The Shtetl

"Gone now are those little towns where the shoemaker was a poet,
The watchmaker a philosopher, the barber a troubadour.
Gone now are those little towns where the wind joined
Biblical songs with Polish tunes and Slavic rue,
Where old Jews in orchards in the shade of cherry trees
Lamented for the holy walls of Jerusalem.
Gone now are those little towns, though the poetic mists,
The moons, winds, ponds, and stars above them
Have recorded in the blood of centuries the tragic tales,
The histories of the two saddest nations on earth."

--Antoni Sionimski, "Elegy for the Jewish Villages"

Shtetl - Little city, small town, village - in particular, the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe, where the remarkable culture of the Ashkenazim flourished before World War II.

In many a shtetl, most of the inhabitants were Jews; in others, all were Jews. And it was in the shtetlach that certain Jewish traditions and values were preserved and embellished until they achieved a character distinctly their own.

The shtetl was the incubator and fortress of Ashkenazi culture. The residents were poor folk, fundamentalist in faith, earthy, superstitious, stubbornly resisting secularism or change. They wrote in Hebrew or Yiddish, shunning foreign tongues among themselves. They were dairymen, draymen, cobblers, tailors, butchers, fishmongers, shopkeepers, peddlers. They considered their exile temporary and dreamed of the Messianic miracle that would -any day- return them, and their brethren around the world, to the shining glory of a restored Israel in the Holy Land.

Many people invariably think of "Fiddler on the Roof" as the summation of 19^th and early 20^th century Shtetl life – while it is true that music and dancing were important components of the Shtetl life, there was far more to it as well.

The Tsars had confined the Jews to the "Pale of Settlement," twenty-five provinces of the Russian empire. To live outside, a Jew needed special permission from the authorities-and some skilled workers, professional men and businessmen did receive (or purchase, via bribery) such permission. But the vast majority of the Jews in the tsarist empire lived within a restricted area. They could not move without approval from the police. Entire local populations could be abruptly "resettled," forced out of their homes, with no more legality then the arbitrary impulse of an often besotted governor.

Jews were forbidden to own land. They were barred (with exceptions) from colleges and universities and from the humblest government jobs. They were not allowed to practice certain crafts, skills, and trades.

Life in the shtetl was very hard. (in some years, thousands literally starved to death.) Jews were spat upon, beaten, killed, their synagogues and cemeteries desecrated - either in "minor incidents" shrugged off by the authorities, or in full-scale pogroms instigated by successive regimes. The hooliganism of drunken thugs, and the ghastly bloodbaths by pious Cossacks, were alike tolerated by government officials, witnessed by unprotesting Eastern Orthodox priests, and openly abetted by the notoriously anti-Semitic police.

In the shtetlach, the Jews produced their own people's culture, an independent style of life and thought, an original gallery of human types, fresh and rueful modes of humor, irony, lyricism, paradox - all unlike anything in history. There Yiddishkeit entered a golden age.

They apologized to no one, neither to philosophers nor theologians... They felt no need to compare themselves with anyone else, and they wasted no energy in refuting hostile opinions. There, in Eastern Europe, the Jewish people came into its own.

The world of the Jews in Germany, France, England, Holland, Italy, Austria, was vastly different from the world of shtetl Jews in Eastern Europe. The world of the first was contemporary; the world of the second only contemporaneous. City Jews in Eastern, as in Western, Europe were caught up in political and libertarian movements; they were both workers and bourgeoisie; they became trade unionists, social democrats, socialists, revolutionaries. But the shtetl was another world…

The "Pale," established by Catherine II in 1791, ended, under severe economic and political pressures, during the first World War. Thousands of Jews left it for the factories of Odessa, Kiev, Warsaw, Lodz, Moscow, Petrograd-and from there went on, out of unholy Russia, anywhere; to Germany, England, South America, the United States.

History will surely record the shtetl as a phenomenon worthy of remembrance. It was a world isolated from time, medieval in texture, living on the daily edge of fear. And it was a triumph of human endurance, a crucible from which flamed a brilliant and unexpected efflorescence of scholarship and literature".

The attitude of American Jews to the shtetl is torn by ambivalence.

On the one hand [the shtetl] is remembered sentimentally ...it sends up a nostalgic glow for its survivors and for those who have received the tradition from parents and grandparents? It is pictured as one of the rare and happy breathing spells of the Exile, the nearest thing to a home from home that the Jews have never known. On the other hand, it is recalled with a grimace of distaste. The Shtetlach! Those forlorn little settlements in a vast and hostile wilderness, isolated alike from Jewish and non-Jewish centers of civilization, their tenure precarious, their structure ramshackle, their spirit squalid. Who would want to live in one of them? The shtetl offers a pattern of the exalted & the ignominious.

The Rabbi of any shtetl always led his congregation with great dignity and was highly respected by all Jews.

There were usally different groups for the study of Talmud, Mishnaes, Torah, and Rashi. There were also arguments, bickering and feuds in the religious/cultural sphere, and confrontations between various clergy representing Hasidim and their opponents, Misnogadim. For the uneducated Jews, the Rabbi would often create a group to study the Book of Psalms. On Saturday afternoons in the summers, they studied the 'sayings of our fathers.' All these studies, these spiritual activities, helped overcome the misery of everyday life, and enabled them to survive the various decrees, and the gruesome persecutions they had to suffer from the Czarist regime and the Landlords.

The people of a shtetl, like their counterparts in so many other towns in Eastern Europe, lived and worked hard to sustain their poor lives. There were a few well-to-do families, but the majority were poor artisans, storekeepers, and just plain poor folks. Most of the week they worked hard and lived from hand-to-mouth, but were able to save enough for the Sabbath.

Any Jews that could spare time would go to synagogue or a house of study to hear religious words or to read a religious book. The materialistic life was not primary. A Jew would manage to get along on very little. The main concern was one's spiritual life. Years passed by and generation after generation carried on the same way: people believed that nothing would ever change. That's the way the world was created and that's the way it would remain.