AJL Newsletter, Feb/Mar 2005

In 1945, Falk ZOlf, a Jewish teacher in the I.L. PeretzShul in Winnipeg, published a moving semi-autobiographical novel in Yiddish called Auf Fremder Erd. In a series of 132 vignettes, he vividly described elements of his life from his childhood in Zastavieh until his emigration to Canada. Born in 1898, he offers us a glimpse of a generation whose youth predated the Holocaust, and was compelled to grapple with the forces unleashed during World War I, be they military, ideological, or psychological. Zolf's experiences are extremely diverse: a student at the Slobodker Yeshivah, a "draft-dodger" from the Czar's Army, a soldier in the Communist Russian Army, a Poale Tsion activist, a prisoner in a POW camp in East Prussia, and a familiy man in Zastavia, to name a few. His many wanderings in both the Pale of Settlement and Russian heartland give the reader a picture of the diversity of Jewish communities at the time. Zolf also addresses how the -isms and schisms of his day played out in this life: religious observance, secularization, and platforms of Jewish political movements, communism etc.