Depictions of shtetl life — with their pogroms, close knit community and at times provincial ways — invite nostalgia and criticism all at once. Many of the shtetls’ most famous chroniclers in fiction were also moralists of the old world, critiquing the pieties and superstitions of the Pale of Settlement, often from the safe distance of an urban center. But while they didn’t miss the poverty or the at times parochial thinking of these places, the work was never without sentiment or a need to speak more of the past. Artists safely landed in Di Goldene Medine were spinning yarns about the Old Country, even on the eve of its final disruption.