The Shtetl: A Creative Anthology of Jewish Life in Eastern Europe

By Neugroschel, Joachim (Ed.)
Overlook, 2001, Paperback, 584 pp., ISBN: 0879513802, $21.95

This collection of Yiddish classics, some never before translated into English, offers the full and wonderfully vivid panoply of shtetl life from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century.

Written by such masters as Sholom Aleichem, Yisroel Aksenfeld, Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Yitzik Leyb Peretz, Rabbi Nakhman, and Der Nister, this unique collection includes not only early religious writings and engaging Hasidic yarns but also colorful stories of latter-day realism, fantasy, and satire. Humor and suffering, faith and rationalist parody, romantic love and sordid cruelty-a panorama of shtetl life unfolds before us, conjuring up all the colors of a vanished world.