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Yuletide Reveal: A Strange New Place
Jan. 1st, 2021 08:22 amYuletide Reveal! I wrote four fics. This was my original assignment, and it was very interesting. Alas, my local library system didn't have any books on Jewish history/culture pre-WWII. They had a lot of stuff about the Holocaust, and some current/contemporary stuff, but nothing on Jewish life in Eastern Europe in the late 19th Century. There were online resources, but none that had the sort of detail I wanted. For example, several of them mentioned that the Jewish communities had this amazing charity/mutual aid network, but none of them had any detail as to how it was organized and what it looked like. So, after consultation with my beta Chaya, we decided that it was easiest just to have Motel and Tzeitel stay in a Jewish boarding house that would allow them to do housework to pay their bill until they could get jobs.
Also, I put way too much thought into "so how long would they be on the road, exactly?" In the original stories Fiddler on the Roof is based on, the town of Annatevka is (very loosely) based on Boyarka, Ukraine, which is roughly 860 kilometers away from Krakow. The rule for calculating the minimum time necessary to hike a particular distance is to allow one hour for every 5km travelled, plus an additional hour for every 600m of ascent. That works out to 172 hours of walking if everything is flat and all conditions are perfect. They are carrying a baby and pushing a wheelbarrow with all their worldly goods (including a sewing machine, which is heavy), and conditions are far from perfect, so I doubled that figure, which took me to 344 hours of walking. Averaging 8 hours on the road a day (it’s the winter, days are short), that's 43 days. They would not have traveled on the Sabbath, so that's an extra six days. (I'm sure the rest would have been deeply welcome.)
Title: A Strange New Place
Author: Beatrice_otter
Fandom: Fiddler on the Roof (1971)
Characters/Pairings: Motel/Tzeitel, Chava/Fyedka
Rating: General Audiences
Word Count: 5178 words
Written For: anabel in Yuletide 2020
Betaed by: Chaya (xslytherclawx)
Summary: Tzeitel and Motel arrive in Krakow to find Chava and Fyedka already there.
On AO3. On tumblr. On Pillowfort.
It took them almost two months to walk to Krakow, and by the time they got there Tzeitel had never been more exhausted in her life. She would have marveled at the size of the great city, had she any energy to marvel with. Instead, she trudged silently beside Motel, one hand on the baby in its sling. None of them had ever been to Krakow before, of course, but the people they'd stayed with the night before had given them an address to go to and directions on how to navigate the Kazimierz to find it.
The woman who opened the door to them looked them up and down: all seventeen of them from Annatevka who had come to Krakow, either as a final destination or as a stop along their way. "What village are you from?" she asked, opening the door to them.
"Annatevka," said Todrish Gaimsky, the oldest of them. "Near Kyiv. They expelled all the Jews."
The woman nodded and sighed. "Well, we'll soon get you settled." She stood aside from the door. "Come in, come in! We don’t have room for all of you here, but there’s another boarding house down the street that should have a room or two. You can help out around the place until you have jobs to pay with, but that’s tomorrow’s problem."
( Read more... )
Also, I put way too much thought into "so how long would they be on the road, exactly?" In the original stories Fiddler on the Roof is based on, the town of Annatevka is (very loosely) based on Boyarka, Ukraine, which is roughly 860 kilometers away from Krakow. The rule for calculating the minimum time necessary to hike a particular distance is to allow one hour for every 5km travelled, plus an additional hour for every 600m of ascent. That works out to 172 hours of walking if everything is flat and all conditions are perfect. They are carrying a baby and pushing a wheelbarrow with all their worldly goods (including a sewing machine, which is heavy), and conditions are far from perfect, so I doubled that figure, which took me to 344 hours of walking. Averaging 8 hours on the road a day (it’s the winter, days are short), that's 43 days. They would not have traveled on the Sabbath, so that's an extra six days. (I'm sure the rest would have been deeply welcome.)
Title: A Strange New Place
Author: Beatrice_otter
Fandom: Fiddler on the Roof (1971)
Characters/Pairings: Motel/Tzeitel, Chava/Fyedka
Rating: General Audiences
Word Count: 5178 words
Written For: anabel in Yuletide 2020
Betaed by: Chaya (xslytherclawx)
Summary: Tzeitel and Motel arrive in Krakow to find Chava and Fyedka already there.
On AO3. On tumblr. On Pillowfort.
It took them almost two months to walk to Krakow, and by the time they got there Tzeitel had never been more exhausted in her life. She would have marveled at the size of the great city, had she any energy to marvel with. Instead, she trudged silently beside Motel, one hand on the baby in its sling. None of them had ever been to Krakow before, of course, but the people they'd stayed with the night before had given them an address to go to and directions on how to navigate the Kazimierz to find it.
The woman who opened the door to them looked them up and down: all seventeen of them from Annatevka who had come to Krakow, either as a final destination or as a stop along their way. "What village are you from?" she asked, opening the door to them.
"Annatevka," said Todrish Gaimsky, the oldest of them. "Near Kyiv. They expelled all the Jews."
The woman nodded and sighed. "Well, we'll soon get you settled." She stood aside from the door. "Come in, come in! We don’t have room for all of you here, but there’s another boarding house down the street that should have a room or two. You can help out around the place until you have jobs to pay with, but that’s tomorrow’s problem."
( Read more... )
