RED SHTETL: The Unique Tale of How One Jewish Shtetl Thrived Under Communism

Situated in southern Ukraine near the Romanian border, it was the great fortune of a shtetl named Shargorod, to be one of the few cities in the Soviet Union not overrun by the Germans in 1941. Instead, Romanian troops occupied the town. The Romanian government subsequently expelled several thousand of its own Jews to Shargorod. The resulting story of Jewish culture thriving under Communism is the unique gift found in Red Shtetl by Charles Hoffman.

Red Shtetl is the only study ever made of how this particular shtetl managed to hold on to its Jewish traditions long after the iron curtain closed it off to the world in 1917. Ironically, Shargorod’s Jewish history only came to an end in the past few years, when the doors to immigration were opened after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Even as Jews were leaving Shargorod, Charles Hoffman, a field worker for JDC, started visiting the town to document this remarkable story. And what a story it is.

While many of these Romanian Jews perished of malnutrition, overwork in labor brigades and exposure, they left behind a legacy for Shargorod’s Jews which they had not come into contact with since the Bolshevik revolution of 1917: Jewish religious practice. Thus a flame was rekindled, and this flame would sustain Shargorod’s Jews for the next five decades.

In Red Shtetl, Hoffman takes us to meet Misha, the no-nonsense director of a food processing plant, who made sure matzoh was baked each Pesach—and sent the bill to the communist authorities. We step into the home of two elderly sisters, Klara and Maya, who were insulted when Hoffman asked if they kept a kosher home. There’s also Semyon, the klezmer musician who performed at every Jewish wedding, and Lazar, the shtetl’s detective.

Hoffman also shows us how Zuss Reibman and his friends, when faced with the closure of the synagogue in 1947, simply set up a prayer room in a nearby home. They then had the chutzpah to register the shul with the communists. All these characters come fully to life in Red Shtetl, as do many more, including the non-Jewish mayor of the town, who never seemed to find time to report to the KGB how the children of Moses were living in the land of Marx.

Aside from interviewing Jews in Shargorod itself, Hoffman fleshes this story out by poring through archives that had just been opened. This is the kind of reporting one would expect from a man who spent years working as a Jerusalem Post reporter in the 1980s, as well as the author of the highly acclaimed Gray Dawn: The Jews of Eastern Europe in the Post-Holocaust Era.

Red Shtetl is the story of a handful of Jews who refused to give up their way of life. We are lucky that their story was captured by a man who devoted his final months to telling it.

Tragically, Hoffman became ill while writing Red Shtetl, and died shortly before its completion. Thanks to the professional support and efforts of his wife, Ann Lee Hoffman, the world can now explore this strange and wonderful story.