The story of how the Holocaust decimated Jewish life in the shtetls of Eastern Europe is well known. Still, thousands of Jews in these small towns survived the war and returned afterward to rebuild their communities. The recollections of some 400 returnees in Ukraine provide the basis for Jeffrey Veidlinger's reappraisal of the traditional narrative of 20th-century Jewish history. These elderly Yiddish speakers relate their memories of Jewish life in the prewar shtetl, their stories of survival during the Holocaust, and their experiences living as Jews under Communism. Despite Stalinist repressions, the Holocaust, and official antisemitism, their individual remembrances of family life, religious observance, education, and work testify to the survival of Jewish life in the shadow of the shtetl to this day.

Winner, 2014 Canadian Jewish Book Awards, history category

About the Author

Jeffrey Veidlinger is Joseph Brodsky Collegiate Professor of History and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He is author of The Moscow State Yiddish Theater (IUP) and Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire (IUP).

Reviews

Hitherto the story of the Holocaust in the Eastern European shtetl has been told by those who left-on behalf of those who did not survive. What do we learn from these stories told from the shtetl itself? In the Shadow of the Shtetl restores horror to the setting in which it occurred: at home, among familiar people and places. . . . In their accounts the everyday and the extraordinary, the innocuous and the gruesome are continually intertwined. The same people participated in both. The relationship between the normal and the abnormal, the intimate and the alien takes on a different shape in these stories-perhaps a shape that can help us better understand places like Rwanda or Cambodia-or Bosnia.

* New York Review of Books *



Book Information
ISBN 9780253022974
Author Jeffrey Veidlinger
Format Paperback
Page Count 424
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press
Weight(grams) 549g