Most Jewish Americans equate the shtetlach of Eastern Europe with Anatevka, the setting for the Broadway hit musical Fiddler on the Roof. Such singing, such dancing – what warm, wonderful places these small, largely Jewish townlets must have been. But scrape away a predilection for nostalgia, for romanticizing utter poverty and squalid living conditions, and what remains is "the truth" about the shtetl that scholars from a wide variety of disciplines – history, sociology, and literature – pursue.

Steven J. Katz, director of the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies at Boston University, is a distinguished scholar of the Holocaust. Out of an academic conference centering on the shtetl that he arranged, The Shtetl: New Evaluations resulted. It includes 13 scholarly essays (some very scholarly indeed), a helpful guide/introduction by Samuel Kassow, and a meditation on memory by Elie Wiesel.

What we learn is that there were hundreds of shtetlach and that no two were exactly the same. As Kassow points out, "The term ‘shtetl' connotes a Jewish settlement with a large and compact Jewish population who differed from their gentile, mostly peasant, neighbors in religion, occupation, language, and culture." Taken together, the essays suggest that Jewish-gentile relations were, let us say, a mixed bag – sometimes good, sometimes disastrous. It depended on the political climate, economic conditions, and frictions that a local priest could ignite during, say, the days leading up to Easter.

Interestingly enough, the book's essays do not directly address the benefits and liabilities of living a cramped, parochially Jewish life. Some, like Gershon David Hundert's "The Importance of Demography and Patterns of Settlement for an Understanding of the Jewish Experience in East-Central Europe," seem to be of scholars, by scholars, and for scholars. (For example, in trying to describe the specifics of Jewish-gentile relationships, Hundert says this: "…a simple dichotomous view is not nearly complex enough…") They are specialists largely talking to each other. But there are also paragraphs that are clearly written and accessible. Here, once again, is Kassow:

"One important aspect…was the sale and manufacture of alcoholic beverages.

"Largely in Jewish hands, the liquor trade generated much needed cash and gave landlords an important hedge against falling grain prices in export markets. In time, the Jewish tavern keeper became a stock figure of the Eastern European countryside, a link between the Jewish shtetl and the local peasantry, a source of news and rumors, someone whom the peasants would regard – depending on the circumstances – both as a familiar confidant and as a despised exploiter. In the Ukraine especially, the Jews would find themselves resented as the agents of the hated Polish nobility."

Talk about stereotype busting! Not only are we forced to readjust our sights regarding Tevye the dairyman (Broadway would never put him behind a bar, serving peasants hard drink), but in the best moments of Katz's collection, we learn how to distinguish what is factually true from what is mythically imagined. Even more important, we begin to see, a bit more steadily, a bit more whole, the world of the shtetlach that the fog and night of the Holocaust forever destroyed.

That is why Elie Wiesel's essay, "The World of the Shtetl," is so important. A rumination on a world gone and a present world in which survivors of the Holocaust grow older and will soon disappear altogether (this at a time when there are more Holocaust deniers than ever), he says perhaps the central thing to say: "When I think of the shtetl…, I am filled with pity and sadness." We cannot know, as Wiesel knows, the shtetl and the colorful, disparate people who lived there, but The Shtetl: New Evaluations brings us closer to that knowledge.