FINESILVER'S GOLD:
A Jewish Adventure Like No Other
A Fictionalized Memoir by Ruth Shallet Littman
pbk. 360 pgs
Publication Date: Dec. 2, 2007
Description
In 1985, Ruth Littman travelled to Canada and found the names of her grandfather and grandmother in the records of the Canadian Northwest Mounted Police. Inspired by the diaries her grandmother had kept, she retraced their steps and has written the story of their amazing adventure.
It begins in 1894, when Jacob Finesilver, age 19, escape conscription into the Czar's army by walking from his shtetl, Khotin, in the Ukraine to the Yukon. News of the goldrush in the Klondike has reached into the Ukraine, and has inflamed Jacob's imagination, as it did thousands of others from the United States and Canada who made the perilous journey in their own ways. But Finesilver's plan is to cross the Bering Sea during the winter, when it is frozen, and he believes he can walk across it. He almost freezes to death, but is rescued by an Inuit Eskimo whose medicinal knowledge not only saves Jacob's life, but his gangrenous leg.
A year later, Jacob sends for a bride from Khotin. Seventeen year old Malka, restless with the constraints of shtetl life, accepts his proposal and makes a similarly perilous journey, this time by a stomach-churning steerage ship to Baltimore, by train to Canada, and by foot, accompanied by the Indian guide, Andrew Red Sky, across the notorious Chilkoot Pass, braving hazards of rapids and waterfalls--though she cannot swim, escaping avalanches--all the while carrying the bridal gown she had sewn for herself in Khotin. The Chilkoot Pass can today be traversed by train and is popular with tourists.
Using Malka's diaries, Ruth Littman's book vividly recaptures the life and people of the Yukon at the end of the 19th century, the hustle and bustle of Dawson City, the exciting feeling of the new democratic spirit growing under the life-and-death circumstances of survival in bitter winters, and the struggle of a young Jewish couple to maintain their religion--and their marriage--when bodily survival was difficult enough. Finesilver's Gold is not only an adventure story, but a great love story. In the end Jacob finds his gold---but what it is is the secret of his life.
Ruth Littman's descriptions of ice, snow, and freezing temperatures may rival those of Jack London, and her book renders the incomparable service of preserving a portion of Jewish history that few know. She herself was a former opera singer with the New York City Center Opera, The Chicago Symphony, and the Grant Park Opera under Eric Leinsdorf
