The Shtetl
Subtitle: Image and Reality
Edition: First edition.
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 190
ISBN-13: 9781351198394
Subjects: Cities and towns; Congresses; Jews; Social life and customs; Villes; Congrès; Juifs; Mœurs et coutumes; Cities
Description: "There is no possibility of entering the world of Yiddish, its literature and culture, without understanding what the shtetl was, how it functioned, and what tensions charged its existence. Whether idealized or denigrated, evaluated as the site of memory or mined for historical data, scrutinized as a socio-economic phenomenon or explored as the mythopoetics of a rich literature, the shtetl was the heart of Eastern European Jewry. The papers published in this volume - most of them presented at the second Mendel Friedman International Conference on Yiddish organized by the Oxford European Humanities Research Centre and the Oxford Institute for Yiddish Studies (July 1999) - re-examines the structure, organization and function of numerous small market towns that shaped the world of Yiddish. The different perspectives from which these studies view the shtetl trenchently re-evaluate common preconceptions, misconceptions and assumptions, and offer new insights that are challenging as they are informative."
Table of contents: title: Chapter 1 The Shtetl as Imagined Community  -- David G. Roskies; title: chapter 2 What Exactly Was a Shtetl?  -- John D. Klier; title: chapter 3 The Podolian Shtetl as Architectural Phenomenon  -- Alla Sokolova; title: chapter 4 Jewish Art between yidishkayt and Civilization  -- Hillel Kazovsky; title: chapter 5 Berdichev in Russian Jewish Literary Imagination: From Israel Aksenfeld to Friedrich Gorenshtein  -- Mikhail Krutikov; title: chapter 6 Shtetl Kuzmir: The Reality of the Image  -- Dafna Clifford; title: chapter 7 Soviet and Kosher in the Ukrainian Shtetl  -- Anna Shternshis; title: chapter 8 The Shtetl Theme in Sovetish heymland  -- Gennady Estraikh; title: chapter 9 Immigrants Mourning for a World Lost -- Moise?s Kijak.