The shtetl : new evaluations
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The shtetl : new evaluations
（Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies series）
New York University Press, c2007
- : cloth : alk. paper
- : pbk
Available at 2 libraries
Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
HTTP:URL=http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0617/2006022419.html Information=Table of contents only
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
Table of Contents
Editor's NoteSteven T. KatzIntroduction Samuel Kassow1 The Importance of Demography and Patterns of Settlement for an Understanding of the Jewish Experience in East-Central EuropeGershon David Hundert2 A Shtetl with a Yeshiva: The Case of Volozhin Immanuel Etkes3 Rebbetzins, Wonder-Children, and the Emergence of the Dynastic Principle in HasidismNehemia Polen4 Two Jews, Three Opinions: Politics in the Shtetl at the Turn of the Twentieth CenturyHenry Abramson5 The Shtetl in Poland, 1914-1918 Konrad Zieli'nski6 The Shtetl in Interwar Poland Samuel Kassow7 Looking at the Yiddish Landscape: Representation in Nineteenth-Century Hasidic and Maskilic LiteratureJeremy Dauber8 Imagined Geography: The Shtetl, Myth, and Reality Israel Bartal9 Gender and the Disintegration of the Shtetl in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish LiteratureNaomi Seidman10 Rediscovering the Shtetl as a New Reality: David Bergelson and Itsik KipnisMikhail Krutikov11 Agnon's Synthetic ShtetlArnold J. Band12 The Image of the Shtetl in Contemporary Polish FictionKatarzyna Wi?ecl"awska13 Sarny and Rokitno in the Holocaust: A Case Study of Two Townships in Wolyn (Volhynia)Yehuda Bauer14 The World of the Shtetl Elie WieselAbout the Contributors Index
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