shtetl,” our minds immediately turn to
Fiddler on the Roof. The 1964 hit Broadway musical and 1971 film is set in Anatevka, a fictional shtetl that depicts an insular, homogenous community in Ukraine in 1905.
It’s no surprise that the story of Tevye and company resonates with so many of us, as it so beautifully details shtetl life but ultimately ends with — spoiler alert! — the family becoming displaced by pogroms and moving to America. Between 1900 and 1924, some 2 million Jews fled to the United States, the majority from the Pale of Settlement — the Eastern European region that included Russian Poland, Lithuania, Belarus (Belorussia), most of Ukraine, the Crimean Peninsula, and Bessarabia. Among those Jews who remained, many fell victims to antisemitic violence, the Holocaust, and the suppression of Judaism in the Soviet era.