Shtetl, meaning “town” or “little town” in Yiddish, is the term for the many small villages with predominately Ashkenazi Jewish populations that existed in Eastern Europe prior to the Holocaust. Shtetls were unusual cultural microcosms where an authentic Jewish community was shaped by the surrounding agrarian Slavic society. The peak of shtetl development occurred after the 1650s. Though they were hit hard by the pogroms between 1881 and 1921, and many shtetls dissolved or assimilated into larger cities during the interwar period, shtetls did not fully collapse until the Holocaust.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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While shtetls varied widely across Eastern Europe, some characteristics of the shtetl included: 

• Yiddish-speaking 

  • ​While Yiddish was the primary language of their community, many Jewish residents of shtetls also had familiarity with the various Slavic languages of their neighbors. 

• Social hierarchy 

  • ​Sheyne yidn were well-off elite who controlled the politics of the shtetl. Balebatim were middle class owners of stores and businesses. Below balebatim were skilled artisans such as watchmakers and tailors, then less skilled artisans and laborers, and beggars were at the bottom rung. 

• Centered around either a marketplace or a specialized industry 

  • ​Market days were a defining characteristics as hundreds of trade wagons would arrive and peasants would come from miles around to purchase goods. By the late 1920s, marketplaces were less popular and often replaced by artisan production. 

• Often squalid and overcrowded living conditions 

  • ​Sewage and horse waste littered unpaved streets. Most buildings were wooden, and fires were common. 

• Highly patriarchal 

  • ​Men held all positions of power in the synagogues, though women played important roles in the communal and economic life of shtetls.  

• Had a synagogue, ritual bathhouse, school, and cemetery 

  • ​A community that did not have these was considered a village, not a shtetl. 

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Shtetls were not widely studied until after the devastation of the Holocaust, when many Jewish survivors were seeking out their roots in an effort to memorialize the millions massacred. After the Holocaust, the “imagined shtetl” became extremely popular – an idealized version of the shtetl of the past. Scholar Ben Cion Pinchuk says: “The tendency to idealize and beautify was reinforced by feelings of sorrow and guilt on the part of those who left the old home in time and survived the destruction” (Pinchuk 172). The “imagined shtetl” was associated with simple piety, tradition, warmth, and faith. The imagined shtetl was often considered, inaccurately, to be purely Jewish and untouched by the outside Slavic gentile society or the effects of industrialization. The imagined shtetl became a touchstone for a lost past, especially for Jewish people who had immigrated to America.  

 

Fiddler became the ultimate example of this imagined shtetl. Prominent literary and social critic Irving Howe called it “the cutest shtetl we never had”, and many others have criticized Fiddler’s historical inaccuracy. But the intention of Fiddler, as Alisa Solomon says in Wonder of Wonders, was to “provide American Jews a screen onto which to project their desire for a usable past” (317). While the real shtetls of Eastern Europe have been lost to war, destruction, and time, Fiddler provides an imagined shtetl that anyone can visit. In this way, Fiddler has become a place for Jewish people to find healing and identity. 

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