Veidlinger Jeffrey. In the shadow of the shtetl: small-town Jewish life in Soviet Ukraine. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,2013. — 424 p.. 2013

The story of how the Holocaust decimated Jewish life in the small towns, the shtetls, of Eastern Europe is well known. But it is a story that has been told exclusively by those who left—for America, Israel, or the major cities of the Russian interior—during or immediately after the war. These writers long assumed that nothing remained of the shtetls they abandoned; they variously portray their hometowns as “lost,” “vanished” or “erased.”1 The shtetl has always been presented as an erstwhile space, an ur-homeland from which the Jewish people emerged. Sometimes this emergence is presented as a physical migration, as in “from the shtetl to the suburbs,” and sometimes as an ideological awakening, as in “from the shtetl to socialism,” and often as both.2 It is a tragic reality that the Nazis destroyed most of small-town Jewish life in Eastern Europe, murdering millions of Jews in the process, and leaving only vestigial remnants of what had once been vibrant market towns.

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CONTENTS

When I first started searching for Jewish life in the small towns of Eastern Europe, the shtetls of Yiddish lore, I thought I would find only cemeteries and dilapidated homes, lifeless remnants of a vanished community.

in the shadow of the shtetl

1 The Shtetl

A HISTORICAL LANDSCAPE

BERSHAD

TEPLYK

TULCHYN

2 The Sears of Revolution

YOU CAN SEE A SCAR