Gennady Estraikh - The Shtetl: Image and Reality

THE SHTETL: IMAGE AND REALITY

UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

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STUDIES IN YIDDISH

Editorial Committee

Professor Malcolm Bowie (General Editor)

All Souls College

Professor Marion Aptroot

Heinrich Heine University, Dsseldorf

Dr Gennady Estraikh

Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies

Dr Mikhail Krutikov

Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies

Professor David Roskies

Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York

Professor Joseph Sherman

University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

Volume Editor

Professor Ritchie Robertson, St John's College

Senior Publications Officer

Mrs Kareni Bannister

LEGENDA

EUROPEAN HUMANITIES RESEARCH CENTRE STUDIES IN YIDDISH 2

Papers of the Second Mendel Friedman International Conference on Yiddish

Edited by
Gennady Estraikh and Mikhail Krutikov

First published 2000

Published by the European Humanities Research Centre of the University of Oxford 47 Wellington Square Oxford OX1 2JF

LEGENDA is the publications imprint of the European Humanities Research Centre

Published 2017 by Routledge
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European Humanities Research Centre of the University of Oxford 2000

ISBN 13: 978-1-900755-41-2 (pbk)

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LEGENDA series designed by Cox Design Partnership, Witney, Oxon

Dafna Clifford is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies and the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.

Gennady Estraikh is Lecturer in Yiddish Linguistics at the Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies and the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.

Hillel Kazovsky is a Ph.D. student at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

Moss Kijak is a Professor at Belgrano University, Buenos Aires.

John D. Klier is Corob Professor of Modern History at University College London.

Mikhail Krutikov is Lecturer in Modern Yiddish Literature at the Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies and the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.

David G. Roskies is Professor of Jewish Literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York.

Alia Sokolova is a Research Fellow at the St Petersburg Jewish University.

Anna Shternshis is a D.Phil, student at the University of Oxford.

The Yiddish word goles (Diaspora) usually occurs in an idiom or context with a meaning of suffering or oppression. Patient waiting for the Messiah, who would bring salvation from exile, and the quest for a do-it-yourself liberation (e.g. Zionism or Communism), often had only one thing in commonrejection of the goles life as a norm. Accordingly, Yiddish was widely despised, or even hated, being seen as an alien 'jargon' imposed on Jews during their centuries-long slavery. None the less, from the end of the nineteenth century the 'jargon' of East European Jewry acquired influential supporters, Yiddishists, whoalbeit divided by huge ideological gulfswere instrumental in improving dramatically the status of Yiddish. Still, even Yiddishists, many of whom envisaged the East European Jewish habitat as the sole place where an egalitarian, Jew-friendly society could eventually be built, were not about to carry into their future the existing form of the goles the shtetl. It was a City of the Sun or a Communist Pastoral rather than a Shtetl of the Sun which fascinated the psyche of the Jewish radical. True, in the late 1920s and in the 1930s there was a movement in Poland, called Landkentenish (the study of local lore, history and economies), which looked sympathetically at the shtetl. However, this movement remains merely a footnote in modern Jewish history.

Although the word 'shtetl', a calque from the corresponding Slavic words (e.g. Polish miasteczko ) , means 'little town', it became a byword for a populous civilization, dispersed all over Eastern Europe, but at the same time connected via ubiquitous religious, business, cultural and family networks. From the end of the nineteenth century, modernization, migration, emigration and revolutions ate away at the Jewish shtetl. Shtetl life mostly perished in the ashes of the Second World War, though many of its landmarks and a few people have survived until now, notably in Ukraine and Belorussia.

It is illuminating to note that the shtetl does not play a prominent part in the history of the Gentile population of Eastern Europe, apparently because the non-Jewish cohorts of the 'little town' dwellers did not differ significantly from their Gentile counterparts living in villages or (proper) towns. The Jewish shtetl, on the other hand, was a world apart. Even so, it is a distorted picture of the shtetl which completely excludes its non-Jewish residents, or reduces them to extras (e.g. shabes-goyim, Gentile helpers for the Sabbath chores) in an all-Jewish saga: in reality, Gentiles very often made up the majority of the shtetl population. There are many examples of such a misrepresentation. Thus, The New International Webster's Dictionary of the English Language (1995 edition) defines the shtetl as a 'small Jewish town or village in Eastern Europe during the 19th and 20th century until World War IP. The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998 edition) fortunately omits this misleading chronology (as if the shtetl did not exist prior to the nineteenth century), but echoes the notion that the shtetl is 'a small Jewish town or village in eastern Europe', adding that the word 'shtetl' came into English from Yiddish in the 1940s.