A Contrary Journey with Velvel Zbarzher, Bard

The lucky reader of A Contrary Journey with Velvel Zbarzher, Bard makes the acquaintance of two great iconoclasts - Velvel Zbarzher and Jill Culiner, the author herself. 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; Jill Culiner's A Contrary Journey with Velvel Zbarzher, Bard, is a captivating romance, a thrilling mystery, a fascinating walking/train 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; Traveling in the footsteps of the mid-19th century troubadour, Velvel Zbarzher, who sang and wrote poetry in both Hebrew and Yiddish, Jill Culiner has produced an intense, powerful, yet breezy narrative that is extremely unusual in that it is at once a work of history, biography, and memoir. On her long and often difficult research journey through the old Pale of Settlement (Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, parts of northern Ukraine, Latvia and Russia), Culiner's first-rate eye allows her to render the world of the shtetl, past and present, with more intimacy, complexity and telling detail than anything else I have read. Zbarzher, considered a heretic by the religious Jewish community, fled to Romania in 1845 and spent the last twenty-five years there singing, writing poems, and carousing. It is the measure of the strength of Culiner's work that her own journey is as fascinating as that of her subject. Robert A Rosenstone, Emeritus Professor of History, California Institute of Technology