A shtetl is defined by Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern as "an East European market town in private possession of a Polish magnate, inhabited mostly but not exclusively by Jews" and from the 1790s onward and until 1915 shtetls … See more

Not only did the Jews of the shtetls speak Yiddish, a language rarely spoken by outsiders, but they also had a unique rhetorical style, … See more

• Qırmızı Qəsəbə – the world's last surviving historical shtetl
• History of the Jews in Bessarabia
• History of the Jews in Carpathian Ruthenia See more

• Bauer, Yehuda (2010). The Death of the Shtetl. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-15209-8.
• Gay, Ruth (1984). "Inventing the Shtetl". The American Scholar. 53 (3): 329–349. JSTOR 41211052. See more

The history of the oldest Eastern European shtetls began around the 13th century and saw long periods of relative tolerance and prosperity as well as times of extreme poverty and hardships, including pogroms in the 19th-century Russian Empire.
The attitudes and … See more

Literary references
Chełm figures prominently in the Jewish humor as the legendary town of fools.
Kasrilevke, the setting of many of Sholem Aleichem's stories, and Anatevka, the setting of the musical Fiddler on the Roof (based on other … See more