BACKWARD AND FORWARD

IN the twenty-first century scholars debate a phenomenon that represented the absolute antithesis of postmodernity. ‘Represented’ because, though lasting for centuries, it was made abruptly extinct in the mid-twentieth century and is swiftly escaping living memory. Why does one study shtetl communities today? As Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog wrote in their Preface to Life Is with People, ‘It is a culture that is not remote. On the contrary, it is one with which many have had direct or indirect contact, through its representatives or their descendants.’ One might even venture to guess that the majority of those researching the topic have had just such contact, in Jewish as well as non-Jewish families. Increasingly there is a desire to return to one's memories or roots; individuals scattered over various continents are visiting places that were home for themselves or close kin. A new non-fiction genre—from Theo Richmond's Konin to Diane Armstrong's Mosaic to Shimon Redlich's Together and Apart in Brzeżany—serves as partial evidence of this.

Accompanying the nostalgia, however, is a desire to analyse a model of multiculturalism glaringly different from the one popularly propagated today—one in which, paradoxically, segregation instead of integration was the rule. In examining the shtetl, we find ourselves puzzled. Inconclusive are the debates in which historical methodology and thinking are applied to determine whether the shtetl was (to paraphrase Ezra Mendelsohn) good for the Jews or bad for the Jews, good for the Christians or bad for the Christians, or (to paraphrase Joel Berkowitz) a dystopia or a utopia.

Arguments for calling the shtetl ‘backward’ abound, of course, if one compares its living conditions to those of the Western world. Who would see as ‘forward’ the rarity of indoor plumbing, the dominance of dirt roads and dirt floors, or the nonexistence of mechanized public transportation? Moreover, these unenlightened folk seem to have been content with the way things were and seem not to have wanted to ‘progress’. This was a ‘traditional’ culture: a conservative society in which upholding and safeguarding the status quo was an ideal towards which all members of the group strove.