Shtetl
שטעטלעך shtetlekh) is a Yiddish term for small towns with predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish populations which existed in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust.
The term is used in the context of former Eastern European Jewish societies as mandated islands within the surrounding non-Jewish populace, and thus bears certain connotations of discrimination.
A shtetl is defined by Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern as "an East European market town in private possession of a Polish magnate, inhabited mostly but not exclusively by Jews" and from the 1790s onward and until 1915 shtetls were also "subject to Russian bureaucracy",[7] as the Russian Empire had annexed the entire Lithuania and the eastern part of Poland, and was administering the area where the settlement of Jews was permitted.
In literature by authors such as Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer, shtetls are portrayed as pious communities following Orthodox Judaism, socially stable and unchanging despite outside influence or attacks.
[9] Throughout this history, shtetls saw periods of relative tolerance and prosperity as well as times of extreme poverty and hardships, including pogroms in the 19th-century Russian Empire.
According to Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog (1962):[10] The attitudes and thought habits characteristic of the learning tradition are as evident in the street and market place as the yeshiva.
The process that produces such a response—often with lightning speed—is a modest reproduction of the pilpul process.The May Laws introduced by Tsar Alexander III of Russia in 1882 banned Jews from rural areas and towns of fewer than ten thousand people.
[11] Also, the anti-Semitism of the Russian Imperial administrators and the Polish landlords, as well as the resultant pogroms in the 1880s, made life difficult for residents of the shtetl.
[8] In the later part of the 20th century, Hasidic Jews founded new communities in the United States, such as Kiryas Joel and New Square, and they sometimes use the term "shtetl" to refer to these enclaves in Yiddish, particularly those with village structures.
[20] This approach to good deeds finds its roots in Jewish religious views, summarized in Pirkei Avot by Shimon Hatzaddik's "three pillars":[21] On three things the world stands.
As the shtetl formed an entire town and community, residents worked diverse jobs such as shoe-making , metallurgy, or tailoring of clothes.
There is a belief found in historical and literary writings that the shtetl disintegrated before it was destroyed during World War II; however, Joshua Rosenberg of the Institute of East-European Jewish Affairs at Brandeis University argued that this alleged cultural break-up is never clearly defined.
He argued that the whole Jewish life in Eastern Europe, not only in shtetls, "was in a state of permanent crisis, both political and economic, of social uncertainty and cultural conflicts".
The 2002 novel Everything Is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer, tells a fictional story set in the Ukrainian shtetl Trachimbrod (Trochenbrod).
The 1992 children's book Something from Nothing, written and illustrated by Phoebe Gilman, is an adaptation of a traditional Jewish folk tale set in a fictional shtetl.
Their contribution is in making a permanent record in color of the life that is described in literature—the klezmers, the weddings, the marketplaces and the religious aspects of the culture.
