In 1900, 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 primarily towards the U.S. and Canada. My paper considers the history and memory of the fusgeyer movement by tracking the 1900 accounts about these emigrants from (Jewish/gentile) press articles, Jewish appeals for help, poems, and art representations as well as the subsequent accounts due to Jewish cultural historians from Romania (esp. Joseph Kissman, Theodor Loewenstein, Israel Bar-Avi, Israel Marcus, Jehiel Michael Sorer). I will compare these accounts with the literary representation of the fusgeyer movement over time as a conduit upholding transcultural networks of memory work in the U.S. primarily thanks to new generations' genealogical research endeavors. To that end, I will examine the representation of fusgeyers (1) in the literature produced by immigrant fusgeyers to the U.S. (M.E. Ravage's 1917 An American in the Making, and Jacob Finkelstein's 1942 Yiddish-language "Memoirs of a Fusgeyer from Romania to America"); (2) in the literature created in contemporary times in the U.S. (e.g. 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 towards a transcultural type of rhetoric in contemporary U.S. memorial literary culture. I will finally assess how the U.S. literary and genealogical narratives about fusgeyers reflect similar or different concerns to the various accounts about fusgeyers from Romania.
