Shtetl is Yiddish for "small town." The word has passed sentimentally into English, describing the small towns where Jews lived in Eastern Europe for centuries. In fact, nostalgia has made the shtetl the symbol of Ashkenazi civilization. Historians and sociologists have somewhat gone along with this synthetic memory, leaving us with a simplified, often stereotyped image of a relatively serene, self-contained world, troubled only by a foreign politics generally summed up in pogroms and survival.
Obviously, the reality and the complexity of the shtetl, or rather the shtetls, were far more confusing and interesting. First of all, we have to think in plurals, we have to talk about shtetls, many, many shtetls.
Of course, certain essential Jewish features were recurrent throughout Eastern Europe. Most important, there was the nuclear religion and its overlay of habits, customs, and traditions, completely ruling the lives of Jews as individuals and as a collective - or collectives. There was the community structure, socializing, protecting, domineering, with its own survival as one of its chief functions. There were the two symbiotic languages: Yiddish, mainly, but not only, for secular life, Hebrew, mainly for religion and for certain other forms of communication, as in business. And there was the omnipresent Christian world, with its laws, pressures, hostility, friendliness, its commercial and economic relations, and its myriad other energies that were part of an intricate cultural enmeshing with Jews.
But despite the features common to all Eastern European Jews, no two shtetls were truly alike. The personal and public dynamics, the interrelations with non Jews, the climate, the economics, the politics, even the dialect of Yiddish and the pronunciation of Hebrew varied sufficiently to form sharp differences, often contradictions - a crazy quilt through time and space. For we are speaking of an enormous geographical area, and we are speaking of centuries of Jewish history.
The most exciting mirror of Jewish life (or lives) in the shtetls was the absorbing literature created mainly in Yiddish and Hebrew, and then to some extent in Gentile languages like Polish and Russian. But if we speak of mirrors, then we have to imagine the mirrors in the fun house of an amusement park. Each mirror distorts in a different way, focusing on a different image. And if we chance to see a more "objective" mirror, say "realistic" fiction or documented historiography, we find that it warps reality in its own peculiar way - any mirror will at least exchange left and right, disorienting us in the universe of our experience. In this collection of Yiddish tales about the shtetls, I have tried to show the variety and diversity of Jewish life in Eastern Europe from the religious roots of the late middle ages to World War II and the destruction of the shtetl world. Like imaginative literature anywhere, these tales had an infinity of goals. The authors meant to instruct, entertain, attack, flatter, inquire, analyze, moralize, laud, preach, reform, restore, amuse, divert, ridicule, destroy, depict.... The list is endless. Common to all of them is a reflection of certain aspects of shtetl life, and at the very least the author's personal shtetl experiences - refracted through later experiences and emotions. But books change with every reader. And a mirror, of course, usually reflects the observer. Need it be said that this literary array of the Jewish past tells us almost as much about our own present, about most people in most places.
The collection is divided into chronological sections, paralleling Jewish history in Eastern Europe, showing how the literary shtetl developed from a backdrop to the object and substance of both satirical and sentimental treatments, of negative, affectionate, and even indifferent approaches. Not even historiography can honestly testify to so-called "accuracy" of description. True accuracy can at best be found in the tone, style, language, attitude, and psychological space of each writer. For we learned long ago that the reality of literature lies in its own creativity, just as its truth lies in spiritual revelation, and in what Aristotle called its "universality."
The shtetls achieved "universal" realities in one of the most stimulating phases of Jewish literature - a diminishing microcosm of which is presented here. This literature, in turn, was a major creative legacy of shtetl life, a profound and inexhaustible gift to the future. The nineteenth century brought the disruption of shied life. The twentieth century brought its destruction and the end of a civilization. The people of the shied took up permanent abode in the literature created about them. They were like Rilke's flamingos: They entered one by one into imagination.