Fusgeyer

I was recently reminded of how I like to write.  I was looking at my different blogs from my times in different places, as I found different ways to be me. I'm back in Cali after a year in Philly, but still finding out more about me and the world. You know how that goes. I know next to nothing about it, but I often come back to the idea of being a fusgeyer. I looked it up again today, and found this:

They were known as the fusgeyer, the wayfarers. They ha sold their valuables, joined together...and made a common fund to ensure that all in the group could make the journey. This journey was often perilous. For some...they were compelled to cross the border at night... (Lawrence Jeffrey Epstein, At the Edge of a Dream, p.17)

Fusgeyers - yiddish for foot-goer (more or less) - were Romanian Jews often identified as gypsies who left Romania by foot during persecution in the late 1800s...ish. My grandparents were fusgeyers. And that matters, but that's not why I bring it up. I've never been persecuted, never had to flee my country.

But I connect with this concept of being a fusgeyer, in a lot of the same ways Christians connect with being sojourners in a foreign land, not destined to stay there. Where you're from and where you've been both connects you and separates you from others. It's often your choice if it's more of the former or the latter.

I've always been sensitive to separations and divisions, wondering why people group and exclude others. But I'm more comfortable with it now, because it can be done in a good way. It's freeing to accept how you do and don't fit in different groups, and to laugh at it or celebrate it as seems fitting.

Moral of the story? I don't know. Take a walk, fusgeyer. And have a laugh about where it leads you.

And definitely call someone a fusgeyer. They'll probably think it's a dirty word. Silly them! :)