"Shtetlers" is a terrific, eye-opening and profoundly affecting meditation on what happens when a community or a way of life disappears. What happens to those who are left behind? How are they transformed by the absences? It is an exploration of often-complicated, always memorable men and women, who are the few remaining threads to the culture and traditions of Eastern European Jewish shtetls.
Shtetls were their own kind of a Jewish microcosm. Places where one's attachment to a craft was no less important than one's religion or customs. Places that embodied a certain paradox: on the one hand, insular in their Jewishness; on the other, inseparable from the economic, social and cultural lives of the broader communities. Places that, once so vibrant, now stand almost entirely depopulated. Even though some survived the Holocaust, subsequent decades of Soviet misrule and mass emigration have left their inhabitants to live on mostly as memories of the few remaining one-time neighbors.
Some of the stories in "Shtetlers" are familiar in a way that certain foundational narratives are: a return home, a pilgrimage, a separation, loss and redemption. Or, in this case, a scattering-of a people already scattered. The characters are shattered and near-broken by their exiles, their scatterings, their losses. Their homecoming is to new homes. Their traditions have to be reinvented, reimagined, re-understood-if they are not to be forgotten altogether. Their destinations are as familiar as their destinies: Israel and New York; Philadelphia and Brighton Beach.
It is a tribute to Ustinova's storytelling talent that, for all their familiarity, these stories feel so raw and so urgent; the clear-but also clear-eyed-affection the author has for these complicated men and women is palpable. "Shtetlers" makes for such a compelling viewing because, unlike many who focus on the stories of the goers, Ustinova recognizes that the stayers have their own stories, and that these stories deserve to be told too-not only because they accidentally preserve the shtetler culture, but also because they are complicated and universal in their own right.
Shtetls were their own kind of a Jewish microcosm. Places where one's attachment to a craft was no less important than one's religion or customs. Places that embodied a certain paradox: on the one hand, insular in their Jewishness; on the other, inseparable from the economic, social and cultural lives of the broader communities. Places that, once so vibrant, now stand almost entirely depopulated. Even though some survived the Holocaust, subsequent decades of Soviet misrule and mass emigration have left their inhabitants to live on mostly as memories of the few remaining one-time neighbors.
Some of the stories in "Shtetlers" are familiar in a way that certain foundational narratives are: a return home, a pilgrimage, a separation, loss and redemption. Or, in this case, a scattering-of a people already scattered. The characters are shattered and near-broken by their exiles, their scatterings, their losses. Their homecoming is to new homes. Their traditions have to be reinvented, reimagined, re-understood-if they are not to be forgotten altogether. Their destinations are as familiar as their destinies: Israel and New York; Philadelphia and Brighton Beach.
It is a tribute to Ustinova's storytelling talent that, for all their familiarity, these stories feel so raw and so urgent; the clear-but also clear-eyed-affection the author has for these complicated men and women is palpable. "Shtetlers" makes for such a compelling viewing because, unlike many who focus on the stories of the goers, Ustinova recognizes that the stayers have their own stories, and that these stories deserve to be told too-not only because they accidentally preserve the shtetler culture, but also because they are complicated and universal in their own right.
