The Spoon from Minkowitz: A Bittersweet Roots Journey to Ancestral Lands

by Judith Fein

Award-winning international travel writer Judith Fein dives beneath the surface of her Russian Jewish American heritage--pushing past all obstacles to find the truth behind the shrouded story about where she came from, what the Old World was like, and what remains of the places so many of our ancestors left behind when they came to America. Fein takes us along as she treks through graveyards, has a private audience with the Gypsy Baron of Moldova, meets the last Jew standing, communes with the dead, quaffs cognac with Russians, wanders among ruins, and hears the call of the ancestors, driving her on.

Ultimately, it is our story too, as we experience the legacy of what was handed down to us in our families, relationships, beliefs, fears and longings. How to crack the mystery of who we are, why we love, and where we came from can be the greatest mystery of all.

Genres: Nonfiction

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Judith Fein lives to leave. An award-winning travel journalist, she is either on the road or on her computer. She has contributed to more than 100 international publications, including the Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Dallas Morning News, National Geographic Traveler, the Jerusalem Post, Hemisphere, Islands, New Mexico Magazine, Travel Age West, Organic Spa, and Spirituality and Health. She is the author of the acclaimed book, LIFE IS A TRIP: The Transformative Magic of Travel.

Judith has been a keynote presenter for many conferences, including the Adventure Travel Trade Association, and Tedx San Miguel de Allende. She is a frequent guest on broadcast media, was a regular contributor to The Savvy Traveler for six years, and has been heard on the BBC, All Things Considered, and Marketplace. With her photojournalist husband Paul Ross, she teaches public speaking and creativity as applied to writing, PR and Marketing.

Judith is the co-founder and executive editor of the award-garnering experiential travel blog www.YourLifeisaTrip.com, which has more than 125 contributors. She blogs about travel for The Huffington Post and Psychology Today, and occasionally she and Paul Ross take open-hearted people on very unusual trips. In her LBTW (Life Before Travel Writing), Fein ran a theatre company in Europe, lived in Africa, and then worked as a Hollywood screenwriter, playwright, and theatre director in the U.S.A.

Like a modern-day Marco Polo or Ibn Batuta, Fein has traveled from Mog Mog to Vanuatu, trained as assistant to a Mexican healer, purchased a camel in Tunisia, danced with spirits in Brazil and a Mayan elder in Quintana Roo, dragged her husband to consult with a Zulu sangoma in South Africa, swum with beluga whales, had a private audience with the High Priest of the Ancient Israelite Samaritans, appeased the mischievous jinns in Morocco, and eaten porcupine, albeit not with relish, in Vietnam.

Reviews

[Betsy Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written with a contagious passion and curiosity, The Spoon from Minkowitz by seasoned travel writer Judith Fein may ignite your own longing to investigate your ancestral homeland. The writing is so alive, I felt as if I was experiencing what it would be like to walk the same streets my Eastern European ancestors walked; before reading this, it never really occurred to me that I would feel a visceral connection to the land of people I know nothing about.

Judie is a fine journalist (pun intended) and often very funny. So this is not just a personal story of finding her roots. It is a history of Jews in Ukraine and in Russia. The journalism and history are artfully woven into a personal story so compelling I read it one day. This would be a good book for students (it includes a study guide), book groups, and individuals who are interested in exploring their ancestral roots.

A fast, easy read. Compelling stuff.

[Laraine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book "just happened" to come into my hands (from a friend who's husband is from Minkowitz)--clearly it was meant to be. And so this memoir goes...linking a few key words the author's grandmother told her over and over as a child about her homeland to a journey of a lifetime, finding her roots in the old country.

Ms Fein's writing style is clear, pointed and moving-each and all important to keeping going on the path to knowledge. The Spoon from Minkowitz is part-geography and history lesson, part-human bonding with one ancestors and for sure introspective for both author and reader alike. As I recently confirmed my paternal Ashkenazi Jewish roots, but having no clues (other than DNA comparisons via 23andme, etc.) I eagerly lived through Judy's quest realizing mine could very well be most similar.

[Ellen Goldman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book! In a way, I felt it was my own story. I have always loved to travel, and I started traveling to Europe by myself with a backpack at the age of twenty-one. Yet, although I have always longed to visit Kanczuga, my father’s birthplace, a tiny shtetl in the Galicia region of Poland, I have never done so. Somehow the time has never been right. So this transformative book has been my passport. I was transfixed by the author’s journey. Her skill as a writer, her choice of just the right words and imagery to convey the scene and the emotion made me feel as if I were by her side throughout her journey; a journey both thoroughly enjoyable and meaningful.

I do believe I was meant to read this book. I came across it when I googled the name of the manufacturer on the back of a spoon that my husband’s grandmother had brought with her to the US when she emigrated from Minsk, Russia in the early 1900’s. The book came up in my search, and there on the book cover was my husband’s spoon! Of course I immediately ordered a copy of the book and read it the day it arrived.


I highly recommend this book.

[Bitchin' Reads · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a sweet journey of ancestry and heart, of pain and death, of what could have been and what was/is and what is lost and found. I found myself wanting to push Fein into Minkowitz, wondering what the heck she was waiting for. The story begins with her childhood and her grandmother's past in Russia (present day Ukraine), reaching far into the past, a place that Fein openly admits to feeling distanced to at times when the Holocaust is brought up, but she feels obligated to make this trip and absorb as much as possible in honor of her ancestors and herself.

The only complaint(s) I have are in reference to the writing itself, stylistically and organizationally. You find out that Fein has written screenplays and theatrical works, and it shines through her writing. When dialogue comes in, most often it stands alone and is separated from the scene--they are not integrated with one another. The recurrence and mentioning of pertinent information happens strangely, which I believe continues to reflect Fein's original choice of the play form of writing. The important themes are repeated so often that occasionally (especially the beginning for myself) I became annoyed--instead of telling me again and again how much Minkowitz meant to her, I would have preferred Fein showing us through her daily actions how everything seemed to always point back to her grandmother's roots. And the pertinent information: Fein brought in information only when she felt was relevant, which made for some confusing moments and many seconds of regrounding myself in the story. My best example is when she first begins referring to Paul. There isn't an explanation that Paul is her husband. Not to mention, she just casually mentions after she has explained Paul and their preparations for marriage, she had been previously married--well, that is a big fact to gloss over. And I get it: Paul and her seem destined for one another because of both of their origins in the shtetls of their grandparents' and great grandparents' pasts. But that does not mean you focus solely on the subject matter and remain blind to what is on the exterior. I would have rather seen Fein reflect on her first marriage not working because of the lack of a deeper connection, like Minkowitz for her and Paul.

Overall, a deep and compelling story. I give it three stars because the writing itself detracted from the importance and intensity, particularly from the beginning to the middle.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

I accept that Fein has a fascination with her ancestors that not everyone has. (I am happier to hear the stories of my family than concern myself with where they lived and the facts.) Also I accept that the fact her mother and her grandmother did not tell her about her ancestors that she has always been overly obsessed with Minkowitz, the town that her grandmother was from.

What I struggle with is her sheer determination that she "knows" how her grandmother's life was and how simplistic and how poor that her grandmother's family must have been. In many ways, all Fein is accomplishing is romanticizing her grandmother's life and making it just as unreal as the life she fantasized her grandmother as having when Fein was a little girl. The only way she could truly know anything would be if someone living told her. This might be pedantic of me, but the fact that she uses the word "knows" rather than the word "imagines" or even "assumes" frustrates me to no end.

Any good historian or even travel writer (although this book reads more as "history" than "travel") knows that there are two sides to every story. By fantasizing/ romanticizing something obviously, Fein lessens the impact of her grandmother's childhood and life in Minkowitz (poverty, Nazis etc) rather than allows the stories and the history to shine through. I feel like the point of the book got lost somewhere and the results are muddled.

I guess that it boils down to the fact that I view the world very differently than she does. So every time she talks about "fate" - her husband's family being from the same town, the timing when it comes to things happening, all of the different people saying "you are one of us" (be it Ukrainian, Asian, Jewish) - it just drove me crazy. Ultimately her spiritual/ religious/ superstitious believes regarding her life, her decisions and so forth are so vastly different than mine.

I wanted so much to like this book - after all the book summary is great - but I just could not.

[Emi Yoshida · Rating 2 out of 5]

Judith Fein is a travel journalist, a bit of a wit, and a true Mensch. She was always very close with her maternal grandmother, a Jew who escaped her Minkowitz shtetl in the knick of time before the Pogroms and Nazis could get her. This book describes the trip Judith and her husband made together back to their roots, in order to verify six facts she had gleaned as a child about her grandmother's origins. The author ruminates over these six facts her whole life, this book would have us believe that she repeated them like a mantra, even turning them into a musical at some point.

I was hoping she would uncover more bits and pieces about her roots, but clearly she is content to have them verified. Fein's focus on her own raw emotions during this spiritual journey is surely heart-felt and earnest, but I found it a bit off-putting and exhausting. There was so much repetition, and combined with the large print and double spacing, I think this would have made a better series of essays.

[Pam · Rating 4 out of 5]

This wonderful book is both a memoir and a travelogue. The author, Judith Fein's strong emotional attraction to the homeland of her maternal Jewish grandmother, Minkowtiz, brings heart into this voyage and propels the reader through the book. Photographs of the people and places are interspersed throughout the book. If you haven't explored your ancestral roots yet, this book will encourage you to do so.

[Degan Walters · Rating 1 out of 5]

Picked this book up as a suggestion for psychotherapeutic travel agents but I couldn’t get farther than the second chapter because the writing style just wasn’t there.

[Jessica Feinstein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent!

[Bette · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing

I love books about genealogy and family history, but this one was disappointing. Not well-written (by someone who purports to be a travel writer) and full of errors and over-obvious "epiphanies."

[Jodi · Rating 1 out of 5]

Horrible!