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Until roughly the end of the 19th century, a shtetl was just a shtetl\\u2014that is, a town as designated in Yiddish, and nobody paid them any particular attention. Then interest in shtetls as places where Eastern Europe Jews lived picked up. Assimilated Western European Jews embarked on heritage tours to survey their exotic brethren in the east, academic interest in folk-life grew, and representations of shtetl life began appearing with more frequency in literature. After that came the Holocaust, which dealt life in the shtetl a final blow. Yet in a sense the shtetl did not die at that point. In fact, it\\u2014or the idea of it\\u2014has thrived in the decades since the end of WWII as artists, filmmakers, and writers have depicted shtetls\\u2014and what they imagine them to...

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