stereotype it is meant to correct. The gain, however, is a sharpening of the contrast with post-1860 Russian Jewry and a refreshing truth-telling about the reality behind some of the beliefs and practices of Jews fostered by antisemites. Negative stereotypes are transformed into signs of the vital energy and realistic adaptation to the restrictions and disabilities the government placed upon Jews. Each of the chapters on smuggling, liquor production and marketing, trade dominance, violence, etc. is copiously documented by a bewildering wealth of specific case studies drawn principally from archival sources in Ukraine, Russia, and Israel. The appeal of Petrovsky’s rich and locale-specific narrative all but conceals its hyperbole, lending it a kind of poetic truth about life in the shtetl.

Paradoxically, the one element that remains largely un-specific is the shtetl itself. Petrovsky is deliberately vague about defining the focus of his study except as a settlement of Jews and gentiles ranging in size between a small village and what otherwise have usually been considered towns and cities such as Berdichev, Uman, and Zhitomir.[207] Petrovsky’s shtetl is in fact not a particular place at all, but a way of life in which Jewish energy and acquisitiveness expressed itself in many forms and in which a greater ease and freedom existed among the shtetl’s mixed ethnicities and between Jews and the government. The survival of the power of Polish landowners in the region provided an ongoing buffer against the gradual encroachment of the Russian government in taxing and controlling the Jewish population. Jewish privileges thus waned along with those of the Polish grandees, who had functioned as indolent and unwitting protectors of some Jewish rights, such as trading in liquor.

Despite the more repressive means by which the Russian government sought to control the Pale’s Jews, Petrovsky contends that the Russian courts dealt with Jews more fairly and even-handedly in this period than later. The effectiveness of Petrovsky’s many concrete examples in veiling the literal truth of his assertions seems most questionable in this instance. Although its overall truth relies on the assumption that Jews generally received far worse treatment under the last two Tsars, the advent of the 1864 judicial reform alone and the greater participation of Jews in the judicial system suggest the need for verification of that assumption.

In sum, Petrovsky’s idealized image of the Pale’s pre-reform shtetl, in its broader outlines, serves as a counter-image to that later drawn by Aleichem and many Yiddish writers. Its importance lies less with its literal truthfulness than its usefulness in raising questions about Russian Jewry in both halves of the 19th Century. In the first instance, it offers a “new history”, an alternative to the image of the shtetl as a locus of victimization by documenting much of the diversity, assertiveness, and vitality of Jewish endeavors and occupations. It shows us that the Jews of the newly created Russian Pale of Settlement did not take their poverty and forced disabilities sitting down, but took advantage of the weaknesses in Tsarist governance and enforcement, the government’s rivalry with resident Polish landowners, and the venality of local officials to survive and sometimes even flourish in their shtetl enclaves.

Petrovsky’s shtetl image casts light on the character of the post-reform shtetl as well. The energy, vitality, and defiance he describes changed in character, but surely did not disappear after the reforms and after the 1881 pogroms. As the challenges to Jewish existence grew more demanding and more threatening, so did Jewish responses. The study not only modifies our understanding of life in the Jewish Pale in the earlier years of Russian rule, but also suggests greater depth and complexity to Jewish responses in the