A Soviet Shtetl

Shmuel Gordon

1966

Like every shtetl Medzibosz has a main street, and side streets and back streets. Nowadays the old hunched little huts have mostly vanished, and there are new houses in their place—not everywhere.

Thirty years ago many of the inhabitants of the shtetlach left to go to the big industrial towns. Few returned. And few returned also from the collective…

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Creator Bio

Shmuel Gordon

1909–1998

The shtetl, a much maligned subject in Soviet Jewish culture, became the focal point in the postwar reportorial writing of Shmuel Gordon. Born in Kovno (Kaunas), Gordon was orphaned and grew up in Ukraine. He studied at the Yiddish department of the Second Moscow State University, graduating in 1931, and pursued a career as a prose writer and journalist, often writing about Jewish communities in Birobidzhan and agricultural settlements. His first collection of stories was published in 1934. He was employed by the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during the Second World War. Imprisoned by Stalin in 1949 as a conspiratorial Jewish intellectual, Gordon survived in the gulags until 1956. He later returned to Moscow and wrote witty reportage for the journal Sovetish heymland. His last major work was a novel about the persecution and murder of Soviet Yiddish intelligentsia.

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