Shtetl Tales

This collection of stories takes place in the fictional shtetl of Patchentuch, located somewhere in the backwater of Eastern Poland in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The stories, which transcend the grim reality of shtetl life to another geography, tell of the lighthearted adventures and misadventures of the town’s residents. My hope is that these tales will provide the same pleasure for the reader that I derived from creating them.

This multi volume collection of stories takes place in the fictional shtetl of Patchentuch, located somewhere in the backwater of Eastern Poland in the late nineteenth century. The stories tell of the lighthearted adventures and misadventures of the town’s residents, and they transcend the grim reality of shtetl life to a more light hearted place. My hope is that the tales will provide the same pleasure for the reader that I derived from creating them.

This collection of stories takes place in the fictional shtetl of Patchentuch, located somewhere in the backwater of Eastern Poland in the late nineteenth century. The stories tell of the lighthearted adventures and misadventures of the town’s residents, and they transcend the grim reality of shtetl life to a more light hearted place. My hope is that the tales will provide the same pleasure for the reader that I derived from creating them.

This collection of stories takes place in the fictional shtetl of Patchentuch, located somewhere in the backwater of Eastern Poland in the late nineteenth century. The stories tell of the lighthearted adventures and misadventures of the town’s residents, and they transcend the grim reality of shtetl life to a more light hearted place. My hope is that the tales will provide the same pleasure for the reader that I derived from creating them.

This collection of stories takes place in the fictional shtetl of Patchentuch, located somewhere in the backwater of Eastern Poland in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The stories, which transcend the grim reality of shtetl life to another geography, tell of the lighthearted adventures and misadventures of the town’s residents. My hope is that these tales will provide the same pleasure for the reader that I derived from creating them.

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD AND THE JEWISH FICTION AWARD FROM THE ASSOCIATION OF JEWISH LIBRARIES GOOD MORNING AMERICA MUST READ NEW BOOKS * NEW YORK POST BUZZ BOOKS * THE MILLIONS MOST ANTICIPATED A remarkable debut novel—written with the fearless imagination of Michael Chabon and the piercing humor of Gary Shteyngart—about a small Jewish village in the Polish forest that is so secluded no one knows it exists . . . until now. What if there was a town that history missed? For decades, the tiny Jewish shtetl of Kreskol existed in happy isolation, virtually untouched and unchanged. Spared by the Holocaust and the Cold War, its residents enjoyed remarkable peace. It missed out on cars, and electricity, and the internet, and indoor plumbing. But when a marriage dispute spins out of control, the whole town comes crashing into the twenty-first century. Pesha Lindauer, who has just suffered an ugly, acrimonious divorce, suddenly disappears. A day later, her husband goes after her, setting off a panic among the town elders. They send a woefully unprepared outcast named Yankel Lewinkopf out into the wider world to alert the Polish authorities. Venturing beyond the remote safety of Kreskol, Yankel is confronted by the beauty and the ravages of the modern-day outside world – and his reception is met with a confusing mix of disbelief, condescension, and unexpected kindness. When the truth eventually surfaces, his story and the existence of Kreskol make headlines nationwide. Returning Yankel to Kreskol, the Polish government plans to reintegrate the town that time forgot. Yet in doing so, the devious origins of its disappearance come to the light. And what has become of the mystery of Pesha and her former husband? Divided between those embracing change and those clinging to its old world ways, the people of Kreskol will have to find a way to come together . . . or risk their village disappearing for good.

This multi volume collection of stories takes place in the fictional shtetl of Patchentuch, located somewhere in the backwater of Eastern Poland in the late nineteenth century. The stories tell of the lighthearted adventures and misadventures of the town’s residents, and they transcend the grim reality of shtetl life to a more light hearted place. My hope is that the tales will provide the same pleasure for the reader that I derived from creating them.

This multi volume collection of stories takes place in the fictional shtetl of Patchentuch, located somewhere in the backwater of Eastern Poland in the late nineteenth century. The stories tell of the lighthearted adventures and misadventures of the town’s residents, and they transcend the grim reality of shtetl life to a more light hearted place. My hope is that the tales will provide the same pleasure for the reader that I derived from creating them.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, some 84,500 Jews in imperial Russia converted to Christianity. Confessions of the Shtetl explores the day-to-day world of these people, including the social, geographic, religious, and economic links among converts, Christians, and Jews. The book narrates converts' tales of love, desperation, and fear, tracing the uneasy contest between religious choice and collective Jewish identity in tsarist Russia. Rather than viewing the shtetl as the foundation myth for modern Jewish nationhood, this work reveals the shtetl's history of conversions and communal engagement with converts, which ultimately yielded a cultural hybridity that both challenged and fueled visions of Jewish separatism. Drawing on extensive research with conversion files in imperial Russian archives, in addition to the mass press, novels, and memoirs, Ellie R. Schainker offers a sociocultural history of religious toleration and Jewish life that sees baptism not as the fundamental departure from Jewishness or the Jewish community, but as a conversion that marked the start of a complicated experiment with new forms of identity and belonging. Ultimately, she argues that the Jewish encounter with imperial Russia did not revolve around coercion and ghettoization but was a genuinely religious drama with a diverse, attractive, and aggressive Christianity.