Of Flying Fiddlers & the Gefilte Fish Line
The shtetl in
Jewish history and memory
By Joellyn Wallen Zollman
Virtually every Jew today has a mental image of the shtetl, the small villages in which Jews
lived for centuries in Eastern Europe. These images are informed by the
portrayal of shtetl life in a variety of media, from fiction to film. Sholem
Aleichem's Tevye the Dairyman (which
most of us know better as Fiddler on the
Roof) and artist Marc Chagall's whimsical depictions of Ukrainian Jewish
life (with images of floating fiddlers) contribute to the contemporary vision
of the shtetl as a small Jewish town in in Eastern Europe where a population of
poor but industrious Jews worked and studied, all the while seemingly
accompanied by a klezmer soundtrack.
It doesn't take a professional historian to realize that
such a static representation of the populous and geographically disperse Jewish
communities of eastern Europe doesn't reflect historical reality. The popular
"fiddlers" image of shtetl life neglects the great diversity of ideas
and experiences that characterized these communities. This article examines the
shtetl as a historical phenomenon.
What Exactly Is a Shtetl?
The word "shtetl" is Yiddish, and it means
"little town." Shtetls were small market towns in Russia and Poland
that shared a unique socio-cultural community pattern during the 19th and early
20th centuries.
Shtetls ranged in size from several hundred to several
thousand residents. Forests and fields often surrounded these small towns.
Gentiles tended to live outside of the town, while Jews lived in the town
proper. The streets were, for the most part, unpaved, the houses constructed of
wood. Public spaces included synagogues (often wooden), the beit midrash (study house), shtiblekh (smaller, residential houses
of prayer), a Jewish cemetery, Christian churches (Russian Orthodox or Roman
Catholic, depending on the location), bathhouses, and, of course, the
marketplace.
The Jewish community was typically governed by a community
council, a kahal. The kahal oversaw
civil and religious affairs, from collecting taxes to dispensing charity. While
religion guided daily life, it was not, as is often portrayed, the sole
occupation of Jewish males. In reality, the scholarly class was a small, elite
segment of society. A majority of shtetl Jews, both men and women, worked to
support their families, usually in commercial or artisanal trades, and then,
more commonly, as time and industrialization marched on, in factories.
Modernization, migration, emigration, and revolution
contributed to the decline of the shtetl. The Holocaust destroyed any remaining
vestiges of shtetl life.
Shtetls Were Separate and Distinct
Thousands of shtetls existed in Eastern Europe at the turn
of the 20th century, and while many of Jewish communities shared a similar
organizational structure, they were not all the same. Politics, dialect, and
religious customs varied across Eastern Europe, as evidenced by what has come
to be known as the "gefilte fish line." This is an imaginary line
that extends across Eastern Europe, dividing those Jews to the west who season
their gefilte fish, a traditional Sabbath dish, with sugar from those to the
east who season the fish with pepper.
This culinary equator highlights the fact that each shtetl
had its own history and traditions, inspired by the local milieu. Each shtetl
had its own recipes, stories, legends, and klezmer tunes. Even Judaism varied.
Hasidism thrived in scores of shtetls, with many communities simultaneously
supporting several distinct groups of Hasidim. Where there were Hasidim, there were
likely Mitnagdim, the opponents of
Hasidism, who practiced traditional historical Judaism. From different flavors
of gefilte fish to different flavors of Judaism, the small market towns of
Eastern Europe supported their own identities.
Not an All-Jewish Saga
Non-Jews often made up the majority of a shtetl's
population. Scholar Gennady Estraikh explains, "It's a distorted picture
of the shtetl which completely excludes its non-Jewish residents or reduces
them to extras (e.g. the Shabes goyim,
Gentile helpers for the Sabbath chores) in an all-Jewish saga." In reality
shtetls were characterized by daily contact between Jews and Gentiles.
Jewish-Gentile relations ranged from peaceful to explosive.
Shtetl memories, however, tend to focus on the pogroms--anti-Jewish riots--to
the exclusion of more harmonious daily interactions. Without question, pogroms
were promulgated by Gentiles and devastated Jewish communities, but these
incidents of anti-Jewish violence do not tell the whole tale of
Jewish-Christian relations in the shtetl. Shtetls were market towns, and, as
such, their residents, Jewish and Gentile, merchant and farmer, buyer and
seller, conducted daily business transactions and maintained social contacts as
well
Shtetl Memories
Why does the shtetl loom so large in contemporary Jewish
consciousness? For American Jews, a majority of whom are of Ashkenazic (Eastern
European) descent, the shtetl serves as a mythical point of origin. This
simple, down-to-earth culture--guided by what seems to contemporary observers a
colorful combination of religion and folk wisdom--is where we came from. And
while shtetl life was inexorably changed by industrialization and
modernization, it was destroyed by the Holocaust. Thus, shtetl life is
sanctified with an aura of martyrdom.
In Jewish history and Jewish memory, shtetls pulse(d) with yiddishkeyt (Jewishness). Rabbis and
rebbes and Yiddish and klezmer and perhaps even an occasional flying fiddler
characterized these small market towns, but they were also defined by much more
than these stereotypical images.
On a micro level, each shtetl had a unique local history. On
a the macro level, societal changes--including the economic upheaval caused by
industrialization and demographic change, and the ideological upheaval wrought
by socialism and Zionism--made life in the shtetl a dynamic experience. A more
nuanced vision of shtetl life makes it easier to appreciate why so many Jews
left the place we now view with such nostalgia even before that centuries-old
way of life was ended by the Holocaust.
Joellyn Wallen Zollman
is the History & Community editor of MyJewishLearning.com.
