“Deconstructing Fiddler on the Roof” is a favorite gambit of professors introducing students to the history of East European Jewry: begin with what they think they know about life in the shtetl, and then start busting the myths. Were matchmakers women? (No.) Did Russian police instigate pogroms? (Rarely, if ever.) Is there a single documented case of shtetl residents singing “Sunrise, Sunset” at a wedding? (Come on.)
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, a historian at Northwestern University, has given us a vigorous, well-documented, and entertaining new version of this trick in his recent The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe. In fact, he uses Fiddler on the Roof as a foil, beginning and ending with references to the musical while devoting the bulk of the book to everyday shtetl life in the half-century from 1790 to 1840.
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