View the Table of Contents. Read the Introduction.
aThe book is a must-buy for all libraries.a
--"AJL Newsletter"
a[A]nyone looking to really understand the Jewish past, not just
the romanticized version of it, will find this book a perfect
antidote.a
--"The Reporter"
"This important and comprehensive collection provides a
fascinating re-evaluation of one of the main locations of Jewish
life in Eastern Europe down to the Holocaust and beyond."
--Antony Polonsky, Albert Abramson Professor of Holocaust Studies
at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Brandeis
University
"The contributors help lift the veil of nostalgia that has long
obscured the history of small town East European Jewish life. They
contest the literary conception of the hermetically sealed,
monolithic shtetl, and describe a more integrated and varied
Jewish-Christian (and Jewish-Jewish) dynamic that seems much more
true to life. This collection constitutes an important step beyond
the older, diachronic understanding of Jewish history."
--Glenn Dynner, author of "Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of
Polish Jewish Society"
Dating from the sixteenth century, there were hundreds of
shtetls--Jewish settlements--in Eastern Europe that were home to a
large and compact population that differed from their gentile,
mostly peasant neighbors in religion, occupation, language, and
culture. The shtetls were different in important respects from
previous types of Jewish settlements in the Diaspora in that Jews
had rarely formed a majority in the towns in which they lived. This
was not true of the shtetl, where Jews sometimes comprised 80% or
more of the population. While the shtetl began to declineduring the
course of the nineteenth century, it was the Holocaust which
finally destroyed it.
During the last thirty years the shtetl has attracted a growing
amount of scholarly attention, though gross generalizations and
romanticized nostalgia continue to affect how the topic is treated.
This volume takes a new look at this most important facet of East
European Jewish life. It helps to correct the notion that the
shtetl was an entirely Jewish world and shows the ways in which the
Jews of the shtetl interacted both with their co-religionists and
with their gentile neighbors. The volume includes chapters on the
history of the shtetl, its myths and realities, politics, gender
dynamics, how the shtetl has been (mis)represented in literature,
and the changes brought about by World War I and the Holocaust,
among others.
Contributors: Samuel Kassow, Gershon David Hundert, Immanuel
Etkes, Nehemia Polen, Henry Abramson, Konrad Zielinski, Jeremy
Dauber, Israel Bartel, Naomi Seidman, Mikhail Krutikov, Arnold J.
Band, Katarzyna Wieclawska, Yehunda Bauer, and Elie Wiesel.
This is the first book published in the "Elie Wiesel Center for
Judaic Studies Series,"
General
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