Book Review: In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine

In place of a tangible, physical existence, the shtetl, or eastern European market town with a significant Jewish population, has instead loomed large in both imagination and memory, shaped more by fictional portraits such as Fiddler on the Roof or quasi-ethnographic ones like Life Is with People, than by historical research, though a slew of recent publications has begun to address this imbalance. Working in collaboration with a team of researchers on the Archives of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories Project or AHEYM (which means "homeward" in Yiddish), Veidlinger, the project's codirector along with the linguist Dov-Ber Kerler, participated in a series of fieldwork expeditions to the towns of eastern Europe, focusing on the territories of the former Soviet Union which had earlier constituted the Pale of Settlement, an area that the Russian Jewish historian Simon Dubnow referred to as a kind of Jewish "Dark Continent." [...]Veidlinger succeeds in bringing to life the distinctive characteristics and experiences of individual interviewees. [...]to give only one example, as children, some individuals attended a kheyder or even a yeshiva, where they were exposed to traditional Hebrew and Aramaic texts; others were educated in Soviet-era Yiddish-language schools; while still others studied in Russian or Ukrainian.