The Lost Shtetl

I flew through THE LOST SHTETL in two days, which is my favorite kind of reading experience – when you're walking around the house about to trip on something because you NEED to keep reading.

This inventive debut novel poses the question: what if there was a Jewish village in Poland that survived the Holocaust and the Cold War, in complete seclusion without the trappings of modern convenience and innovation?

Welcome to Kreskol. Its residents live in relative seclusion until one day, a nasty divorce and two runaway ex-spouses prompt the village to send Yankel Lewinkopf into the forest and beyond. What results is Kreskol's exposure and re-discovery.

This humorous, complex book is a story of Jewish resilience despite rumor, media conjecture, and mutual incomprehensibility (between Kreskolites and the Polish, and among the Kreskolites) of how to live. Woven into the several characters' perspectives and journeys, we get a peek at how assimilation, anti-Semitism, and inflation might play out. What is the first institution we would build or establish in a previously-unknown town? How might we explain the unfathomable horror of the Holocaust to a Jewish community who never heard of it? It also looks at how we grapple with multiculturalism and assimilation as it relates to ethnicity and religion.

This book features a lot of footnotes, offering context for Jewish, Yiddish, and Polish terminology that come up throughout the plot. While I'm by no means versed in Yiddish or Hebrew, I found some of the footnotes a bit unnecessary (“schmaltz,” “bubbe,” “yenta,” and “challah” were some) especially since there's a glossary of terms at the end.

The reviews for THE LOST SHTETL have been uneven, and the ending seems to be hit or miss. For me it was a hit!

⚠️ Content warnings: anti-Semitism, sex work

The voice in this is super fun and parts of it were genuinely affecting (I loved the story about the “heroic” census taker, and the schism in the town between the two Rabbis who had heard the story of the Holocaust as children was devastating). The book was way too long, though, with a lot of wasted page time, a pointless ending, and terrible writing about women.