A shtetl is a Yiddish term for a small town in eastern Europe before World War II with a significant Yiddish-speaking Jewish population. These towns were located in areas now part of Ukraine, Russia, Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, Slovakia, Moldova, Romania, and southern Latvia. Shtetls were key centers of Jewish life in that region from the 16th to the 20th century. The shtetls, and the Jewish communities that sustained them, were destroyed in the Holocaust. However, the shtetl has lived on in literature and film in the Jewish Diaspora as a symbol of identity, memory, and nostalgia.
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