The Shtetl : : New Evaluations / / ed. by Steven T. Katz.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter New York University Press Backlist eBook-Package 2000-2013
• MitwirkendeR: Abramson, Henry,; Band, Arnold J.,; Bartal, Israel,; Bauer, Yehuda,; Dauber, Jeremy,; Etkes, Immanuel,; Hundert, Gershon David,; Kassow, Samuel,; Katz, Steven T.,; Krutikov, Mikhail,; Polen, Nehemia,; Seidman, Naomi,; Wiesel, Elie,; WięcŁawska, Katarzyna,; Zieliński, Konrad,
• HerausgeberIn: Katz, Steven T.,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : New York University Press, , [2006]; ©2006
• Year of Publication: 2006
• Language: English
• Series: Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies Series ; 1
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

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

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Editor’s Note -- Introduction -- 1 The Importance of Demography and Patterns of Settlement for an Understanding of the Jewish Experience in East–Central Europe -- 2 A Shtetl with a Yeshiva The Case of Volozhin -- 3 Rebbetzins,Wonder-Children, and the Emergence of the Dynastic Principle in Hasidism -- 4 Two Jews, Three Opinions: Politics in the Shtetl at the Turn of the Twentieth Century -- 5 The Shtetl in Poland, 1914–1918 -- 6 The Shtetl in Interwar Poland -- 7 Looking at the Yiddish Landscape Representation in Nineteenth-Century Hasidic and Maskilic Literature -- 8 Imagined Geography The Shtetl, Myth, and Re -- 9 Gender and the Disintegration of the Shtetl in Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature -- 10 Rediscovering the Shtetl as a New Reality: David Bergelson and Itsik Kipnis -- 11 Agnon’s Synthetic Shtetl -- 12 The Image of the Shtetl in Contemporary Polish Fiction -- 13 Sarny and Rokitno in the Holocaust A Case Study of Two Townships in Wolyn (Volhynia) -- 14 The World of the Shtetl -- About the Contributors -- Index