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The Holodomor in Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 was a result of the collectivization policy of the Soviet government and took approximately 4 million lives. The Holodomor had a profound impact on the entire population of Ukraine. It badly affected the lives of Jews in Kyiv and Ukraine, and it damaged Jewish–gentile relations for many years. The famine occurred not only in rural areas, but also in the cities and towns of Ukraine. The Holodomor provoked a significant migration of Jews from shtetls to the large cities, particularly to Kyiv. Many desperate inhabitants of villages and towns fled to the large cities where they hoped to receive some aid. However, the overcrowded cities could not accommodate this flood of migrants. Anatolii Kuznetsov wrote in Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel that if not for the Holodomor in Ukraine and Stalin's repressions of the 1930s, the attitude of the Kyiv gentile population toward the Holocaust would perhaps have been different. People had gotten so used to the suffering of others, victims of the famine and political repression, that they remained mainly passive, silent, and indifferent toward the mass execution of Jews in Babi Yar during the Holocaust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the fact that Jewish women statistically outnumbered men in the former market towns of the Soviet Union, the discourse of the "new Jew" in the 1920s and 1930s focused overwhelmingly on the Jewish male and was debated primarily by men. This article explores what the restructuring of the economic base of the shtetl meant for Jewish women during the New Economic Policy and the transition to the Stalin Revolution when party activists and theorists grappled with the "shtetl problem" and the question of Jewish productivization. Utilizing socioeconomic studies, political reports, and ethnographic sketches, it raises questions about the perspectives of the (largely male) observers who documented Jewish women in the former market towns. How did these accounts portray the "female economy" of the shtetl, the role of Jewish women as either facilitators or disruptors of Soviet modernization, and the relative value of women's productive and reproductive labor at a time of profound social disruption? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information about comparative literature, featuring novels of modern Jewish life. It highlights Dovid Bergelson's "Nokh alemen" or "The End of Everything," a modernist Yiddish novel set in a provincial town outside Kiev, Reb Gedalya, as well as the idea of the shtetl as a withering and diminished object, which is also implicit in Russian Jewish ethnographic work.

The paper analyses a specific form of revolutionary collectivity referred to as akhdes by Jewish militants of 1905. This peculiar political subjectivity, which emerged independently of mass political parties, could hardly be recognized and apprehended by historians. However, it was perceived by some Yiddish writers who instantaneously fictionalized revolutionary events of 1905. The way the revolted crowd (oylem) was rendered both in historical and literary works is reconsidered with reference to the concepts coined by recent political philosophy (particularly, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Paolo Virno). The paper is composed of three parts. The first part reviews briefly some of the attempts at writing the history of crowds. The second part is devoted to revolutionary events of 1905 in a specific place, the shtetl of Krynki, which--due to the intensity of the revolt there--attracted particular attention of historians. The third part focuses on Isaac Meir Weissenberg's novella, A Shtetl, published in 1907, to suggest a political reading that could inform historical narrations insofar as they try to apprehend the dynamics of the revolution itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Leopold Buczkowski (1905-89) is considered one of the most enigmatic Polish prose writers. Czarny potok (Black Torrent), his first postwar novel and his masterpiece, was critically examined in terms of its complex aesthetic. This article focuses on the thematic of Black Torrent, which centers on the destruction of the Jewish town Szabasowa. Thus, in one sense, the novel serves as a Yizkor Book, a testimonial of the destruction of a Jewish community. In another sense, the novel presents a unique vision of Polish and Jewish underground insurgents on a mission to protect the surviving Jewish children and defend the population at large. This Polish-Jewish band proclaims an empathic-dialogic relationship of equals; their shared goal of fighting the occupier and collaborators supersedes the identifications of ethnicity, blood kinship, or religion. However, unavoidable exposure to the inhumane Weltanschauung of the enemy raises the issue of the effects of the genocidal system on the humanistic orientation of the band members. While attempts to reform the perpetrator in an empathic-dialogic interaction fail, the recourse to a violent, ruthless struggle for survival denotes a compromise of the humanistic values of equality, justice, and empathy. The article shows how Buczkowski's ars poetica informed by his humanistic-enlightened upbringing enabled his vision of human solidarity and mutual obligation under the circumstances of genocidal terror. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the series "There Was Once a Home" and "Pictures of the Old Country" which feature photographs of people and town or shtetls in Lithuania. Among the photographs in the series include composer Hirsh Ichilchik, Zionists, and Yiddish Theatre groups. Information about A. Sarid, editor of the journal "Afrikaner Idishe Tsaytung," is also discussed.

This article considers the representation of the shtetl in two museum narratives devoted to Jews in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. The first, the state-funded 1939 exhibit "The Jews in Tsarist Russia and the USSR" was organized by the Jewish Section of the State Museum of Ethnography in Leningrad and remained on display to the Soviet public until the Nazi invasion in June 1941. The second is the privately funded Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, which opened in 2012. Though conceived under radically different ideological and political circumstances, each exhibition conveys a significant message about the place of Jews in Soviet and post-Soviet society, respectively, and each positions the shtetl as a formative arena for Jewish civic identity vis-à-vis the Russian homeland. Across the chasm of over seventy years, these two museum projects raise strikingly similar questions about how and why cultural institutions are mobilized to define the relationship of Ashkenazi Jews and the state. In both cases, the shtetl plays a significant role in narrating this unequal relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the second part of an article that draws a portrait of Mark Zborowski, Stalin’s master spy in the Left Opposition, revealing his activities and analysing the damage he caused from Paris to the US. Known as Etienne in the Trotskyist movement, Zborowski was smart, inconspicuous and dangerous, and became one of a handful of leading operatives in the network of secret spies charged by Stalin with rooting out his political and intellectual opponents in the West. Part One showed how Zborowski sowed suspicion and deepened divisions within the international Left Opposition, enabled assassinations and played a role in the death of Trotsky’s son, Lev Sedov. Zborowski was so successful in penetrating Sedov’s inner circle that he became the Editor of theBulletin of the Left Oppositionafter Sedov’s death, thereby positioning himself to alter Trotsky’s articles in subtle, undetectable but politically damaging ways. Zborowski’s life was marked by deception, intrigue and luck: he survived and flourished when millions perished. In this second part, we take up his trajectory in the US, where he continued his work for Stalin’s ‘organs’. Zborowski was eventually unmasked as a spy, but he nonetheless managed to pursue two successful careers and achieve enormous influence in the areas he worked in—first as a cultural anthropologist and then as a medical anthropologist. In both fields he published texts that established him as a leading figure—in Jewish studies with the influentialLife is With People, and in medical anthropology with the publication ofPeople in Pain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before the Holocaust, Jews and Muslims lived in close proximity in the kresy (borderlands) of northeastern Poland. While an abundance of literature exists on Jewish-Christian relations in Poland, no scholarly comparison of the history of coexistence specifically between Jews and Muslims in this territory has previously been done. This article is the first to document the living situation of these two Abrahamic faith minorities in interwar Poland. In a handful of small villages and even larger towns, they traded together on the market square, Muslims bought their meat from the local Jewish shochet, the Jews received fresh vegetables from their Muslim neighbors, and they even celebrated certain religious holidays together. These stories complicate previous arguments of self-imposed minority separateness which argue that social interactions between Jews and non-Jews were uniformly minimal and superficial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses several elements of Holocaust experiences of shtetl Jews in Poland. Topics discussed include a reconstructed diary of a Holocaust survivor from Staszów that offers details about Holocaust events in small town shtetl and the reactions and coping mechanisms of Jews, and a comparative analysis with several other small towns to determine common shtetl characteristics during the Holocaust.

This article explores the music of Yiddish theatre in early twentieth-century New York by considering multiple adaptations of Russian Jewish author Sholem Aleichem's 1888 novel Stempenyu, about a klezmer violinist, which was transformed into two theatrical productions in 1907 and 1929, and finally inspired a three-movement recital work for accompanied violin by Joseph Achron. The multiple versions of Stempenyu present the eponymous musician as an allegory for the ambivalent role of the shtetl – the predominantly Jewish small town of Eastern Europe – in defining diasporic Jewish life in Europe and America, and as a medium for the sonic representation of shtetl culture as it was reformulated in the memories of the first generations of Jewish immigrants. The variations in the evocations of Eastern European klezmer in these renderings of Stempenyu indicate complex changes in the ways Jewish immigrants and their children conceived of their connection to Eastern Europe over four decades. The paper concludes by viewing changes in the symbolic character type of the shtetl fiddler in its most famous and recent manifestation, in the stage and screen musical Fiddler on the Roof. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the history of Jewish collective farms (kolkhozes). In the 1920s many Jewish families decided to join collective farms mainly because of the collapse of local shtetls. It was an attempt of craftsmen, petty traders and other categories of the marginalized population to survive. The Soviet government tried to attract the local peasantry to collective farms, promoting collectivization and preventing the rise of Zionist ideas. The Jewish kolkhozes were supposed to serve as socialist patterns of economy and way of life. However, a lot of farmers followed the norms and traditions of Judaism. Members of Jewish collective farms faced certain difficulties, e.g. schooling, medical care, etc. Massive collectivization, as well as the creation of ethnically "mixed" kolkhozes (the so-called process of internationalization) resulted in an outflow of Jews. In the 1930s the number of Jewish collective farms decreased considerably. In the second half of the decade, the local Soviet administration did not mention Jewish farms in their statistics any longer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Soviet life in the former Pale of Settlement appears in the memories of its residents as a world of living Jewish tradition existing within the professional and business activities of artisans and merchants at a time when the ideology and political structure of the Soviet Union prohibited private enterprise. That is why it occupied the shady parts of the socialist economy. Today, after collapse of the Soviet Union, it still poses moral dilemmas for those associated with its illegal activities. However, recollections about Soviet illegal enterprise also provide a space for critique of the Soviet system and a base for construction of contemporary local identity; in this way people reconcile the economic ethics of the recent Soviet past with modern capitalist reality. Narratives about illegal economic activities in the Soviet period are about the relationship between the people and the state. They are seen as a cosmological system; the Soviet state acted as an economically ineffective external force. Within its matrix was integrated a local world of human relationships with their customs and rules created the own local world of consumption and welfare. At the centre of this space is the socially and economically experienced Jewish entrepreneur whose competence is based on local Jewish tradition. Stories about illegal Soviet economic activity have become the heritage of local communities that approve of local business continuity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with the series of photos made by the Ukranian artist, designer and photographer Eugeni Kotlyar. His exibition "By the rivers of Babylon..." was a part of the large project "Neshama: through art to the heart." The main part of this project is an open-air workshop in the former Jewish shtetls which took part in August 2011 in Ukraine. E. Kotlyar created his works during his trip around the Ukraine. His photos were exhibited at the group exhibition "Jewish Atlantis: the world of shtetl in the works of Kharkov artists" and at the exhibition "By the rivers of Babylon" held in Kharkov in 2012. The project reveals "Jewish Atlantis" lost in the depths of the Ukrainian province, depicts the dramatic conflicts in Jewish history as well as the philosophy and culture of the people. The author captures the historical architectural landscape and romanticizes the image of history which is a result of mere observation of trifles and artifacts of everyday life. The photographer shows the "aesthetics of desolation". He also presents a series of still life and portrait gallery, and proposes the idea of the continuity of cultural traditions. Kotlyar's images show Jewish culture in the past and present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Holocaust of the Jews in World War II involved not only the murder of 6 million Jews but also the traumatic destruction and wipe-out of whole communities, with their rich culture and tradition which had existed for centuries. In places where no one survived, it was almost impossible to reconstruct the collective memory of those communities. The voice of the ancestors was lost. As a daughter of Holocaust survivors, I have always felt the strong presence of the loss, not only of the murdered family members but also of the ancient colourful world of Eastern European Jews. I have always felt compelled to link back to that lost world. In the past three years, my journey to the pre-war past has become more intense. This article describes the double role of my journey: it is both an attempt to reconstruct, redeem and preserve the memory of the lost ancestors, and a personal journey to the echoes of my ancestors' voices within my soul. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1880 and 1930, a major wave of Jewish immigration, from Eastern Europe, transforms the social fabric of Quebec's largest city. These immigrants have a strong sense of identity, and are quick to set up private schools, with educational projects that reflect their cultural, religious, social and ideological backgrounds. This article aims to present the process of forming the Jewish school system in Montreal, between 1874 and 1939, examined both in terms of the political will of the community leaders and the social aspirations of the Jewish population. We show that this network of private schools participated in the creation of a Jewish identity in Montreal, ensuring the continuity of a Jewishness rooted in the "Old World" that immigrants had left behind while adapting to the situation in Montreal and North America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to apply the recently proposed definition of a shtetl (Samuel D. Kassow, “The Shtetl,” in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Gershon D. Hundert, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), to the problem of determining the lower limit of shtetl size, if any, by relating the size of the Jewish population in a given site to the degree to which the site fits the definition. The definition of the shtetl used here is based on the presence of the five institutions needed for observance by an orthodox Jewish community, namely a free-standing synagogue, a heder, a mikveh, two or more charitable hevres, and a local Jewish cemetery. For each of 56 putative shtetl sites in Eastern Europe c.1845–1940, information on the presence or absence of these institutions was found in a memoir. The number of Jewish residents in these sites ranged from about 2600 to about 40. Each site was classified as either a shtetl, a potential shtetl, or a non-shtetl. The smallest shtetl had a Jewish population of about 200. This provides an estimate of the lower limit of shtetl size, in terms of Jewish population. The data suggest that the non-shtetl – more aptly called the “pre-shtetl” – is an entity separate from the shtetl as here defined. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on ethnic life stories written by early twentieth-century Romanian-Jewish immigrants to the US, and attempts to determine to what extent these narratives correspond to the generalised pattern of ethnic life writing at the time, as well as what particularises their texts. I analyse the memoirs of M.E. Ravage, Konrad Bercovici, Maurice Samuel and Edward G. Robinson, all of them born at the close of the nineteenth century but publishing their memoirs at different moments in history. I first trace the images of Romania that spring from these texts, ranging from the legal and educational discrimination portrayed by M.E. Ravage and Edward G. Robinson, to the existence of pogroms and other anti-Jewish feelings foregrounded by Konrad Bercovici, and to the nostalgic shtetl atmosphere evoked in Maurice Samuel's books. I then consider the place of the US in these authors' writings, starting from its utopian image prior to emigration to its more complex image after settlement in the new location. Finally, I show how their return journeys to Romania at different moments in time and the persisting prejudiced atmosphere they found there contributed in all cases to these authors becoming strong supporters of American democracy and its openness to critical debate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examines house-building traditions in the Podolian shtetl, as evidenced by surviving buildings and by the folk memory of building practices. Using oral sources, taken from extensive field research in Ukraine, the study considers the extent to which members of remaining Jewish communities in the former Pale of Settlement function as “carriers” of this folk memory, and what they can tell us about the manner in which Jewish houses in the shtetl were constructed and their meaning as socio-cultural spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Consideration of two different working definitions of a shtetl, and the two different datings of the first shtetl that they produce, leads to the following conclusions. (1) The definition of a shtetl is formed by a set of criteria, one of which distinguishes it from similar settlements by providing a characteristic termed “sufficient Jewishness.” Because “sufficient Jewishness” exists in multiple forms, such as “at least 40% Jewish population,” and “the presence of certain specified institutions of religious observance,” a number of valid definitions can coexist. (2) The dating of the earliest shtetl will vary from one study to another, because it is determined by the selected definition of a shtetl used to arrive at that dating, and ultimately by the selected form of that definition's distinguishing criterion. (3) Therefore, just as more than one definition of a shtetl can coexist, each with a different form of the distinguishing criterion, so more than one valid dating of the first shtetl can coexist. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Born in the Transylvanian town of Sighet, a traditional Jewish shtetl, Elie Wiesel lived the tormenting experience of the deportation to Nazi death camps. The study discusses the ever present feeling of nostalgia for a lost paradise, as it appears in the writings of this author. Attention is also paid to the constant parallel between Sighet and Jerusalem, the two symbolic poles of Elie Wiesel's existence. Realizing the impossibility of actually returning to the lost world, Wiesel grants memory a restorative, integrative, and redemptive role, tying the past to the present and further orienting it towards the future. For him, memory is thus the antidote to melancholy and despair. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with the character of Molly Goldberg in Gertrude Berg's television program "The Goldbergs." Goldberg provides a comical way to dealing with family life during the 1950s. She represents the shtetl mother in the U.S. and the mother archetype who takes care of other people. Regardless of her Jewish heritage, she is aware of the challenges faced by all mankind and wants to resolve them. As the program progresses during the 1950s, the character of Molly becomes much less old fashioned in her physical appearance.

The article presents an essay about the book "Mazel" by Rebecca Goldstein. The book is a narrative of three generations represented by a Jewish Judith Shakespeare figure who could find no outlet for her genius in the oppressively traditional shtetl. It reflects Goldstein's assumption that shtetl life must have produced some brilliant, energetic and totally neurotic women. It conveys that intellectual women are beset by the mind/body problem. It also presents Jewish feminist classic.

The analysis of two actual strategies in the reformulation of the Jewish identity in Israel and the diaspora, are the central themes of this article. The historic memory of the Hebrew people in cognitive and emotional terms affirms the collective commitment with Judaism. One of the strategies is secular and the other religious. The first is based on the transmission of the Shoa (Holocaust) to the new generations as an exemplary event experienced by the Jews that pretends not to be forgotten to avoid its recurrence in other groups. The message has a universal dimension that incrusts in the Jewish history within the western culture and reinforce secular values such as democracy, tolerance, respect to others, pluriculturalism and social justice. In the Jabad case, by the theological way, the objective is the religious re-enchantment of the world in all the aspects of life to create a social milieu that emulates what they consider the authentic Judaism inspired in the shtetl, the premodern communities of the ashkenazi Jews in Eastern Europe. In both cases, the historical and cultural legacy acquire new meanings that summon Jews, giving continuity to Judaism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the writings of author Dvora Baron and her attention to the shtetls (Jewish communities) of Eastern Europe. The author argues that the typical interpretation of the shtetl imagery as acquiescence to the patriarchal marginalization of women is incorrect and states that the shtetls in Baron's writing served to create important female writing strategies in the Zionist movement.

How did East European Jewish immigrants in America remember, depict and recreate the cities of Eastern Europe? Through an examination of selected articles and poems from "landsmanshaft" (hometown associational) publications, this article examines the metaphors, images and idioms summoned by immigrant writers in the interwar "landsmanshaft" press to describe their former urban homes. Though many question "landsmanshaft" publications' aesthetic value, this article argues that they vividly capture the voice of the people, providing a lens through which to glimpse the inner world and popular culture of Jewish immigrants in early-twentieth century New York. Some writers reinvented their former urban homes by deploying the leitmotif of the shtetl, while others used motherland imagery; all, however, used their recreations of the East European city to ponder the price of migration and to ruminate on the promise of America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Shtetl , the small town of Eastern Europe, especially in Poland and Russia, where Jews were the majority in the population and set the tone of life, has not received proper historiographical treatment. The major problem is that the shtetl has been idealized, much like in the play Fiddler on the Roof , to represent people's nostalgia, not reality. Shtetl society was also taken by Zionists and others as representative of an objectionable Jewish role model, the contrary of what Zionist sought to achieve. It is commonly thought that by the time of the Shoah, when the Nazis indeed destroyed it, the shtetl was already moribund. In fact, through the early twentieth century, shtetl population remained steady; in some cases it even grew. This survey of existing literature, whose quantity is less than what might be expected, is a prelude to a comprehensive study on shtetl society, in particular during the twentieth century, which this author is now concluding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the shtetl's literary image in Jewish literature. Literary shtetlekh is found in the works of S. Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, Y. L. Peretz, Dovid Bergelson and S. Y. Agnon among many others. The description of these writers' shtetlekh implies that influential tradition existed in Jewish literature which demanded the radical Judaization of the shtetl image of eastern Europe. The tradition of Judaization was not disregarded by some writers because they wish to project their fictional artistic images, which were motivated by the agenda of the oppositionist.

The article analyzes a few of the stanzas, as well as the melodies of the shtetl folk songs "Der Mai Lied (The May Song)" and "Die Soche (The Plough)." It discusses how the images and sounds of the folk songs reflect the values of the shtetl culture. It details a shtetl wedding as described in the song "The May Song," and a carefree, idyllic life of a farmer as presented in the song "The Plough."

This article presents information on three inner cities Ghetto, Shtetl and Polis. The East European small town has been a favorite subject for writers, historians, sociologists, and even anthropologists. Though there seems to be basic consensus on core culture and relations with the surrounding outside society on whose goodwill it depended, there is nevertheless an enormous range of presentations, interpretations, emphases, and evaluations of those communities' ways of life. In sum, the ghetto is in the deathly gap of a defunct tradition. A philosophy of poverty lurks behind the elaborate rationalization. The criterion of a community's well-being is in the infusion of its cultural institutions, its sense of authenticity is drawn from a commitment to traditional ways and values. Shtetl, too, is the section of a town so which Jews were restricted. This primitive barter, backbone of Barnow's economic structure, in addition to the meagre choice of trades and occupations, is responsible for the Ghetto's social degradation and economic sterility But if those are unproductive aspects of Barnow's economy and easy targets of ridicule, there are those which are outright shameful, branding the ghetto with a stigma of corruption.

This article explores the extent to which Jews were able to transplant their East European Shtetl communities into the city as ethnic urban villagers, to what extent they are also active in the macro political and economic structures of Winnipeg, Manitoba, and to what extent they employ social psychological means of identification. Since the Jews have seldom been in political control of a national territory, they did not come to Canada with great visions of Jewish power and influence in this country. When the Jews moved into the Northend of Winniepeg, they settled first in the Point Douglas area. They were some of the first to settle in this territory together with the Ukrainians and Poles. In a democracy, an ethnic group must dominate an ecological area demographically in order to gain control of the political decisions in the area. The Northend was always a part of the city of Winnipeg. The East Europeans did send representatives from their Northend wards which were often Jewish. Economically, the Jews who were originally of lower socio-economic status, have risen to highest status in Winnipeg. They, however, under-represented among the corporate elite. The article concludes that the Jews were never able to dominate the ecological, demographic, political and economic macro-social structures in Manitoba.

The unprecedented rapidity and breadth of Jewish upward mobility in the United States is generally attributed, at least in part, to a continuity in ideational culture that characterized the East European shtetl, namely, a high value placed on learning. Upon examination, we contend that this explanation appears to be based on a myth of intellectuality. Continuities there are, we maintain, between the Old World and the New; they reside, however, insofar as upward mobility is achieved, in socio-economic patterns and their associated values. To the minimal extent that shtetl scholarship ideals were internalized, they functioned as an obstacle to acculturation in an expanding industrial environment. Professionalism, not intellectuality, was an outgrowth--for Jews as well as groups lacking ancient learning traditions--of urban, middle-class status. The Jews, however poor, arrived with a middle-class orientation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]