shtetl
Americannoun
noun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of shtetl
Yiddish, little town
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
My father was born in a shtetl outside Kyiv — didn’t speak Russian, spoke Yiddish.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 2, 2026
But a time jump, moving from a shtetl during World War I to 1930s Warsaw, pushes the film into more unexpected territory, as it encompasses issues of immigration, adoption and assimilation.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 14, 2026
By setting Aleichem's words to Jerry Bock's Eastern European-inspired music, Harnick created a new mythological shtetl that Jews in America could be deeply proud of.
From Salon ● Jul. 8, 2023
He later set up a village on the outskirts of Kyiv that he named Anatevka — like the fictional shtetl in the Broadway musical “Fiddler on the Roof” — for displaced Jewish families.
From New York Times ● Jul. 5, 2023
As they wound on through the forest, Hannah guessed everybody from the shtetl was there.
From "The Devil's Arithmetic" by Jane Yolen
His parents, Jacob, a plasterer, and Rel Goldman Topol, a seamstress, had fled shtetlach in Eastern Europe to settle in Palestine in the early 1930s.
From New York Times ● Mar. 9, 2023
The soup, redolent of the shtetlach of Thomas' Jewish forebears, speaks for itself.
From Time Magazine Archive
We read novels about the Holocaust with the burden of knowledge: the incalculable statistics, the sickening photos, the faint outlines of vanished shtetls.
From Washington Post ● Apr. 28, 2015
What comes through most is his affection for his grandparents, both born in shtetls outside Kiev, who met in Baltimore when young Boris was on tour and Bessie was 14.
From New York Times ● Apr. 6, 2011
A recent Jerusalem Post piece details one professor's attempt to show how modern humor flows directly from the mean, aggressive, sarcastic, bleak humor practiced by "badkhn" entertainers in the Jewish shtetls of 17th-century Eastern Europe.
From Slate ● Mar. 15, 2011
Both parents had come to America before the First World War from Jewish shtetls, or small towns, outside Warsaw.
From The New Yorker ● Jan. 14, 1966
His teachings, which emphasized the immediacy of God's presence in everyday life, quickly swept through the shtetls of Eastern Europe.
From Time Magazine Archive
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
