Britannica's Literature: Year In Review 1994, stated: “Master wordsmith Eli Shekhtman concluded his epic lamentation for the courage of Polesyier Jews in the novel Baym shkiye-aker”.

Gilles Rozier, in his article "Le yiddish d'une guerre à l'autre", compares Eli Schechtman with his contemporaries Vasily Grossman and Varlam Shalamov.

[2] The Last Sunset is a tragic and heroic epic that covers the catastrophic events for European Jewry of the twentieth century: a century of bloody libel (a vivid example is the Beilis case), villainous pogroms, the extermination by German Nazis and their supporters in most European countries, and almost universally, the indifference of the Christian world.

25 years ago, a few weeks before his death, in response to an article about his novel The Last Sunset, Shekhtman responded to criticism: “A writer ... describes the sunset of a Jewish town”: 'My mission in Jewish literature was and remains not to reflect the decline of Jewish villages and towns but to show everyone who denies galut (diaspora) what powerful generations, spiritually and physically, grew up in galut, in the most remote places.

The pre-war Eastern European Jewish community is really well described, and through these unforgettable characters, it lives again for a moment.