Stepchildren of the shtetl: The destitute, disabled, and mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800-1939

Be it in S. An-ski’s The Dybbuk, Sholem Abramovitch’s Fishke the Lame, in memoirs, yizkor books and anthropological studies, the figure of the Jewish marginal seems omnipresent. It appears to speak to a wider experience of marginality and liminality of East European Jewish society, as a metaphor or symbol even for the people itself. In Stepchildren of the Shtetl, Natan M. Meir explores the history of those on the fringes of Jewish society – the way they were perceived and treated, the role they played in the imaginations of Jewish and Gentile society, writers, philanthropists and activists, and their lived experiences in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.