In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine

1. The Shtetl: A Historical Landscape

1 S 1 Reading Yiddish literature as a child, I used to imagine the shtetl as a Smurf village, an oasis fantasyland populated with peaceful, joyous, and simple Jews, singing Yiddish songs and humming Hasidic tunes. This blissful flow of life would only be interrupted sporadically by the marauding Cossacks, who, I imagined, lived in the outskirts of the village , plotting like the Smurf’s nemesis Gargamel against the Jews. My images were probably influenced by the likes of Maurice Samuel, who did much to bring the idea of the shtetl to American audiences in the 1960s, although I only encountered his writings much later. In 1963, he described the shtetl as an “impregnable citadel of Jewishness.” “The Shtetlach!” he continued, “Those forlorn little settlements in a vast and hostile wilderness, isolated alike from Jewish and non-Jewish centers of civilization, their tenure precarious, their structure ramshackle, their spirit squalid.”1 In one of the first academic articles published on the shtetl as a sociological phenomenon, Natalie Joffe referred to the shtetl as “a culture island.”2 To Elie Wiesel, the Shtetl (spelled occasionally in his rendition with a capital S) is a “small colorful Jewish kingdom so rich in memories.”3 In Wiesel’s imagination, “No matter where it is located on k The Shtetl a hIstorIcal landscaPe 2 in the shadow of the shtetl the map, the shtetl has few geographical frontiers. . . . In its broad outlines , the shtetl is one and same everywhere.”4 It has become customary to write about the shtetl as an ur-space located outside of any particular time or place. Countless “composite-collective” portraits of “the Shtetl” have emerged in the Jewish imagination, as though no further geographic distinction is necessary. Some refrain from naming individual shtetls and instead write of an imagined “Shtetlland.”5 Wiesel’s portrait purposefully exemplifies the duality of this tragic and nostalgic image: Such was the fate of hundreds of communities. The enemy would suddenly emerge with sword in hand, and in a frenzy of hatred, he would behead men, women, and children in the streets, in poorly barricaded homes, caves, and attics. The murderers would leave only when they thought the last Jew was dead. Then as if out of nowhere, a man, a woman, or adolescent would appear . . . life would once again begin flowing, binding the abandoned survivors into a community. They would rebuild their homes, open schools, arrange weddings and circumcisions, celebrate holidays, fast on Tisha b’Av and Yom Kippur, dance on Simhat Torah, and make their children study Talmud: all that, while waiting for the next catastrophe. That was life in the shtetl.6 In Wiesel’s colorful rendition, the shtetl lurches from tranquility to catastrophe. Today when most people think of a shtetl they think of Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman, or, more accurately, of Norman Jewison ’s adaptation of that story cycle as Fiddler on the Roof. Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye, though, lives not in a shtetl, but in a dorf, a village. It was the non-Jewish Jewison who relocated him to a shtetl, as the small town had become by the 1960s a synecdoche for Eastern European Jewish life. For American audiences in the 1960s, it was difficult to conceive of Eastern European Jews living anywhere other than a shtetl. The emotional impact that the Yiddish language and the shtetl continue to have on American Jewish culture is remarkable. Nowhere has this impact been more evident than in the literary marketplace: modern novelists and nonfiction writers have continued to play with the sentimentality of the shtetl, reworking these worn nostalgic themes toward new ends. They often portray the shtetl in epic terms as the focus of a journey, a quest that will forever remain unfulfilled. In his debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer imagines a fic- The Shtetl 3 tional character aptly named Jonathan Safran Foer, who travels through Ukraine in search of the elusive Trachimbrod, a shtetl that turns out to exist only in memory and ephemera. Similarly, Nicole Kraus—the spouse of the real Jonathan Safran Foer—writes, in her History of Love, of longing for an Eastern European past that can no longer be recovered. Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million is, in many ways, a real-life version of Safran-Foer’s novel. Like Safran-Foer’s protagonist , the real Daniel Mendelsohn travels to...