The Shtetl: New Evaluations

by Steven T. Katz (Editor)

Overview

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 decline during 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814748015
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	12/24/2006
Series:	Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies Series , #1
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.88(d)

About the Author

Steven T. Katz is Slater Professor of Jewish and Holocaust Studies and former Director of the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies at Boston University. His many publications include The Holocaust in Historical Context.

Table of Contents

Editor’s Note
Steven T. Katz
Introduction
Samuel Kassow
1 The Importance of Demography and Patterns of Settlement for an Understanding of the Jewish Experience in East–Central Europe
Gershon David Hundert
2 A Shtetl with a Yeshiva: The Case of Volozhin
Immanuel Etkes
3 Rebbetzins, Wonder-Children, and the Emergence of the Dynastic Principle in Hasidism
Nehemia Polen
4 Two Jews, Three Opinions: Politics in the Shtetl at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Henry Abramson
5 The Shtetl in Poland, 1914–1918
Konrad Zieli´nski
6 The Shtetl in Interwar Poland
Samuel Kassow
7 Looking at the Yiddish Landscape: Representation in Nineteenth-Century
Hasidic and Maskilic Literature
Jeremy Dauber
8 Imagined Geography: The Shtetl, Myth, and Reality
Israel Bartal
9 Gender and the Disintegration of the Shtetl in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature
Naomi Seidman
10 Rediscovering the Shtetl as a New Reality: David Bergelson and Itsik Kipnis
Mikhail Krutikov
11 Agnon’s Synthetic Shtetl
Arnold J. Band
12 The Image of the Shtetl in Contemporary Polish Fiction
Katarzyna Więcławska
13 Sarny and Rokitno in the Holocaust: A Case Study of Two Townships in Wolyn (Volhynia)
Yehuda Bauer
14 The World of the Shtetl
Elie Wiesel
About the Contributors
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“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

"These studies are very enlightening about the process of secularization and the decline of religion as depicted and understood by a variety of observers."

-Shaul Stampfer,Hebrew University

“The quality of the essays is uniformly good, and after reading them, readers will be fully acquainted with the elusive concept of the shtetl. The essays are well documented.”

-Choice

,

“The book is a must-buy for all libraries.”
-AJL Newsletter

,

"Talk about stereotype busting! Not only are we forced to readjust our sights . . . but in the best moments of Katz's collection we learn how to distinguish what is factually true from what is mythically imagined. Even more importantly, we begin to see . . . the world of the shtetlach that the fog and night of the Holocaust forever destroyed."
-New Jersey Jewish News

Editorial Reviews

"The quality of the essays is uniformly good, and after reading them, readers will be fully acquainted with the elusive concept of the shtetl. The essays are well documented."

Choice

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 Studiesat the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Brandeis University

“The quality of the essays is uniformly good, and after reading them, readers will be fully acquainted with the elusive concept of the shtetl. The essays are well documented.”

- Choice

"Talk about stereotype busting! Not only are we forced to readjust our sights . . . but in the best moments of Katz’s collection we learn how to distinguish what is factually true from what is mythically imagined. Even more importantly, we begin to see . . . the world of the shtetlach that the fog and night of the Holocaust forever destroyed."
• New Jersey Jewish News

“[A]nyone looking to really understand the Jewish past, not just the romanticized version of it, will find this book a perfect antidote.”
• The Reporter

From the Publisher

"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

"The book is a must-buy for all libraries."

AJL Newsletter

"[A]nyone looking to really understand the Jewish past, not just the romanticized version of it, will find this book a perfect antidote."

The Reporter

"Talk about stereotype busting! Not only are we forced to readjust our sights . . . but in the best moments of Katz’s collection we learn how to distinguish what is factually true from what is mythically imagined. Even more importantly, we begin to see . . . the world of the shtetlach that the fog and night of the Holocaust forever destroyed."

New Jersey Jewish News