The Golden Age Shtetl
A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe
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- €23.99
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- €23.99
Publisher Description
The shtetl was home to two-thirds of East Europe’s Jews in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, yet it has long been one of the most neglected and misunderstood chapters of the Jewish experience. This book provides the first grassroots social, economic, and cultural history of the shtetl. Challenging popular misconceptions of the shtetl as an isolated, ramshackle Jewish village stricken by poverty and pogroms, Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern argues that, in its heyday from the 1790s to the 1840s, the shtetl was a thriving Jewish community as vibrant as any in Europe.
Petrovsky-Shtern brings this golden age to life, looking at dozens of shtetls and drawing on a wealth of never-before-used archival material. The shtetl, in essence, was a Polish private town belonging to a Catholic magnate, administratively run by the tsarist empire, yet economically driven by Jews. Petrovsky-Shtern shows how its success hinged on its unique position in this triangle of power--as did its ultimate suppression. He reconstructs the rich social tapestry of these market towns, showing how Russian clerks put the shtetl on the empire’s map, and chronicling how shtetl Jews traded widely, importing commodities from France, Austria, Prussia, and even the Ottoman Empire. Petrovsky-Shtern describes family life; dwellings, trading stalls, and taverns; books and religious life; and the bustling marketplace with its Polish gentry, Ukrainian peasants, and Russian policemen.
Illustrated throughout with rare archival photographs and artwork, this nuanced history casts the shtetl in an altogether new light, revealing how its golden age continues to shape the collective memory of the Jewish people today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Neither a comprehensive history of Eastern European Jewish life or the shtetl, Petrovsky-Shtern, professor of Jewish Studies at Northwestern Univ., focuses on three provinces Volhynia, Podolia, and Kiev of the then Russian Empire during what he deems the golden age period, 1790 1840, when the shtetl was "the unique habitat of some 80 percent of East European Jews." Here are portraits of Jewish life in small towns and cities quite different from those Sholom Aleichem immortalized in Fiddler on the Roof, where Jews lived in "an impoverished yet God-fearing dwelling place" afflicted by Russian pogroms. In this account, Russian authorities had a "relatively benevolent attitude" toward Jews. While some Jews were poor, others thrived as traders, owning stalls at fairs that, in the city of Berdichev, featured a casino, horse races, and trapeze artists. Petrovsky-Shtern also notes how important Jews were in selling liquor and owning taverns, introducing us to shtetl criminals and surveying Jewish folklore relating to the Land of Israel (such as tunnels under houses supposedly leading to Jerusalem). At times Petrovsky-Shtern gets bogged down in anecdotal detail, but this is a colorful, exhaustively researched study of a period when Jews were fully at home in shtetl life. 50 photos, 1 map.