The Golden Age Shtetl: A New History of Jewish Life in East Europe by Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern (in Ukrainian (transl. Y. Strikha) "Kritika" PH XII+394 p.)

The book by Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, a prominent researcher of Eastern European Jewry, Professor of Northwestern University in Chicago, is the first attempt to construct the course of social, economic, religious and cultural life of the Jewish town of Shtetl in Ukraine, where in XVIII-XIX centuries. lived two-thirds of the Jews of Eastern Europe. We are talking about half a century (1790s - 1840s), i.e. the short period when Atlantis of Eastern European Jewry reached its peak. Based on innovative approaches to sources and original research of Shtetl's material culture and anthropology, this detailed and generalizing work depicts a completely unexpected new history of Shtetl, which could become the “Russian” counterpart of European free trade cities, but, actually it has never happened. However, when it disappeared, the Shtetl left behind numerous testimonies of the processes and phenomena that created and continue to create the very foundations of the collective memory of both modern Jews and modern Ukrainians.