shtetl

plural shtetls · plural shtetlach · plural shtetlech · plural shtetlekh

1. A Jewish village or small town, especially one in Eastern Europe.

   Said the dybbuk, “What do you know? In the shtetl where I grew up, the muddy village, we thought all Christians had tails and horns. And the Nazi soldiers carried pitchforks.”

   2008, Sid Fleischman, The Entertainer and the Dybbuk, New York, NY: Greenwillow Books, →ISBN, page 24

   3 more examples

   However, you are right to suspect that there is some connection between my carefully considered opinion of the Hebrew people and this marvellous recital which your waxy ears, full of the cheesy gunk of the shtetl, have been so fortunate to hear.

   1992, Will Self, Cock and Bull

   Most of the second-generation immigrant kids of his neighborhood had been […] as desperate to go to college and become lawyers, doctors, businessmen, and leave the teeming city for the suburbs, as their parents had been to leave behind the shtetls of Russia.

   2004, Martin Torgoff, “Fearless, Immune, and Ready for All”, in Can’t Find My Way Home: America in the Great Stoned Age, 1945–2000, New York, N.Y.: Simon & Schuster, →ISBN, page 8

   Albert Speer had a big vision for it during the Third Reich, with boulevards and gigantic monuments, and we definitely don't want that again. It's a collection of villages, of shtetls as we say in Yiddish.

   2010, Peter Conrad, The Monthly, April 2010, Issue 55, The Monthly Ptd Ltd, page 52-3