The Yivo Encyclopedia of Jews in Western Europe
https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Shtetl






As revolutions and total war ravaged Jewish Eastern Europe, the treatment of the shtetl in Yiddish literature increasingly diverged from the models of Mendele, Sholem Aleichem, and Asch. Yitskhok (Itshe) Meyer Vaysenberg’s 1906 masterpiece, A shtetl, portrayed a community torn apart by an internal Jewish class conflict. Yet, Vaysenberg asked, what was the ultimate importance of these internecine Jewish struggles in a fragile shtetl, a negligible dot in an enormous gentile world that stretched beyond its muddy streets? In his 1913 classic Nokh alemen (After All Is Said and Done) and in many shorter stories, the writer Dovid Bergelson presented a picture of a shtetl marked by banality and emptiness. Like Vaysenberg, Bergelson denied the shtetl any redemptive meaning.






A devastating picture of the wartime shtetl appeared in Oyzer Varshavski’s 1920 novel Shmuglars, in which World War I turns the entire community into a gang of immoral smugglers. Traditional values collapsed as all classes let nothing stand in their way in pursuit of a quick profit. In the 1920s and 1930s, the shtetl was portrayed in Soviet Yiddish literature as a doomed community. The poet Izi Kharik envied his famous Russian counterpart Sergei Esenin, who mourned the Russian village. While the shtetl was to Jews what the village was to Russians—the crucible of their folk culture—Kharik could not mourn its passing. But, he admitted, even while he cursed the shtetl, his curses were intermixed with feelings of lingering tenderness.