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Stepchildren of the Shtetl - The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800-1939 (Paperback)
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Stepchildren of the Shtetl - The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800-1939 (Paperback)
Series: Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Memoirs of Jewish life in the east European shtetl often recall the
hekdesh (town poorhouse) and its residents: beggars, madmen and
madwomen, disabled people, and poor orphans. Stepchildren of the
Shtetl tells the story of these marginalized figures from the dawn
of modernity to the eve of the Holocaust. Combining archival
research with analysis of literary, cultural, and religious texts,
Natan M. Meir recovers the lived experience of Jewish society's
outcasts and reveals the central role that they came to play in the
drama of modernization. Those on the margins were often made to
bear the burden of the nation as a whole, whether as scapegoats in
moments of crisis or as symbols of degeneration, ripe for
transformation by reformers, philanthropists, and nationalists.
Shining a light into the darkest corners of Jewish society in
eastern Europe-from the often squalid poorhouse of the shtetl to
the slums and insane asylums of Warsaw and Odessa, from the
conscription of poor orphans during the reign of Nicholas I to the
cholera wedding, a magical ritual in which an epidemic was halted
by marrying outcasts to each other in the town
cemetery-Stepchildren of the Shtetl reconsiders the place of the
lowliest members of an already stigmatized minority.
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