The fusgeyer movement, in which large numbers of impoverished, persecuted Jews suddenly decided to “go on foot” towards the U.S. and Canada, is the most salient characteristic of turn-of-the-century Jewish emigration from Romania. In this presentation, Dana Mihailescu considers the history and memory of the fusgeyer movement by tracking the representation of these emigrants in the Jewish and general press, single issue newspapers, poems, and visual arts from the turn of the twentieth century—as well as in more contemporaneous narratives. We will further consider resources such as the 1900-1903 press coverage of “emigration on foot” in reports on the phenomenon made by American diplomats, as well as the little known manuscript, Zikhroynes fun a fusgeyer fun rumanye keyn amerike, which won the 1942 YIVO-bleter competition for best Jewish immigrant story in the U.S., among others, in order to tell the fascinating story of this unusual moment in the history of Jewish immigration.

About the Speaker
Dana Mihailescu is an Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Bucharest, Romania. She was a Fulbright Junior grantee at Brandeis University and the Edith Kreeger Wolf Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Crown Family Center of Jewish and Israel Studies at Northwestern University. Her main research interests and publications focus on Jewish American studies, Holocaust (child) survivor’ testimonies, graphic narratives and the Holocaust, trauma and witnessing, ethics and memory, migration from Eastern Europe to the United States. She is the author of articles in venues such as MELUS, Rethinking History, Shofar, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, East European Jewish Affairs, American Imago, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and of the monograph Eastern European Jewish American Narratives, 1890-1930: Struggles for Recognition (Lexington, 2018).