One of the most unusual characteristics of Poland as compared with other European countries, was a large Jewish presence in villages and townlets. In the inter-war period approximately 30 per cent of Jews lived in such settlements. Although most of the Jewish population inhabited towns and cities, Jews from small towns (fewer than 20,000 people) constituted an average of 62 per cent of all Jewish townsmen. In some areas of eastern Poland these figures were even higher.

These settlements, shtetlekh, were fascinating centres of Jewish life and culture, and places of daily contacts between Jews and Christian Poles. It is therefore surprising how few books on the shtetl have been published. Hence one welcomes every publication dealing with this important aspect of Jewish life before the Holocaust. Unfortunately, the work of Rachel Ertel does not fulfil our expectations.

The author, who teaches American and Jewish civilization in Paris, attempts to show the evolution of shtetlekh from tradition to modernity. The first quarter of the book is an historical summary of Jewish life in Poland from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the 20th century. This is based on secondary material only, much of which is quite old. The history of Jews in Poland is treated in total isolation from Polish history, about which the author knows precious little. The book abounds with factual mistakes too numerous to quote here. Some of these suggest a lack of basic historical knowledge: Potop (literally the Flood), is explained as ‘a name given to massacres caused by the rising of Bogdan Chmielnicki against the Polish rule and by the Polish-Swedish war (1548-1657)'!

No Polish sources have been consulted with a few exceptions, one of which is quoted in a footnote but never invoked (the work of Witold Kula, footnote 32, p. 36), the other invoked wrongly (suggesting, for instance, that W. Pobóg-Malinowski in his history of Poland describes the period between 1926 and 1935 as ‘a one-party régime of Piłsudski’, p. 177).

Three model shtetlekh are briefly described: Bekhatów (Belhative), Zdzięioł (Zetl) and Nowy Sącz (Santz), which for some reason she calls Sąc. (Incidentally, the transliteration of both Polish and Yiddish names is far from perfect.)