Customer Reviews

Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I give this book 5 stars. The author has rejected myths, generalizations, and prejudiced thinking to give a fascinating history of Polish Christians and Polish Jews. She is careful to give the viewpoints of both groups, beginning in the Middle Ages and continuing to the present. When she quotes a source, she reminds us that this is that person's opinion, not necessarily a universal truth. She cites to references in Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew. She does not condemn or defend either group, and realistically argues that neither was right or wrong; some people helped each other, some people harmed each other. She gives a detailed account of the history of Poland that is not widely available in this country. The author is both Polish and Jewish, and grew up in Poland. Her ability to abjectively at her subject is convincing and admirable.

This book filled me with hope, despair, joy, sorrow and finally, at the end, a disquieting and lingering sadness. Though not always complete in itstelling of political events, I strongly recommend this to anyone interested in learning about his Polish Jewish past. A good first look.

Shtetl is an excellent work of social history, although it is also a good outline of Polish history at the political level over the 8 centuries it covers. It is well written and an easy read.

The author has a clear agenda, which is to be more balanced in her treatment of Poles than Jewish writers have usuually been and to be more balanced in her treatment of Jews than Poles have been. The book digs deeply into the sources of Polish perceptions of Jews and vice versa. It gives a deep feel for what life was like in Jewish communities in Poland. The chapter on the period between World Wars I and II is particularly good for showing the political, cultural and economic vibrancy that had come even to the rural shtetls. It must be one of the most "objective" books written about the historical relationship between Jews and Poles. A sympathetic portrait of both peoples that celebrates their virtues and describes their shortcomings as perceived by the other.

Both my mother's parents came to the United States from Poland as children, sent alone on the boat with relatives' addresses in New York City pinned to their coats. Once here, they successfully assimilated, raised families, and bought homes. Family history and the effects of the holocaust erased the stories from the old country that could be handed down to future generations, including me. Ms. Hoffman's book recreates the socio-political history of Poland, and allows me to piece together various snippets of family history and attitudes and culture. I am sharing this with my family, as there were many "ah-ha's" of recognition for me in reading this work. While dry and more scholarly than I expected in some spots, this book was a gift to read. Thank you Ms. Hoffman.

This serious, well-researched, and ultimately frustrating book is full of information and analysis.But it is definitely not the companion text to, say, the photography of Roman Vishniac, as the title might lead one to assume. In fact, it's historiography, and the title and subtitle are a bit misleading. It's as much about Poland as about the shtetl, and is -- incomprehensibly -- lacking an index. Hoffman grew up in Poland, emigrating as a teenager, and brings a compassionate mind to the historic problems of that country. Definitely worth reading.

This book paints a complicated portrait of almost a thousand years of relations between Jews and Gentiles in Poland as they played out in a small town or shtetl. Without ignoring the horror of events such as the Holocaust, the author seldom describes this history as black and white; favoring shades of gray and multiple perspectives instead.

I appreciated the author's attempts at balance and her non-vindictive tone especially considering her own background. Focussing on how events played out in one particular town, grounds the account in the lives of real people and makes the subject more accessible. This is a good book for general readers but it suffers from overly academic language and a tendency to repeat itself in some places. I also thought the author's thesis about multiculturalism was underdeveloped.

Hoffman traces the experience of Jews in pre-modern Poland, partitioned Poland, the Second Republic, WWII, and the immediate postwar period. There is a wealth of information presented in this volume, and I generally focus on matters not elaborated by the previous reviews.

After the Partitions, and particularly as the 19th century wore on, Jewish and Polish political interests increasingly diverged. Consider the situation in Russian-ruled eastern Poland: "In fact, Jewish attitudes towards tsarist rule were mixed. In contrast with the Poles, Jewish communities basically accepted the legitimacy of the Russian government, even though they may have bridled against some of its policies." (p. 117). Hoffman sees the later Litvak Jewish immigrants as not so much a force of Russification, as a significant source of pro-Russian political orientation as well as radical-left sentiment (p. 137).

By the time of the resurrection of the Polish state in 1918, the Polish-Jewish gulf had grown large. Polish Jews wanted not only civil rights, but, in contrast to western European Jews, also minority rights (p. 164). Not surprisingly, this led to overt separatism. Hoffman writes: "In Bialystok, representatives of the Jewish community proposed that the city and surrounding region should become part of Lithuania rather than Poland, because this would put Jews in a better numerical position. The suggestion was met with outrage by Polish politicians." (p. 164). During the Polish-Bolshevik War of 1920, Jewish loyalties were ephemeral. Hoffman remarks: "According to the Yizkor Book, views were divided between those who sided unequivocally with the Polish cause, and others who felt that Bransk did not really belong to Poland, and therefore should not be required to supply soldiers to the Polish army." (p. 165)

Much has been said about prewar violence against Polish Jews, but little about internecine Jewish violence. Hoffman comments: "The factions quarreled, splintered, and accused each other of betrayal and Jewish anti-Semitism. Not infrequently, members of competing parties disrupted each other's meetings and got into bloody street brawls." (p. 179; see also pp. 180-181).

Most Bransk-area Jews were murdered by the Germans at Treblinka. Those Jews who managed to flee the ghettos not only faced the danger of betrayal by Poles, but also betrayal by other Jews (pp. 224-225). In fact, two of Hoffman's fugitive relatives perished as a result of a Jew who led the Germans to their hiding place (p. 6).

The small percentage of Jews saved owes to the rarity of Jews who escaped the ghettos. Furthermore, Hoffman remarks: "The Yizkor Book records several instances in which Jews refused help offered to them by Poles, because they did not want to abandon the others." (p. 223).

Hoffman recognizes the fact (p. 2) that the Germans' choice of occupied Poland as the site of the death camps had nothing to do with actual or presumed Polish attitudes towards Jews. She is also open-minded to the possibility that the Kielce Pogrom had been a Soviet-staged event (p. 249).

The superiority of this book over many of the other books out there on Jewish history can be summed up in one word - objectivity. In fact, having read this book, Eva Hoffman will go down in my estimation as one of the most fair and impartial writers known to human kind. Just when she had convinced me of one side of an issue, she would essentially counteract it with an equally compelling argument supporting the other side.

Shtetl is essentially a history of the complex and often tangled relationship between Poles and Jewish Poles. Hoffman tells the history of a small village in Poland named Bransk which, at one time, had a demographic that was significantly influenced by its sizeable minority Jewish population. She uses the story of Bransk as a case study and places her findings about this town into a greater historical context with several chapters of in depth research on the history of Poland in relation to the Jewish question.

I suspect that, like me, many of the reviewers gave this book four, rather than five stars because of Hoffman's exacting, yet sometimes tedious history of Jewish-Polish relations. In all fairness, although Hoffman is no David McCullough (in the sense of breathing life into monotonous historical facts through superior story telling capabilities), she does masters the English language in her own style (I had a dictionary close by the entire time I was reading). Fortunately, she interrupts the history lessons with meaningful and relevant first-hand accounts from her interviews with individual Jews and Poles who lived in Bransk when the Jewish community was still intact there.

If you are looking for a book on Jewish history with strong entertainment value, you've come to the wrong place. However, if you would like to read a refreshingly objective historical account of Jewish-Polish relations, I highly recommend Hoffman's Shtetl.

While it is true that the limits of difference were tested in the Polish-Jewish relationship, this book is as much as monument to the perpetrators and bystanders as it is to the victims. In the United States we do not have a situation where differences in culture lead to mass extermination. And though it is also true that the Germans were the instigators, it is no accident that the death camps were in Germany and eastern, not western, Europe. In any case, the dead Jewish children, women and men won't get out of their graves to dance if and when we finally understand this most terrible of all events.