old-fashioned headgear. They hold their shoulders back proudly. Just remove those synthetic jackets and we could be in another era. School children of all ages travel for a stop or two before setting out on foot through the snow, heading for some invisible homestead. One young man leaps agilely from the moving train, strides towards a hazy clump of houses and barns. I want to call out to him: ‘Take me with you. Let me, a nosy intrusive person, peek into your life for a short time.’

Silence without media interference is too much to bear for a few travellers. A scratchy radio is snapped on—happily, the music is traditional Romanian, jumpy, nervous, and catchy. A few moustached men hum, sing along, slap their thighs, and whistle shrilly at all the right places. I encourage them with nods and grins.

Excerpt 4

Falling snow obscures all. Surely no one will travel in such a blizzard. Even huge, snow-covered stray dogs curl desperately against the walls and doors of the central bus station. Take a look at the rusty mini-buses with threadbare tires in the station yard: those motorized tin cans will never risk ice-covered, potholed roads. 

I’m wrong, of course. I’ve spent too much time in places where people are easily upset by weather. This is Ukraine; snow is normal. The unheated can I board joins other cans, cars, horse-drawn carts, and off we go, gliding along as if nothing unusual is going on. Even the driver is not in the least troubled by high drifts. As we slalom merrily, left, right, centre, left, half-spin, centre again, he chats amiably to the woman sitting just behind him. Further obscuring the view, a special metal attachment just above the windscreen allows for his impressive collection of good luck tchotchkele: toy animals—two bears, a bunny, a puppy—a bouncing crucifix, an icon, several splendid sprays of plastic flowers.

Svyniukhy (Svinich) is now called Privetnoye, and it’s some thirty kilometres away. On these bad roads, the trip there will easily take three or four hours, although I’m not certain about much of anything since I’ve also lost my modern road map and I can’t understand anyone anyway. Outside, white hills swell gently, and despite the snowstorm, a heavy mist makes time inconsequential. Perhaps it’s a curtain of sorts, one through which I must pass in search of the past. Yes, the countryside does resemble that of Michigan or Ontario—my grandmother said it would. Still, there’s something else out there, something quite unlike the New Country. Although Stalin ordered the collectivisation of smallholdings and the ploughing up of boundary brush, the traces of long strips, as narrow as the medieval past, are still stamped into the black earth by those long-gone serfs’ toil. Old mud roads are here too, just wide enough for carts and horses, heading toward villages hidden by hills and coppices. And, everywhere you look, those peasant women are there again, drab, bulky, lumbering homeward.

People climb into and out of the tin can at strange places, without dwellings, signs, or indications of any sort. Sometimes we pause in tiny villages with today’s usual jumble: ruined old houses with tin roofs; beautiful wooden terraces ruined by polyvinyl chloride siding; ugly new shops in cement; brick bungalows lacking style and charm but with effective heating; beautifully tended old houses of adobe with small double windows and, sometimes, a sculpted wooden entry. What I wouldn’t give to be invited into a few of those for a gawk.

The driver, exasperated that I speak no Ukrainian, lets me know it, turning, looking at me pointedly, sneering, making snide comments to smirking fellow passengers, all of them flat-faced, blue-eyed folk. Let him have his fun, I don’t mind in the least. I’m taking in the sight of the men and women trudging through the snow with straw baskets containing flapping chickens or heavy sacks. These tree-lined roads, carts and horses, unpaved mud streets, are visions from another time: yes, I have reached the other side of the curtain. What will I find in Svinich? Will I see the inn? Is there still a bench out in front? What about the river?

What’s so Exciting About Writing Non-Fiction?

 

If you think that writing non-fiction is dull, that it compares in no way to fiction, you’re wrong. I write both, and although I do enjoy letting my imagination create characters, conflicts, and landscapes, it is creative non-fiction (also called literary nonfiction or narrative nonfiction) that is closest to my heart. Why? Because creative non-fiction is a perfect blend of memory, fact, and imagination.

 

What exactly is creative non-fiction?

 

In creative nonfiction, all information must be based on research, and nothing can be invented. However, a writer can use personal experience to complete the picture, and unlike pure journalism or academic work, creative non-fiction reads like any good story, with conflict, a turning point, and vivid description.

 

Twelve years of research went into A Contrary Journey with Velvel Zbarzher, Bard, and the result is a story set into an authentic nineteenth-century landscape, with real people who are as flawed and doubting as the rest of us—after all, who can relate to a perfect person?

 

Have I convinced you? Here’s a short excerpt from, A Contrary Journey, and this should do the trick:

 

            I’m on the wrong rusty mini-bus. The driver, a friendly roly-poly man, expert in dangerous driving, hawking, and spitting, makes that clear. He and a few passengers explain with gestures and shouts that this bus doesn’t go as far as Zbarazh—or I think that’s what they’re saying. Who knows? Do I care? Despite the lack of heating in this rotting vehicle, I’ve been lulled into contented passivity by the sight of snowy fields and frozen lanes ambling on to nowhere in particular…until the bus slithers to an uncontrolled halt and deposits me at an empty crossroads. I’m to do the last four kilometres on foot? Fine with me. Can anything be more exciting than walking into the village where Velvel was born, where he grew up?

            The flat Ukrainian plain has given way to gentle Carpathian foothills and snow-dusted conifers. Was this the very road Velvel took, going the other way, sneaking out of town in 1844? The idea puts a delighted bounce into my step, and with my cheap and trusty plastic camera, I snap pictures of the woods, misty hills, and the frozen dirt track for horses and carts running alongside this paved roadway. Until a sign announces I’ve arrived.

 

Born in New York, raised in Toronto, Jill Culiner has lived in England, Holland, Greece, Turkey, Germany and Hungary, keeping body and soul together by delivering newspapers, belly dancing, translating, tour guiding and a great many other tedious jobs. She presently resides in a small French village, similar to the not very pleasant one presented in her mystery, Slanderous Tongue.
For her non-fiction work, Finding Home in the Footsteps of the Jewish Fusgeyers, she crossed Romania on foot tracing the path of immigrants bound for North America at the end of the 19th century. The book won the Tannenbaum Prize for Canadian Jewish History in 2005 and was short-listed for the ForeWord magazine prize.
As a photographer, her exhibition concerning the First and Second World Wars, La Mémoire Effacée, has toured France, Canada and Hungary under the auspices of UNESCO and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As an artist/creator of social critical objects, her work has been exhibited throughout France and Germany, in Spain, England, Switzerland and Poland. It now fills La Boule d’Or, a former café/hotel transformed into a peculiar mini museum open to the public. Its wild garden (much to the distress of close neighbours) is a reserve for birds, butterflies, insects and reptiles.
She has spoken to genealogical and historical groups throughout the United States and Canada, has worked as a broadcaster for Radio France. An amateur musician (flute, piccolo, oboe, oboe d’amore, English horn) she plays in several orchestras and chamber groups. 



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