Fragments of Loast History

A journey through Shtetls in Western Ukraine - Back in the days when Jews could travel without having to go anywhere - one minute a house was in Poland, the next in Russia - they lived in places called shtetls, defined neither by physical size nor population, possessing mysterious features both urban and rural. Though Christians lived there too, the shtetl tilted spiritually toward Jerusalem, while performing economic services for the Slavic society to which it also belonged, giving it an Eastern European character all its own. Its amorphous nature has made it the subject of easy mythologizing, so that it often pops up in the American imagination as a kind of Jewish Brigadoon where all the villagers are singing, unless they are running from a pogrom.