Once Upon A Shtetl

This spirited novel paints the colorful characters in my Jewish generational family in the shtetl, Skalat, Austria, in Galicia from the 1890s and on. This is their story. It reveals their daily fight to handle poverty, fears, their private neuroses and anti-Semitism which pervades their days. Ever battling to eke out a living, they still fall romantically and lustily in love, marry, and have children. Their early innocence is touching and human. Some remain stalwart defending their religious beliefs, while others grow intellectually, attending secret meetings in the woods, joining a new Renaissance philosophy called the Haskalah movement. They turn away from God and the old customs, their secularism causing pain to the older generation. History is cruel to them. Its brutal pogroms, murderous deaths or attacks by hostile Polish soldiers, and confusing wars bring changes they learn to handle stoically. Survival is the grandiose aim. Rapes of their female family members are deeply tortuous but their women are endowed with shtetl metal strengths to recover, surrounded by familial love and boundless support. Shtetl bonds and customs carry them through their troubled days. Some flee and escape to America, the golden land with gold in the streets, seeking jobs or a new freedom for learning and education. A new survival. Their story permeates us, and envelops us in much pride. And we carry their deep-felt love of family and shtetl in our hearts, equipping us with the necessities to hand its values to new generations.

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD AND THE JEWISH FICTION AWARD FROM THE ASSOCIATION OF JEWISH LIBRARIES GOOD MORNING AMERICA MUST READ NEW BOOKS * NEW YORK POST BUZZ BOOKS * THE MILLIONS MOST ANTICIPATED A remarkable debut novel—written with the fearless imagination of Michael Chabon and the piercing humor of Gary Shteyngart—about a small Jewish village in the Polish forest that is so secluded no one knows it exists . . . until now. What if there was a town that history missed? For decades, the tiny Jewish shtetl of Kreskol existed in happy isolation, virtually untouched and unchanged. Spared by the Holocaust and the Cold War, its residents enjoyed remarkable peace. It missed out on cars, and electricity, and the internet, and indoor plumbing. But when a marriage dispute spins out of control, the whole town comes crashing into the twenty-first century. Pesha Lindauer, who has just suffered an ugly, acrimonious divorce, suddenly disappears. A day later, her husband goes after her, setting off a panic among the town elders. They send a woefully unprepared outcast named Yankel Lewinkopf out into the wider world to alert the Polish authorities. Venturing beyond the remote safety of Kreskol, Yankel is confronted by the beauty and the ravages of the modern-day outside world – and his reception is met with a confusing mix of disbelief, condescension, and unexpected kindness. When the truth eventually surfaces, his story and the existence of Kreskol make headlines nationwide. Returning Yankel to Kreskol, the Polish government plans to reintegrate the town that time forgot. Yet in doing so, the devious origins of its disappearance come to the light. And what has become of the mystery of Pesha and her former husband? Divided between those embracing change and those clinging to its old world ways, the people of Kreskol will have to find a way to come together . . . or risk their village disappearing for good.

As the Holocaust is memorialized worldwide through education programs and commemoration days, the common perception is that after survivors arrived and settled in their new homes they continued on a successful journey from rags to riches. While this story is comforting, a closer look at the experience of Holocaust survivors in North America shows it to be untrue. The arrival of tens of thousands of Jewish refugees was palpable in the streets of Montreal and their impact on the existing Jewish community is well-recognized. But what do we really know about how survivors’ experienced their new community? Drawing on more than 60 interviews with survivors, hundreds of case files from Jewish Immigrant Aid Services, and other archival documents, The Montreal Shtetl presents a portrait of the daily struggles of Holocaust survivors who settled in Montreal, where they encountered difficulties with work, language, culture, health care, and a Jewish community that was not always welcoming to survivors. By reflecting on how institutional supports, gender, and community relationships shaped the survivors’ settlement experiences, Abramson and Lynch show the relevance of these stories to current state policies on refugee immigration.

Neither a comprehensive history of Eastern European Jewish life or the shtetl, Petrovsky-Shtern, professor of Jewish Studies at Northwestern University, focuses on three provinces Volhynia, Podolia, and Kiev of the then Russian Empire during what he deems the golden age period, 1790 - 1840, when the shtetl was "the unique habitat of some 80 percent of East European Jews."

"These stories describe aspects of Jewish life in Brantford from the 1940's. They are centred on fictional characters and events but loosely based on some of the experiences the author had growing up.