Reviews

Jill Culiner has written a significant and often gripping account of her personal odyssey. She traverses Jewish history and geography from the towns and shtetls 
of Romania, through some of the major cities in Europe, to the Canadian cities, towns and settlements where Jews wandered. In the many places she visits 
she recounts not only her immediate impressions but often brings in important elements of Jewish history. If she is not an historian(?) she has introduced 
a new way of looking at history.
ABRAHAM ARNOLD, Western Jewish Heritage Centre

Culiner has a professional photographer’s eye, and a gifted writer’s ear. 
In her wonderfully detailed, descriptive style, she also vividly recreates the many
colourful characters she met en route. And with her own fluency in French, Hungarian, Yiddish in other languages, and her gift for the spoken word, she also captures their style of conversation. Waiting in Winnipeg’s bus station cafeteria, Culiner overhears "a red-faced woman endlessly haranging her companion, a chain-smoking man: “I toja noda teller. I tolja noda.” 

And Winnipeg’s North End is “a desolate 
stretch of North Main, where paint falls in chunks from the frames of boarded-up windows and the brickwork looks nibbled.” 

This personal account of one woman’s attempt to uncover an era in Jewish history is a masterpiece that’s part travel writing, and part history.
MATT BELLAN Jewish Post, Winnipeg