The Shtetl: New Evaluations (review)

The Shtetl: New Evaluations is a scholarly anthology that, as Samuel Kassow asserts in his introduction, sets out to redress the “gross generalizations and romanticized nostalgia” that affect discussions of the shtetl and have turned the shtetl into a myth more than a historical reality. To this end, the book consists of fourteen chapters, first delivered as papers at a conference on the shtetl, that look at a variety of aspects concerning the history, culture, literature, and mythology of the shtetl in different historical periods. The contributing authors include leading scholars from the fields of East European Jewish history and literature, such as Arnold Band, Israel Bartal, Yehuda Bauer, Immanuel Etkes, Gershon Hundert, Samuel Kassow, and Elie Wiesel, whose Center for Judaic Studies at Boston University sponsored the book.

The collection is the first serious scholarly attempt to address the topic of the shtetl—myth versus reality—in such a comprehensive way, and it picks up on important contributions to the field from over a decade ago such as Dan Miron’s essay “The Literary Image of the Shtetl” (1995) and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s highly instructive introduction to the reissue of the classic, yet seriously flawed ethnography of the shtetl, Life is With People (1995). In those works, Miron and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, respectively, offer insightful correctives on how to separate the mythologized, “imagined shtetl” of Hebrew and Yiddish literature and Jewish collective memory from the actual small towns in Eastern Europe where a large segment of Ashkenazi Jews lived until World War Two. At its best, this new anthology expands on the insights of Miron and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett in an attempt to replace the commonly propogated, nostalgic, overly generalized conception of the shtetl, in which it essentially functions as a stand-in for the entirety of East European Jewish tradition and culture. Authors such as Kassow, Bauer, and Bartal methodically dismantle this sentimentalized mythology of shtetl life in two complementary ways: first, Kassow and Bartal (as well as other authors in the collection) explain where these myths originated from and why. Then, they juxtapose these mythologized images of the shtetl with detailed accounts of life in actual shtetls within a particular historical context. Indeed, Kassow’s and Bauer’s chapters are the richest and most detailed portrayals of small-town (shtetl) Jewish life in Poland in the interwar years and during the Holocaust that I’ve seen in recent scholarship.

Kassow’s chapter illustrates the vitality, complexity, and diversity of shtetl life in Poland during the interwar period, and emphasizes regional differences and the problems of generalizing a composite picture of shtetl life from this period that ignores real differences. For its part, Bauer’s chapter is a case study of two shtetls during the late 1930s and World War Two—Sarny and Rokitno— that tries to reconstruct the major political, social, cultural, and economic trends of these two shtetls in eastern Poland in these years. Bauer chronicles the changes that took place in these towns during the Soviet occupation of 1939 to 1941 when a quick process of sovietization occurred; he then describes in thorough detail the chronology and process of the brutal Nazi occupation of the former Soviet area where the two shtetls were located.

Perhaps most consciously drawing on Miron’s notion of the literary shtetl, Bartal’s chapter deals explicitly with the issue of the mythology of the shtetl versus its reality. Bartal persuasively argues against confusing the historical reality of the shtetl with the literary image of the shtetl created by nineteenthcentury Jewish writers or with the mythical image of the shtetl located in the Jewish collective memory. The main focus of Bartal’s chapter then is “the gulf between the literary fiction created by Jewish authors and the reality of the Jewish small town” (pp. 180–81). Bartal relies on historical documents concerning the founding of cities in Eastern Europe, maps of small towns, and descriptions of shtetls from memoirs to provide his historical account to juxtapose the literary image of the...