The Shtetl

The setting for our musical, "our little village of Anatevka," is a shtetl.  A shtetl is a small town with a large Jewish population.  The book I've been bringing to rehearsal is called Life is With People: The Culture of the Shtetl.  This is the book that the creators of Fiddler used as a reference while they were creating the musical, and it is filled with information about the culture we are trying to present on stage.  Here are a few quotes that I especially like, regarding the shtetl life.

"The shtetl of the teeming market place, the unpaved streets, the shabby wooden buildings.  In summer the dust piles in thick layers which the rain changes to mid so deep that wagon wheels stick fast and must be pried loose by the sweating driver, with the assistance of helpful bystanders."

"The houses of the rich are in the center of the town, around the market place.  A few buildings may have two stories, the others will be shabby, unadorned, one-story structures, some with a yard and perhaps a small vegetable garden surrounded by a fence, often broken down."

"The crowds in the market place are predominantly women--those who come to buy and those who to sell.  All are dressed in their weekday clothes, drab mended dresses, a shawl over the shoulders, and each one carries a basket on her arm."

"There is beyond this surface dealing, however, an underlying sense of difference and danger.  Secretly each feels superior to the other, the Jew in intellect and spirit, the 'goy' in physical force--his own and that of his group.  By the same token each feels at a disadvantage opposite the other, the peasant uneasy at the intellectuality he attributes to the Jew, the Jew oppressed by the physical power he attributes to the goy."

"A long history of exile and eviction strengthens the tendency to regard the dwelling place as a husk."

"'My shtetl' is the people who live in it, not the place of the buildings or the street. 'My home' is the family and the family activities, not the walls or the yard or the broken-down fence."