The word shtetl in Yiddish is a diminutive of the word shtot or ‘town'; its exact meaning is, therefore, ‘small town’. Not every small town, however, can be called a shtetl. The name refers not only to a physical entity, but to a particular cultural entity: a shtetl represents the modus vivendi of Jews in Eastern Europe. It was a bastion of traditional Jewish culture, and the word thus became a synonym for, and symbol, of that culture.

Though many Yiddish words were assimilated into the Polish language, shtetl was not one of them. It was usually translated as miasteczko, ‘small town’. This was the translation used for the title of Sholem Asch's famous novella Shtetl. Alternatively it was printed in italics, as an unassimilated foreign word, in order to convey a specific milieu. This linguistic fact seems to indicate that the Jewish shtetl was not perceived as a socio-cultural phenomenon by the Poles.

There remains the question of Polish literature. Did it recognize the shtetl as an entity? Did it record the fact of its existence?

‘The shtetl - a Polish phenomenon, a very Polish product… The shtetl. A flower which has grown out of our soil. But the Poles were little concerned with it … The shtetl was therefore not recorded by those writing in Polish.’ This judgement by Adolf Rudnicki is perhaps overly severe, for although it was understandably never as important a theme in Polish as in Jewish writing, the shtetl, as perceived in specific categories discussed below, did not go unremarked in Polish literature. The small Jewish, (or Polish-Jewish) towns scattered throughout the Polish province had already begun to appear in Polish fiction in the early eighteenth century and continue to do so to the present day: Andrzej Kuśniewicz's Nawrócenie (The Return)’, Waldemar Siemiński's Kobieta z prowincji (A Woman from the Provinces); Piotr Szewc's Zagłada (Dissolution) and Konwicki's Bohiń, are the most recent examples. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the theme of the shtetl was found predominantly in prose; in the twentieth century, and more specifically from the inter-war period, it also became a dominant theme in poetry.