The Story of the Jews Volume 2: When Words Fail: 1492--Present

by Simon Schama

Satanow, like countless comparable towns in Jewish eastern Europe, scarcely resembled the one-cow mudhole conjured by Anatevka, the Fiddler’s shtetl. But then Tevye the milkman and Anatevka with its ‘small mud huts’, ‘low and rickety’, their ‘roofs half buried in the ground’, a pathetic swarm of destitute Jews dwelling in dirt-poor streets, ‘packed together like herring in a barrel’, shut off from the Gentile world, except when visited by pogroms, was the picturesque fiction of Sholem Aleichem, composed at the end of the nineteenth century.4 Both he and the other great Yiddish bard of the imaginary shtetl, Mendele Moykher Sforim, wrote at a physical and temporal distance (usually urban) from historical reality and at a moment when Jewish towns in the Russian Pale of Settlement were becoming vulnerable to depopulation, a narrowing of economic opportunity and repeated physical attack. Dilapidated ruin as the most obvious characteristic of the shtetl was projected back onto Jewish towns by writers who saw themselves as liberated from its stifling narrowness. They sat before the rattling tramcars of Odessa or Delancey Street in New York smoking their Russian cigarettes, while the bleating of faraway goats and the penitential laments of Yom Kippur filled their heads. Before they knew it they had made an Anatevka as fantastic as anything Marc Chagall of big-city Vitebsk would conjure from his dreams. The reality of the eighteenth- and early-ninteenth-century shtetl was different...