Shtetl is Yiddish for a small town. The plural is shtetlach. “There were hundreds of them, and no two were alike. The term ‘shtetl’ connoted a Jewish settlement with a large and compact Jewish population who differed from their gentile, mostly peasant, neighbors in religion, occupation, language, and culture”. (1, The Shtetl, S. Kassow)

My maternal grandparents, Abraham and Annie Kirschenbaum, lived in the shtetl Tarnobrzeg, now in Poland. Also Abraham’s brother, Jacob lived there.

My fraternal great-grandparents, Gedalia and Rebecca Lechtus,  lived in the shtetl Murovano-Kurilovtzy, Ukraine. Also their children: Louis, Joseph, Lieba, Morris, Eisek, and Dincha lived there.

My fraternal grandparents, Isaac and Rachel Maltzer, lived in the nearby shtetl Kopaygorod, Ukraine. Their children were born there: Eda, Ben Zion, Morris, Rebecca, and Sy.

Louis Licht moved from Murovano-Kurilovtzy to Kopaigerod, and married Eda Maltzer. Their children were born there: Bennett, Mayer, Leah, James, Anne, and Ella.

Carolynn’s father Jack Pinsler  was born in the shtetl Dukla, now in Poland.

I have used the English names, which they adopted after they emigrated, for easier association by the reader.  

Dukla is about 85 miles south of Tarnobrzeg. Kopaygerod is about 300 miles south east of Tarnobrzeg. This is measured in straight lines, not by roads, but these towns are not far apart.

The best know image of the Shtetl is Fiddler On The Roof, which is a musical, by Sheldon Harnick and Joseph Stein, and a motion picture, based on the story Tevye and his daughter by Sholem Aleichem.

Life Is With People is a book about “The Culture of the Shtetl”:  

The Polish rulers, eager to develop their backward provinces, welcomed the immigrants from the West,    experienced in commerce and industry. They granted them privileges and liberties, religious freedom and communal autonomy. (34)

The book has detailed descriptions about the Sabbath, Cemetery, Synagogue, and mikvah.

The shtetl had the teeming market place, the unpaved streets, the shabby wooden buildings. In summer the dust piles in thick layers, which the rain changes to mud so deep that wagon wheels stick fast.…Dishwater and other liquid refuse...is emptied out in the streets. The main street of a large shtetl may be paved with jagged stones. The houses of the rich are in the center of the town, around the market place. A few buildings may have two stories, the others will be shabby, unadorned, one-story structures, some with a small yard... (61). Many families have chickens, geese, perhaps a goat or even a cow. (62)

A shtetl of any size will have several varieties of school: a kheyder, where the youngest children study, a besmedresh for both prayers and study, a ta/mud toyreh for those whose parents cannot pay tuition, a yeshiva for higher studies. (71)

The residences of the Hassidic leaders are know as 'courts'. The central figure of the court is of course the Tsaddik or the Rebbeh.... (166)

The limitations on means of earning a living have been imposed from without.… conditions and restrictions.… The great majority of the Eastern European Jews engage in commerce, trade, or skilled work. (239-242)

A wedding is the most joyous and most elaborate festivity in shtetl life. The arranged marriage with its attendant contract and dowry has been the most prevalent among the sheyney layt (religious people). (270-271)

The house in the shtetl will probably be not more than two rooms, and may be only one. The usual interior is plastered and whitewashed. The floor may be of boards but more often the earth serves as a floor, swept and sanded. All doors and shutters will be locked at night (361). Everyone in the shtetl  knows, of course, that one must eat only food that is kosher, or ritually fit.... (367) Just as the week is lived from Sabbath to Sabbath, so the year is lived from one holiday to the next. (381)

The conclusion is "the shtetl is a product of the forces from within and from without. . .. The shtetl, with its wide variation of local pattern and its constant core of Yiddishkayt, is as much in character in its responsiveness to the current environment as in its adherence to the age-old tradition”. (430)

Abraham Gannes,- author of "Children in the Shtetl", was born in Winograd, in the province of Kiev in 1911 (1):

The shtetl ... was a jumble of individual houses with thatched roofs. There was no sewage system, no indoor plumbing, no sign of sidewalks, no street lighting, no street or house numbers, kerosene lamps and lanterns and candles were used; there was little coal; straw and wood were used for heating (43). There was no doctor, hospital or clinic in the shtetl. The pharmacist was called in... Transportation was by horse and wagon.. . .Monday and Thursdays were market days.: . We were at Heder most of the day. . . Yiddish was the language of the home and Heder and the street. Russian was used in the main for trading purposes. (49-51)

He wrote about Sabbath preparation and observance in the shtetl. On Friday Heder ended at noon. All day Friday the women were baking the braided challot (bread), cleaning the house, smearing with clay the earthen kitchen floor, polishing the brass candlesticks, cooking the meal, preparing the cholent. The kerosene lamps were filled to the brim so as to keep burning. All the stores closed early and business came to a halt. The Synagogue was full for a short service Friday night, followed by the meal at home. After Synagogue, the table at home was already set and the candles were lit. There was the blessings over wine and bread, the meal, the songs, and the closing prayer. (58)

The life cycle rites and ritual of observance, were observed punctiliously by the rich and poor alike. The town Klezmer (musicians) were kept busy at joyous occasions. My parents told me that when they were married in  1907, the  festive celebration lasted seven days, with feasting, dancing and singing. (59)

He wrote chapters about the 1917 Revolution, the Pogroms, and his flight from Winograd to the U.S. in 1920.

Phil Bibel, was born in 1909 in Shebreshin (Szczebrzeszyn), a Jewish Shtetl in Poland. It is located east of Tarnobrzeg. Phil came to San Francisco in 1927. He is the second husband of  Bassya (Betty) nee Maltzer, who is my father’s aunt.  Phil has described life in his shtetl in the book Tales of the Shtetl , which he wrote in 2004 when he was age 95:

The dress of the men was long black coats and little black pillbox caps. Women wore padded gray clothes. Married women wore ugly large wigs. They spoke Yiddish for conversation, Hebrew for their religion, and a little Polish for trade. The Gentiles produced the food, and the Jews became the merchants. Early in the morning horse-drawn carriages arrived loaded with small livestock and food products. Jews bought their wares, and with the money the farmers bought from the Jewish stands and stores. There were 3,000 Jews and 4,000 Gentiles in the town.  Jewish life centered around the Shul (Synagogue) and the Bet Midrash (torah study building next to it). The Jews were too poor to eat meat except maybe for the Sabbath. Phil was a child there after World War I when this way of life started to change. (4-11) 

The Typhus plague came to his village in 1917, and killed almost half the population in two years. There was only one doctor and one hospital. (36) The village was very small,

You could walk from one end to the other in 20 minutes. (53) In his time a large square plaza was created in the center of the town. He described the buildings around the square, He described the “grand home of the Talanda family”, and his family home at the end of the square at the beginning of the road to nearby villages. (54-58) In the Shtetl in Poland there was no running water, no electricity. There were often shortages of good food. His grandfather’s sister had a home with an earthen floor. (99-100)

Phil described the people, the customs, the holidays. He has a wonderful chapter about Margaret Mead who has written about the culture of the shtetl Shabbas (Sabbath) (127-134).  He made many references to the Nazis and the Holocaust, including the killing of the Jews in the town (200-202), which was 13 years after he left, and an Epilogue about the destruction of the Shtetl.

The small town Chernevitzi, a shtetl, was home of Israel Joseph and Leah Friedman. They had 9 children. Morris, born 1894, was 7th. Sol, born 1902, was 9th. Sol is the first husband of Batya nee Maltzer, my father’s aunt. Morris is the husband of Rifka (Rebecca (Becky) nee Maltzer, also my father’s aunt.

Sol told about Chernevitzi:

When a child was born there was no birth certificate. The child was registered by the rabbi appointed by the czar. My father wrote down all the childrens’ birthdays in a prayer book…. His father trimmed his beard and did not wear a long kaftan, as did his three brothers-in-law. His father taught in a Cheder in his home, Hebrew, Yiddish, and later Russian. His mother used to sell whiskey in the house to peasants…by the glass. His father became a bookkeeper and they moved to a nearby town just before World War I.

Chernevitzi was in the Ukraine, and we could travel from one part to the other….

There were about 350 families, all Jews….Some of them were in the wine business, and some had little grocery stores. Some had piece goods stores, and naturally there were carpenters…. There were no farmers. Around the town there were peasants. Sometimes they would hire a Jew to manage their land. They had several Synagogues, and a Chevra Kadisha (buriel society). The relations with the gentiles was not good. Thursday was market day, the peasants would bring food and chickens to sell, get drunk, and then have a progrum, start breaking windows, and rob and kill.  

His mother died of illness in 1911. When World War I began, and the Revolution, the Austrian army came through on the way to Odessa, and later the Russian army picked up eight Jewish boys from the Austrian army and made Sol and other Jews dance on them in the town marketplace until they were dead.

 Everything was scarce, bread and hot water was a big meal, and his father died of starvation in 1920. Sol was working with piece goods, and then speculated selling bags of sugar. He hid eight five dollar gold pieces in burlap as buttons on his pants and suspenders, and crossed the Dniester River into Romania in 1920 (1-10).

In the shtetl Yiddish was the language of conversation: in the home, business, study in the Cheder (Jewish school) and Synagogue. Hebrew was the language in the Torah and the prayers in the Synagogue etc.

Isaac Balshevis Singer, in his lecture accepting the Nobel prize for literature in 1978, spoke about Yiddish, which was the language in which he wrote all his stories, which were based on life in the Shtetl of Eastern Europe:

The high honor bestowed upon me by the Swedish Academy is also a recognition of the Yiddish language – a language of exile, without a land, without frontiers, not supported by any government, a language which possess no words for weapons, ammunition, military exercises, war tactics; a language that was despised by both gentiles and emancipated Jews. The truth is that what the great religions preached, the Yiddish-speaking people of the ghettos practiced day in and day out. They were the people of the Book in the truest sense of the word. They knew of no greater joy than the study of man and human relations, which they called Torah. The ghetto was not only a place of refuge for a persecuted minority but as great experiment in peace, in self-discipline, and in humanism….One can find in the Yiddish tongue and in the Yiddish style expressions of pious joy, lust for life, longing for the Messiah, patience and a deep appreciation of human individuality. There is a quiet humor in Yiddish and a gratitude for every day of life, every crumb of success,  each encounter of love.

The Nobel Prize Citation said “to Issac Bashevis Singer for his impassioned narrative art which, with roots in a Polish-Jewish cultural tradition, brings universal human conditions to life.” The author Joseph Epstein wrote in 2007 that “I have been asked who among the writers of the past half century I thought might be read a hundred years from now. I could think of only Isaac Bashevis Singer –chiefly because he is the single writer of our time  who might as easily have been read a hundred years before his birth”. (164)

Dr. Gannes quoted the poem by Hayim Nachman Bialik. "Should you wish to know the source from which Jews drew their strength and fortitude in evil days of slaughter and atrocities...; should you wish to know the fount from which Jews drew patience, firmness, trust and heavens' comfort and iron will to endure endless suffering... ;should you wish to know the fortress, the sacred treasures of their yearning souls. ... then go to the Synagogue and there your heart will tell you that you are stepping on the threshold of our life giving source and there you will behold the treasures of our soul”. (51-52)

Dr. Gannes wrote: "I marveled at the courage, stoicism and steadfastness of family, relatives and townspeople and their ability to endure the hardships, constant danger and uncertainty of survival. Destitute and uprooted as they were, they did not despair, nor lose their hope and optimism for the future. The harsh and hazardous experiences they endured provided them with the strength and determination to rebuild their lives anew”. (180-181)

Sholom Aleichem wrote many stories about life in the shtetl. Here are some of his descriptions about the shtetl with the fictitious name Kasrilevke, in The Shtetl – New Evaluation :

The houses themselves are small wood huts, low and rickety…You may say that those streets are not very straight; that they are twisting and curving and wind about, running up hill and down dale, full of  trenches and pits, cellars and cars, back lots and courtyards.(181-182)

A large and broad field, more or less a semi-circle, or perhaps a square, located in the heart of the city center, where you find all the shops and stores ….That is the place of the market every morning, when throngs of non-Jewish famers and their wives come into the city and bring all sorts of edible commodities to its residents….And in that very same field, the she-goats and the he-goats of the community gather in their families….That is also where you will find the synagogues and batei midrash and the other holy institutions of the town, plus the hadorim and the talmudei torah….A special corner was allotted for the bathouse, the place where Jewish women immerse and purify  themselves in the mikve, and also for the poor house, where poor Jews go to die. (189)

Elie Wiesel wrote a chapter titled The World of the Shtetl in the book The Shtetl – New Evaluations. These are some important statements, which he followed with why and how  (290-306):

.…only those who were there know what it meant to be there (the holocaust) .… We must never grant them the dignity of a debate. What they say is indecent and is to be ignored with disdain (holocaust deniers)…. What can the last survivors do but persevere? The task is getting harder and harder, more and more discouraging; we are all aware of that . But to abdicate, to abandon our memory, would be worse than treason. Tragically, there Hitler’s victory seems total. The shtetl is gone. Forever….In its broad outlines, the shtetl is one and the same everywhere….Clearly their Jewishness was at the heart of their commitment to religion and history….It can be said that Hasidism was born in the shtetl and could not have been born anywhere else….What mattered was the kavana, the purity of intent (simple prayer)….A shtetl without its schools  - or cheder – was inconceivable….Ask your father and grandfathers, ask thirty centuries of fathers, and they will tell you: the study of Torah has a beginning but no end!…The passion for learning, which is an essential part of Jewish tradition, did not begin in the Shtetl, but it existed there. I never saw my father or any of my uncles go anywhere without a book under their arms….though we love to celebrate life in the shtetl, from the economical viewpoint, it was far from easy….True, we had no running water, no bathroom, no toilet – so what! One could live very well without such things. Anyway, we were properly dressed….One can never speak enough about what Shabbat was like in the shtetl – and what it did for its inhabitants. Shabbat helped people endure the other six days of the week….I myself can hardly remember a Shabbat without an honored guest in our home…Yiddish was the language of the humor was sharper, funnier, yet never offensive…One laughed at oneself more than at others….In spite of the religious dissension, political splits, and social conflicts that can be found in any community, the shtetl’s spirit of generosity cannot help but move the reader…In the shtetl people lived – well or badly – but they lived before dying. And that was so until the day when the cruelest of our enemies reduced the shtetl to in 2007). Shtetl…,There are words in Yiddish that have no equivalent in any other language….

Carolynn and I visited Tarnobrzeg, Poland (birthplace of my maternal grandparents, and Dukla (birthplace of Carolynn’s father) in 2002.  We visited Bucharest, Romania (birthplace of her mother) -  Muravano-Kurilovtzy and Kopaigerod, Ukraine (ancestral homes of my fraternal grandparents, and their children), in 2008.

Dr. Michael Berenbaum, Jewish Roots in Poland, wrote “we go as Pilgrims back to Europe….For those of us who cannot make the pilgrimage physically, it is the discovery of documents that allows for return, for the encounter with the past, for the sense of self-discovery”. “We must return not only to the ghettos, the concentration camps and death camps, but also the towns, villages and hamlets where the Jews dwelled for so long. Such a journey can change our sense of who we are, of where we have come from, and, above all, of what we must become”. (vii, viii)

Rabbi Lavey Derby, Rabbi of Kol Shofar in Tiburon, wrote in the J about his trip leading 17 congregants to Eastern Europe and the Ukraine, titled: "Remembering where we've come from and where we're going. We have come on this journey not just to visit the sites of our people's destruction, but in large to understand the world of Jewry that existed before the Holocaust, to connect to the lives of our grandparents, and, maybe, to find ourselves along the way”. (The J, July 13, 2007, pg. 13)

They went to small towns, Krakow, Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps, Tarnow, Lvov "where the entire population of 136,000 Jews was murdered." They went to Kiev, the capital where about 34,000 Jews were murdered in 2 days, machine gunned at the ravine named Babi Yar.

Carolynn and I went to Auschwitz and Birkenau in 2002, to Kiev and Babi-Yar in 2008.

The Holocaust destroyed the Jews and their communities. In the Ukraine about 1.5 million Jews were killed, buried in hundreds of mass grave sites. In Poland there were about 3.5 million Jews before World War II, almost all killed by the Nazis.

Rabbi Derby concluded "For all the beauty and suffering, this history is our history, these places our places, these stories our stories. We have come to the birthplace of our Jewish experience. And, if nothing else, we can stand on the edge of the pit, with heads raised toward heaven, and cry: We are still here".

Carolynn and I heard a lecture, at Temple Beth Jacob, by an English Professor from U.C. Santa Cruz, who concluded that the young authors of the 2000’s , are often writing about the lives of Jews, as they changed, from the shtetl of Eastern Europe, through the Holocaust, to life in the United States. This was in contrast to the previous generation of young authors, who wrote about the assimilation of the Jews into the American life in the U.S., about how they strived to become accepted. Acceptance has been accomplished, and the question now is can Judaism survive in the United States, and how?

Mazel is a novel by Rebecca Goldstein, 1995. The principal character is Sasha, and the story of  her life of almost 80 years. It starts when she is in the home of her parents, in the shtetl: Shluftchev, Galicia. She becomes a star in the Yiddish theatre in Warsaw. Her troupe had gone to Vilna, when the Nazi’s invaded Poland, and “Warsaw was in the hands of Amalek.” Vilna was then declared the capital of Lithuania by the occupying  army of the USSR. The story ends in New Jersey, where Sasha is with her daughter and her granddaughter, who gives birth to a son. Sasha was an orthodox Jew in the Shtetl, becomes Secular, and the granddaughter in New Jersey marries an orthodox Jew. The fascinating story passes through 4 generations, and ends at the birth of the 5th.

Jonathan Safran Foer, at the age of 20, went to the Ukraine, to look for the Shtetl where his grandfather lived. He went without preparation, and found nothing. On the way back to the U.S., he stayed for several weeks in Europe to write his first novel, Everything Is Illuminated, 2002.  The story is imaginary, including the life in the Shtetl. The main character has the same name as the author, Jewish, born and lives in the U.S.,  who goes to visit the shtetl of his grandfather, the shtetl named Trachimjbrod, with a picture of a woman who he thinks may have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. The story in the shtetl goes back to his “great-great-great-great-great-grandmother”. He hires a guide, who lives in the Ukraine,  and keeps in touch with him by letters after he returns to the United States. in World War II. The story shows the life of the guide and his family in the Ukraine. The guide speaks and writes an incorrect kind of English, based on his use of a Thesaurus. The writing is very modern. The book jacket states “…this is a story about searching for people and places that no longer exist, for the hidden truths that haunt every family, and for the delicate but necessary tales that link past and future.” I see in this book, Judaism as the link between the generations.

Mosaic is a book by Diane Armstrong, 1998, “a chronicle of five generations”. The continuity in the story  is Diane, nee Boguslawski. The story starts first with her grandparents, her parents, and then her, in Kracow, Poland. Her grandfather was a devout Jew, who died in 1938, shortly before Kristylnacht in Berlin. In Sept., when Poland was mobilizing, her father fled Krakow on foot, walking east to Lwow. .He left his wife, and Diane, who was six weeks old when the Nazis invaded Poland. Her mother saw the persecution by the Nazis in Krakow, and by December she and Diane escaped to Lwow, which had been invaded by the Russians. In 1942 the Nazis occupied Lwow, and ordered the Jews to go into a small area near the train station. They escaped to Piszczac,  a small town near Kracow, where her father, a dentist, opened a practice and pretended that he and his families were Catholic. After the War her parents and Diane emigrated to Australia. The story ends after she goes back for a visit to Kracow, and Piszczac, She is at high holiday services in Sydney. She thinks about 3 years earlier, when her daughter-in-law said she had decided to become Jewish. “I’m not doing this for you or for Jonathan, she said, I’m doing it for myself.”  “Your religion has continued for thousands of years, and so many Jews have died because of it, including your relatives. I don’t want to be the one to break that continuity.”  This book is a true story, that reads as if it were a novel.

Daniel Mendelsohn wrote The Lost: A Search For Six Of Six Million, in 2006. This is a true story, that he undertook, with some of his United States family, to find what happened in the Holocaust to his uncle Schmiel and five others of his family, who had lived in Bolochow, Poland. He found out that only 48 people in Bolochw survived the Holocaust, and he traveled to Ukraine, Israel, Poland, Sweden and Australia, among other places to meet and interview the elderly survivers, and found out how his six relatives died, murdered by the Nazis. In the process he recorded the deaths of so many others. The place that his father called Bolochow, Poland, is now Bolekhiv, Ukraine. It is located south of Kviv and North East of Chernivitsi. He said the Jewish Encyclopedia would tell that the Germans in October 1941 1,000 Jews were shot and put in a mass grave. The population of about 3,000 was swelled with thousands from neighboring villages. Later more were murdered, and others sent by freight trains to the camp at Belzec. He said this is too impersonal. He undertook his search (124). Near the end of the book he referred to “the thoughts that will never be thought, the discoveries that will never be made, the art that will never be created “ (460). He wrote about the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, “some of that can be rescued, if …somebody makes the decision to look back, to have one last look, to search for awhile in the debris of the past and to see not only what was lost but what there is still to be found (487)”