Shtetl

Shtetl

Author: Eva Hoffman

Publisher: Public Affairs

Published: 2007-10-09

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1586485245

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In Shtetl (Yiddish for "small town"), critically-acclaimed author Eva Hoffman brings the lost world of Eastern European Jews back to vivid life, depicting its complex institutions and vibrant culture, its beliefs, social distinctions, and customs. Through the small town of Braƒsk, she looks at the fascinating experiments in multicultural coexistence--still relevant to us today-- attempted in the eight centuries of Polish-Jewish history, and describes the forces which influenced Christian villagers' decisions to conceal or betray their Jewish neighbors in the dark period of the Holocaust.


The Lost Shtetl

The Lost Shtetl

Author: Max Gross

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2020-10-13

Total Pages: 549

ISBN-13: 0062991140

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WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD AND THE JEWISH FICTION AWARD FROM THE ASSOCIATION OF JEWISH LIBRARIES GOOD MORNING AMERICA MUST READ NEW BOOKS * NEW YORK POST BUZZ BOOKS * THE MILLIONS MOST ANTICIPATED A remarkable debut novel—written with the fearless imagination of Michael Chabon and the piercing humor of Gary Shteyngart—about a small Jewish village in the Polish forest that is so secluded no one knows it exists . . . until now. What if there was a town that history missed? For decades, the tiny Jewish shtetl of Kreskol existed in happy isolation, virtually untouched and unchanged. Spared by the Holocaust and the Cold War, its residents enjoyed remarkable peace. It missed out on cars, and electricity, and the internet, and indoor plumbing. But when a marriage dispute spins out of control, the whole town comes crashing into the twenty-first century. Pesha Lindauer, who has just suffered an ugly, acrimonious divorce, suddenly disappears. A day later, her husband goes after her, setting off a panic among the town elders. They send a woefully unprepared outcast named Yankel Lewinkopf out into the wider world to alert the Polish authorities. Venturing beyond the remote safety of Kreskol, Yankel is confronted by the beauty and the ravages of the modern-day outside world – and his reception is met with a confusing mix of disbelief, condescension, and unexpected kindness. When the truth eventually surfaces, his story and the existence of Kreskol make headlines nationwide. Returning Yankel to Kreskol, the Polish government plans to reintegrate the town that time forgot. Yet in doing so, the devious origins of its disappearance come to the light. And what has become of the mystery of Pesha and her former husband? Divided between those embracing change and those clinging to its old world ways, the people of Kreskol will have to find a way to come together . . . or risk their village disappearing for good.


In the Shadow of the Shtetl

In the Shadow of the Shtetl

Author: Jeffrey Veidlinger

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2013-11-01

Total Pages: 441

ISBN-13: 0253011523

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A history based on interviews with hundreds of Ukrainian Jews who survived both Hitler and Stalin, recounting experiences ordinary and extraordinary. The story of how the Holocaust decimated Jewish life in the shtetls of Eastern Europe is well known. Still, thousands of Jews in these small towns survived the war and returned afterward to rebuild their communities. The recollections of some four hundred returnees in Ukraine provide the basis for Jeffrey Veidlinger’s reappraisal of the traditional narrative of twentieth-century Jewish history. These elderly Yiddish speakers relate their memories of Jewish life in the prewar shtetl, their stories of survival during the Holocaust, and their experiences living as Jews under Communism. Despite Stalinist repressions, the Holocaust, and official antisemitism, their individual remembrances of family life, religious observance, education, and work testify to the survival of Jewish life in the shadow of the shtetl to this day.


The Death of the Shtetl

The Death of the Shtetl

Author: Yehuda Bauer

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2009-01-01

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 0300152094

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The author recounts the destruction of small Jewish towns in Poland and Russia at the hands of the Nazis in 1941-1942.


The Shtetl

The Shtetl

Author: Steven T. Katz

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0814748015

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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.


Luboml

Luboml

Author: Berl Kagan

Publisher: KTAV Publishing House, Inc.

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 454

ISBN-13: 9780881255805

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The story of the former Polish-Jewish community (shtetl) of Luboml, Wołyń, Poland. Its Jewish population of some 4,000, dating back to the 14th century, was exterminated by the occupying German forces and local collaborators in October, 1942. Luboml was formerly known as Lyuboml, Volhynia, Russia and later Lyuboml, Volyns'ka, Ukraine. It was also know by its Yiddish name: Libivne.


Daughters of the Shtetl

Daughters of the Shtetl

Author: Susan A. Glenn

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2019-06-30

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 1501741993

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In this fascinating portrait of Jewish immigrant wage earners, Susan A. Glenn weaves together several strands of social history to show the emergence of an ethnic version of what early twentieth-century Americans called the "New Womanhood." She maintains that during an era when Americans perceived women as temporary workers interested ultimately in marriage and motherhood, these young Jewish women turned the garment industry upside down with a wave of militant strikes and shop-floor activism and helped build the two major clothing workers' unions.


The Golden Age Shtetl

The Golden Age Shtetl

Author: Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2014-03-30

Total Pages: 445

ISBN-13: 1400851165

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A major history of the shtetl's golden age The shtetl was home to two-thirds of East Europe's Jews in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, yet it has long been one of the most neglected and misunderstood chapters of the Jewish experience. This book provides the first grassroots social, economic, and cultural history of the shtetl. Challenging popular misconceptions of the shtetl as an isolated, ramshackle Jewish village stricken by poverty and pogroms, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern argues that, in its heyday from the 1790s to the 1840s, the shtetl was a thriving Jewish community as vibrant as any in Europe. Petrovsky-Shtern brings this golden age to life, looking at dozens of shtetls and drawing on a wealth of never-before-used archival material. Illustrated throughout with rare archival photographs and artwork, this nuanced history casts the shtetl in an altogether new light, revealing how its golden age continues to shape the collective memory of the Jewish people today.


Inexhaustible Wellspring

Inexhaustible Wellspring

Author: Hészel Klépfisz

Publisher: Devora Publishing

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 9781930143753

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Modern science, philosophy, thought and reason owe a great debt to the Jewish ghettos that comprised shtetl life in Europe. Contrary to popular belief, the shtetl was not a place where fiddlers on the roof watched the world pass them by. Quite the contrary. The author presents clear, historical data to show that many great minds which grew out of the shtetl refused to shed their Jewishness in order to achieve fame in the world at large. In his cogent analysis, the author reveals the great personalities that blossomed in the cauldron of shtetl life, greats like The Baal Shem Tov, Y I Peretz, Franz Rosenzweig, Januz Korczak, and many others.