Shtetl: for most people, the word evokes only the most distant, hazy associations. For some, it summons warmth-filled images of Chagall-like crooked streets and fiddlers on thatched roofs.Forothers, the verymention of the shtetl, as of anything connected with Eastern European Jewry, touches off the dark emotions aroused by the memories of the Holocaust.
The shtetl is part of a vanishedworld, and its destruction took placein horrifying circumstances.But before the unleashing of death, the shtetl enjoyed several centuries of pulsing,
multifarious life.There were various phases of history, periods of prosperity and of hardship, and social realities more complex, interesting and richly textured than either pure nostalgia or pure bitterness would admit.
But what, exactly, was the shtetl?The word comes from the Hebrew "shtot" or "town," and it came to mean any small town in Eastern Europe in which a sizable portion of the population was Jewish. The majority of shtetls were probably located in Poland.The population of the shtetls
consisted mostly of Polish peasants and farming gentry and of Jewish merchants and craftsmen.But aside from its literal meaning, shtetl also came to connote a way of life that included language, religion and cooking, traditions of dress and of thought, distinctive family relationships, institutions and social arrangements.And although the original shtetls no longer exist, the generic shtetl lives on in the many ethnic neighborhoods and communities in which immigrants or minority groups maintain some of the old, village habits and ways. Indeed, one reason to study the shtetl may be to understand both the charms and the hazards of life in such small, protected enclaves.
Perhaps the main virtue of the shtetl for its inhabitants was theextent to which it was a community.The strongest glue holding the shtetl society together was religion.Inaddition to providing the profound bondof shared practices and beliefs, the Jewish religion encouraged a powerful sense of communal responsibility.The shtetl had its definite hierarchies of status and importance: there were poor Jews and rich Jews, and- an even more crucial distinction- learned Jews and ignorant ones.But no member of the shtetl was ever allowed to completely fall out of the communal safety net.
It'sunlikely, then, that anybody in the shtetl suffered from thatverymodern discontent- the lack of belonging.And yet, it would be a mistake to think that life in the shtetl was an uninterrupted idyll of communal warmth.The internal safety of the shtetl, the patterned orderliness,haditsprice.For one thing, the shtetl was insular and traditionalist to the point of stasis.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the winds of change did, sometimes,reach the shtetl, through the influences of political movements,seculareducation, books and newspapers.But even then, the shtetl remained to a large extent a self-enclosed world.Its isolation was, of course, partlyimposed by the majority cultures.Ineach country, there were regulations prohibiting Jews from practicing certain professions and,later, quotas on Jewish students attending universities.Moreover, to themostly unlettered peasants who constituted the non-Jewish population of the shtetls, the Jews were the original other-sometimes intriguing, more often threatening, but always alien.At the same time, it cannot be denied that the shtetl retained its separateness partly by its own choice- andthat in the eyes of shtetl Jews, the Poles were also strangers, often viewed with condescension and suspicion.
And yet, mutual prejudices couldn't be sustained consistentlythrough centuries of proximity, and of daily, ongoing contacts.Familiarity sometimes breeds tolerance, and shtetl towns nurtured actual neighborliness and cross-influences as well as fears and aversions.Jews meeting Polish peasants on market days and exchanging purchases offarming produce for sales of horseshoes or of shoes;Poles stopping at Jewish inns, and sometimes even coming to the rabbi, to ask his adviceabout vexing problems;Jewish bands playing at Polish weddings, and Polish aristocrats hiring Jewish stewards- all such meetings and interchanges went into makingthecharacteristic,mulchy mix that was the shtetl culture.
The shtetl was at a place where both prejudices and bonds weretested with great immediacy and intensity. The prejudices of stronger culturesagainstminorityones are particularly dangerous, and in
Eastern Europe, they ultimately had tragic consequences.But in its earlier phases, theshtetl can be seen as a kind of experiment in multiculturalism, long before that term, or idea, came into vogue.
From our own increasinglyintermixedworld, we know how difficultmulticulturalcoexistenceactually is.One of the questions for our modern societies is how to maintain some sense of distinct communal
identities without splintering into Balkanized fragments; perhaps the shtetl holds some lessons about tolerating differences and maintaining that precarious balance.
About the Author
Eva Hoffman, born in Cracow, Poland, is a former editor for The New YorkTimes Book Review.
She is the author of Exit Into History, a look at Eastern Europe since the fall ofCommunism and Lost in Translation, an autobiography on the emotional and cultural dilemmas of immigration.Currently, living in the United Kingdom, she is working on a book about shtetl life and history.
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