The Golden Age Shtetl

Neither a comprehensive history of Eastern European Jewish life or the shtetl, Petrovsky-Shtern, professor of Jewish Studies at Northwestern University, focuses on three provinces Volhynia, Podolia, and Kiev of the then Russian Empire during what he deems the golden age period, 1790 – 1840, when the shtetl was “the unique habitat of some 80 percent of East European Jews.”