Imagining a "Shtetl"

This morning I chose a quote from my story "One Voice, One Heart" about Lazar Sussman's childhood home in the town of Brod, which was at that time the border between Romanov Russia and Hapsburg Austria.  From the beginning of my process of picturing this town, I tried very hard to find actual photos, maps and descriptions of Brod.  Otherwise I was certain that I would be overtaken by what we all think we know about the Eastern European "shtetl."

What most of us know is from the backdrops we have seen for various productions of the musical play "Fiddler on the Roof."  It includes comically leaning wooden houses, dirt streets and rabbinical scholars.  Brod, by contrast, had brick-and-stone construction, cobblestone streets, and an extremely lively commercial life in keeping with its position as a port of entry to two major empires.

Why are we so affected by fictional representations of history?  For many Americans, life on an antebellum plantation will always resemble "Gone with the Wind," despite whatever education they may have acquired since they saw that movie.  I remember the release of the movie "Glory" about the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, an all-African American unit in the Civil War.  Two weeks before that film came out, I don't think one white person in a hundred knew that in 1865, ten percent of the Union Army was Black.  But a week after its release, it seemed that everybody had always known that!  You can probably think of five examples of your own right now.

I grew up in a religious Jewish home, and every year our synagogue celebrated Purim with the traditional reading of the Book of Esther and then a carnival where we all dressed up as the characters in that book.  That is how I "know" in my heart, with the certainty that we know things learned at an early age, that the people of ancient Persia went around in bathrobes and with towels on their heads.   As a literate and educated adult I can suppress this "knowledge" but it is still hiding there inside, waiting to burst out at some wildly inappropriate time.

And, again, this is why I was as thoughtful as I could be about my literary imaginings.  Granted, "Stones from the Creek" will never get the audience of "Gone with the Wind" of "Fiddler on the Roof."  But for the readers who take seriously the idea of forgotten history of struggle and resistance, this book may be what they know about 1906.  I have tried to get the important stuff right.