Monday, March 12, 2018

Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews Hardcover by Eva Hoffman (Hoghton Mifflin)



An incredibly objective history on Polish-Jewish relations

The superiority of this book over many of the other books out there on Jewish history can be summed up in one word - objectivity. In fact, having read this book, Eva Hoffman will go down in my estimation as one of the most fair and impartial writers known to human kind. Just when she had convinced me of one side of an issue, she would essentially counteract it with an equally compelling argument supporting the other side.

Shtetl is essentially a history of the complex and often tangled relationship between Poles and Jewish Poles. Hoffman tells the history of a small village in Poland named Bransk which, at one time, had a demographic that was significantly influenced by its sizeable minority Jewish population. She uses the story of Bransk as a case study and places her findings about this town into a greater historical context with several chapters of in depth research on the history of Poland in relation to the Jewish question.

I suspect that, like me, many of the reviewers gave this book four, rather than five stars because of Hoffman's exacting, yet sometimes tedious history of Jewish-Polish relations. In all fairness, although Hoffman is no David McCullough (in the sense of breathing life into monotonous historical facts through superior story telling capabilities), she does masters the English language in her own style (I had a dictionary close by the entire time I was reading). Fortunately, she interrupts the history lessons with meaningful and relevant first-hand accounts from her interviews with individual Jews and Poles who lived in Bransk when the Jewish community was still intact there.

If you are looking for a book on Jewish history with strong entertainment value, you've come to the wrong place. However, if you would like to read a refreshingly objective historical account of Jewish-Polish relations, I highly recommend Hoffman's Shtetl.

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