Review by Choice Review
Exuberant and revolutionary, founded on extensive archival scholarship in multiple languages, this book is fundamental for understanding the authentic significance of the predominately Jewish market towns known in Yiddish as shtetls, which once dotted the map of Eastern Europe. The author (Northwestern) rejects the conventional image of the exhausted, impoverished, depressed shtetl portrayed in Fiddler on the Roof, inspired by Sholem Aleichem's popular Teyve stories. Focused on the historic regions of Podolia, Volhynia, and Kiev, where Hasidism was born and flourished, this book provides a thick description and analysis of the fabric of daily life during the shtetl's heyday, when the dynamic Jewish market towns provided urban commercial services amid the fertile lands of Ukraine. The book is colorfully written and documented with mordant humor and cynical humanism. Reading this book reveals the vibrant heart of Eastern European Jewish civilization, whose traces can still be seen among the descendants of millions of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, compelled to leave by the economic decline resulting from czarist Russian policies. An outstanding work of scholarship about the fabric of life in a multiethnic region. Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries. --Robert Moses Shapiro, Brooklyn College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
BACK IN THE DAYS when Jews could travel without having to go anywhere - one minute a house was in Poland, the next in Russia - they lived in places called shtetls, defined neither by physical size nor population, possessing mysterious features both urban and rural. Though Christians lived there too, the shtetl tilted spiritually toward Jerusalem, while performing economic services for the Slavic society to which it also belonged, giving it an Eastern European character all its own. Its amorphous nature has made it the subject of easy mythologizing, so that it often pops up in the American imagination as a kind of Jewish Brigadoon where all the villagers are singing, unless they are running from a pogrom. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, a professor of Jewish studies at Northwestern University, would like us to view the shtetl as neither the spiritual apotheosis nor the physical nadir of Jewish exile. For this he has to do some digging, because while the giants of Yiddish literature were around to record the shtetl's gasping decline in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, its "golden age" - which he puts roughly between the 1790s and the 1840s - is a tale that lives mainly in the archives. "The Golden Age Shtetl" focuses on three provinces in central Ukraine. It is populated by "Jewish tavernkeepers, international smugglers, members of Slavic gangs, traders in colonial commodities, disloyal husbands and avid readers of books." Determined to keep these unsung heroes from remaining the pale ink in someone else's palimpsest, Petrovsky-Shtern is not beyond his own mythologizing impulses. His shtetl-folk possess "the mental qualities of urban dwellers and the corporeal capabilities of peasants." He mythologizes himself a little, too, telling us that in order to get his hands on hidden documents, "I sometimes disguised myself as a Ukrainian clerk, a Soviet speleologist and a polar explorer." One feels the author, who grew up in Ukraine, imagining himself as one of those Jewish smugglers he writes about, men who could "handle a lance to intimidate the mounted border patrol; a sword if they had to engage the guards in a fight and pistols to protect their booty from the Cossack guards." Smuggling looms large not only in the economy of Petrovsky-Shtern's shtetl but for its symbolism, too. The author is interested in the way aspects of one world slide inside another. His golden-age shtetl was born when Russia swallowed a giant slice of Poland at the end of the 18th century and went from having few Jews to overseeing vast numbers of them, many of whom lived in privately owned Polish towns. These towns are the essential ingredients of the hybrid world Petrovsky-Shtern is celebrating. Polish nobles had permitted Jews to live there on the condition that they ran the outdoor markets, sold liquor and in general acted as engines of trade. When the towns fell under Russian rule, Jews retained many of their economic privileges while expanding their civil rights, especially after they displayed a willingness to inform on their erstwhile Polish overlords. Shtetl dwellers became adept at playing the declining Polish nobility off against bribable Russian officials. The czar had not yet laid his heavy hand on the trade by which shtetl Jews powered the economic growth of western Russia. Neither had he made nationalism the supreme ideology and Eastern Orthodoxy synonymous with Russian nationalism. That would come, and as the Russian treasury bought up more and more of the private towns and trade died, Russia repurposed shtetl Jews as scapegoats for a restive peasant population. But before that happened in the second half of the 19th century, a rough collaborative spirit prevailed, which Petrovsky-Shtern finds evidence of in everything from the Yiddish slang used by Slavic gangsters to the story of "an ambitious and dodgy Eastern Orthodox priest" who teamed up with "a greedy and sleazy Jewish informer" to bring down a pious Jewish printer. The book sets the bar for cross-cultural collaboration a little low in places, as it does for instances of Jewish physical pride - not always distinguishing between self-defense, domestic violence and possible mental illness. But if he sometimes works too hard to push over the old straw shtetl in favor of one that "at its height was afraid of nothing," Petrovsky-Shtern also succeeds in vividly evoking a Jewish world that survived not merely in spite of its neighbors but in complex collaboration with them. There is a reason much of this has been forgotten. The golden-age shtetl lies at the heart of what the historian Timothy Snyder calls "the bloodlands," a region that was a central battleground in the war against the Jews. Which makes "The Golden Age Shtetl" a moving feat of cultural reclamation and even, in its way, an act of quiet heroism. JONATHAN ROSEN is the author of "The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds," among other books.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 27, 2014]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Shtetls (small towns with large Jewish populations) are popularly remembered as places where the Jews who lived there were considered pious, powerless, and poor and where the pace of life was set by the Sabbath, festivals, and holy days. Petrovsky-Shtern (Jewish Studies, Northwestern Univ.; Lenin's Jewish Question) argues that this fallacy is drawn from the era of the shtetl's decline in the late 19th and early 20th centuries after the tsarist government, administratively responsible for the towns, destroyed the local economy. Rather than a place of poverty and weak industry, the shtetl, during its heyday from roughly 1790 to 1840, was a dynamic engine of economic life. Jews living there dominated liquor manufacturing and made up the majority of innkeepers and guild merchants. -Petrovsky-Shtern marshals an impressive array of archival and literary sources to reconstruct the licit and illicit economy of the towns, the family life of the residents, and their patterns of consumption-including alcohol and book purchases. VERDICT General readers may find the first chapter about legal definitions somewhat slow going. Past that point, however, the vibrancy of shtetl life in the days before it was destroyed by the Russian state comes through vividly. This book should appeal to anyone interested in Jewish or Eastern European history.--Frederic Krome, Univ. of Cincinnati Clermont Coll. (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A demonstration of how the shtetl of Eastern Europe enjoyed an early period of thriving prosperity and cultural diversity. Petrovsky-Shtern (Jewish Studies/Northwestern Univ.; Lenin's Jewish Question, 2010, etc.) turns some of the received knowledge about Jewish history on its head as he delves into rich, formerly classified primary sources delineating the evidence of Jewish economic power during the transition between the partitions of Poland by Russia (17721775) and the advent of the Russian military age, beginning in the 1840s, which brought xenophobia and nationalism. During this 50-year period of lax Russian rule, when Russia inherited these formerly Polish territories, the Jews were encouraged in their important roles as traders, tavern keepers and liquor sellers. What was shamefully referred to as a shtetl (small town) by later Yiddish writers like Mendele Moykher Sforim and Sholem Aleichem was proudly called a shtot by its contemporaries. Humming market towns in the provinces of Podolia, Volhynia and the southern part of what was the Pale of Settlement attracted thousands of merchants and enriched the Polish landlords, Russian administrators and Jews alike. Although the areas were spiritual centers and gave rise to Hasidism, for example, the most important aspect was the economic activity of the marketplace. Jews proved they were loyal, industrious and reliable and were entrusted to run the mail service and to make and sell liquor. Their homes, clothing and artifacts revealed a sense of prosperity and dignity, and their language reflected the mingling with their Christian and Slavic neighborsa half-century before the alienation from and the scapegoating of Jews for "the shortcomings of modernism." Packed with vigorous case studies, Petrosvky-Shtern's book is lively and enlightening. A welcome study that is by turns picturesque and scholarly, startling and accessible.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
