In Sholem Aleichem's writing, the Jews' anxious hopes for the arrival of "Cossacks from Tulchin" is ironic; Tulchin was one of the Ukrainian
shtetls where Jews had been massacred during the seventeenth-century Zaporozhian Cossack uprising.
The root cause of the paranoia derives not from enemies without, but from demons within -- demons in the Israelis' archetypal consciousness and historical experience -- representing existential fears of collective annihilation, of pogroms, of Kristallnachts, of gas chambers, of frenzied packs outside the
shtetls, centuries-old fears harking back to Jews' encounters with anti-Semitic rage in Europe, fears that to this day so bedevil contemporary Jews' mindset that they have divided the world around them, improbably, illogically, into one inhabited by 'Jews' and another by 'Gentiles'.
Daniel Schwarz, for example, writes in the preface to his study of Holocaust literature, aptly titled Imagining the Holocaust: "I dream of myself within
shtetls, camps and confined circumstances, as a participant in the very world I am writing about.
Kanovich's ten novels have brought to life the lost Lithuanian
shtetls, the Jewish communities that were spread across all of Lithuania prior to the Holocaust, which nearly annihilated the communities.
I always assumed that, on my father's side, any members of his extended Lithuanian family who didn't manage to escape their
shtetls for America or elsewhere had become victims of the Nazis.
Writes Abraham Joshua Heschel, "The prophet's task is to convey a divine view, yet as a person he is a point of view." (13) While the world Malamud creates in his stories bears little resemblance to those of his Yiddish peers or predecessors, wrapped up as they were in dybbuks, rabbis, Torah scrolls, and
shtetls, Malamud's stories read as no less profoundly animated by the American Jewish experience.
In Warsaw synagogues where the letters of the shema and HaShem rise like fire before the eyes of those who refuse to die, and along the streets of former
shtetls where he must assume the despicable disguise of his enemy, he seeks out clues, propelled by the conviction that he'll achieve his revenge someday.
It was her way of telling us that she was better than we were, and that we should return to the Brooklyn ghettos, or better yet, the Polish
shtetls, from which we emerged.
Schwarz, Norma Rosen, Vanessa Ochs, Leslie Brody, and Aviva Cantor for unethically "appropriating" the suffering of others while resorting to "Holocaust kitsch" imagery imagining themselves in
shtetls or in crammed freight trains--which Rothe labels "victim-by-proxy" claims to emphasize the authors' capitulation to a bystander culture addicted to titillating spectacles of anguish (19-20).
Veidlinger discusses the life of the traditional Jews of
shtetls in Vinnitsa Province in Ukraine throughout the Soviet period, and Bemporad focuses on the Jews of Minsk, the capital of Soviet Belorussia, in the interwar years.
By the early 1900s, Jews arriving from the
shtetls of eastern Europe were beginning to establish small garment-production shops.