A Trip to
Novaya Ushitsa, Podolia, Ukraine, My Bubbie and Zeydie's Shtetl
and
Bucharest, Roumania, My Grandma Lucy's Home Town

Foreword

During my family's trip to the Ukraine and Roumania, I kept a handwritten journal, but events unfolded faster than I could write. I sometimes wrote in the present as things happened around me, and sometimes in the past to describe events of the past few days. Sometimes I just wrote to collect my thoughts. I've used italics to indicate when I'm describing events in the present, or at least close to the present. I draw from my emails, including emails sent from the Ukraine, to fill some gaps. In a few instances, once I described an event in an email to my parents, I didn't bother to describe it in my journal. When I use an email, I do so with a minimal amount of editing, so you'll notice that in the middle of this great adventure, I was also writing about mundane occurrences. Occasionally, something wasn't committed to paper or an email at all. In these instances, I did my best to dredge my memories; they are still pretty vivid.

I started out writing this journal for myself, but I realized almost from the outset that as I delved into my family's history, I was becoming an integral part of that story. Perhaps someday, the grandchildren of my grandchildren will learn about me and themselves through these words and pictures.

As I planned my trip to the Ukraine and Roumania, I found the accounts of the few others who had done similar trips to be riveting reading. Now I can offer my own story for future shtetl schleppers. I hope eventually to put together a page of links I found useful for planning my trip.

The places my family and I visited during our trip were Budapest, Proskurov(Khmelnitsky), Kamenets-Podolsk (Kamanets-Podolski), Dunavitz (Dunaevtsi), Nova Ushitsa (Novaya Ushitsa), Shargorod, Medzhibozh, Letichev, Khotyn, and Bucharest. ...and the story continued with the search for Misha once we were back in the U.S.

As of July, 2005, I've finished my narrative and photo-editing up to and including the day we visited Novaya Ushitsa. The rest will be finished, but the accounts of the days after that are more tangled as my writing jumps back and forth frequently between the present and the recent past. The words make sense to me, but would be difficult for anyone else to follow as they are written. Selecting, cropping, and adjusting the levels of the pictures and merging them into the narrative is tedious and proving to be time consuming, but I think the narrative and photos need each other for context. I will post to the Ukraine SIG and general JewishGen lists when I finish additional chapters. I hope it will be worth the wait.

My wife Neia shared this great adventure with me, and her notes helped fill in gaps when I was too swept away with events. My mom, Davine Izen, and Neia read and reread my drafts, catching many mistakes and making important editorial suggestions. The opinions and mistakes are my own.

This trip would have been only a shadow of itself without the Royzners. As you will read, Anna, Ilya, Tatiana, Marina, and Kostia were as much a part of our story as the places we came to visit. If you are considering a visit of your own to the Ukraine and wish to contact Anna Royzner, you can reach her via email at: rik@dn.km.ua

-Joe Izen, July 10, 2005

N.B. The travelog chapter files are rather large because of many embedded pictures. I have produced a set with reduced-resolution images for online viewing with slower Internet connections and a set with higher resolution images for broadband Internet connections. It will require the patience of Job if you are trying to read the full-resolution set using a conventional modem connection, but you will be rewarded with near-photographic resolution images.

Web Viewing (72dpi images) or Limited Bandwidth

Background, Budapest to Proskurov/Khmelnitsky [14 pages, 629 kB]