"Gross is hilariously funny as he weaves this story....We laugh, but… do we? Yes. The miracle of this book is that it provokes theories about its intention and doesn’t let you stop trying to figure them out.” — Literary Hub

I tried to read this book and I found it uncomfortable to read. My main issue with the story is that it paints a negative view of Orthodox Jews. RIght now there are a lot of movies and books showing Orthodox Jewish women escaping their arranged marriages or leaving their faith. As a Jewish person. I have close friends who are Orthodox and I have found them to be very happy with their lifestyle choice.

An original, serious and sometimes humorous look at what might have happened.
Food for thought!
Wonderful language to read aloud!

Max Gross’ “The Lost Shtetl” begins with a scandal that rattles the small, entirely Jewish Polish town of Kreskol. Pesha Lindauer has disappeared, and her rage-filled ex-husband has apparently gone after her. Fearing that there may be a violent crime in the works, the town’s elders send one of the town’s misfits, Yankel Lewinkopf, to go to the nearest city to engage the authorities.

There is a detail I didn’t mention: This story takes place in the 21st century.

By a historical accident, this fictional town hidden in the woods escaped the attention of both the Nazis and the Polish authorities, and has been functioning self-sufficiently in total isolation for decades.

Thus, when Yankel, who cannot speak Polish and is dressed like a relic from the 19th century, ultimately shows up in the larger city of Smolskie, he is whisked to a hospital for observation. As he is assessed by doctors, he expresses absolute ignorance of the modern world. In one of the book’s poignant moments, when he is informed that nearly all Polish Jews were murdered during World War II, he responds, “Just how dumb do you think I am?”

Some think he is crazy, and some think he is lying. But when he is ultimately believed, the Polish government and the media descend on Kreskol, and nothing will ever be the same for the Jewish town that time forgot.

The novel portrays two arenas of radical change. One is the transformation of Kreskol itself. Once its existence is known, the town sees an influx of bureaucrats, bargain hunters, Jewish tourists and non-Jewish apartment hunters, as well as paved roads, electricity, a new currency and a sewer system (accompanied by tax collection). Some townspeople welcome the changes and others resist them, and as bitter rivalries emerge among the Jewish residents, the initial promise of a better life gives way to a less rosy scenario.

Equally interesting are the changes within Lewinkopf himself, who, upon returning to Kreskol, takes the opportunity to leave again, sneaking onto a helicopter with a news crew headed for Warsaw. With few prospects in Kreskol (he had been sent on his mission largely because, as the son of a deceased prostitute, he was seen as expendable), he is energized by his encounter with the modern world, particularly after he finds, and falls in love with, the disappeared Pesha.

Gross manages to create an unbelievable situation that feels quite real. And he does it with doses of humor that do not diminish the serious issues at hand, including the evocation of antisemitism in both the past and present.

Please see my review for the Forward.
https://forward.com/culture/457086/a-gross-tale-of-traveling-to-chelm-and-back/

I didn't know anything about the plot for "The Lost Shtetl" going into reading it, and I think it was perfect that way. So, I'm not going to describe the plot in detail in this review. I just have to say that I was completely taken with the story and with Max Gross' writing style.

The story starts with the vibe of an old Polish village tale but then morphs into so much more - it becomes a story about what happens when a particular society is pushed into progress and change and the choices we make to stay connected to our past. I loved the inclusion of Yiddish words (with a helpful glossary) and Jewish traditions because this made the whole book feel so much more authentic. And while the tone of the novel varies (from humor to violence to mystery), I felt fully invested in each of the character's journeys.

I'll definitely be recommending this to other readers, and I'm completely blown away by the fact that this was Gross' first novel. I can't wait to see what direction he heads in next.

Written in the style of a Jewish fable with a little Isaac Singer, and with the wit of a Michael Chabon or Gary Shteyngart, this is an adorable novel with old fashioned charm. It made me think of my great grandparents and the lost shtetl is a place I'd like to visit.

Thank you to NetGalley, HarperVia, & HarperCollins Publishers for the opportunity to read and review this book before it's publication date! This in no way affected my review, opinions are my own.

DNF @ 7%

This one wasn't for me (gut instinct and I can't truly explain why), but there are tons of great reviews for it so maybe check a few of them out before you decide one way or another!

I'm not sure how to feel about this book. I was intrigued by the premise and was interested to read how the residents of the shtetl reacted to being discovered. I thought some bits were funny, even though it felt a little like a knock-off of Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated. Some small details bothered me, like the fact that one of the villagers has the name Bergstrom, which is Swedish, not Ashkenazi. I also found the representation of the Roma people to be quite stereotypical, which is pretty disappointing in 2020 when the author should definitely know better. The timeline was hard to follow, as it switched back and forth not only between characters but between times, and sometimes jumped ahead by several years. So I guess overall I think the premise was strong but the execution was a bit messy. Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with a copy in exchange for this review.

Reminiscent of the work of T..C. Boyle, The Lost Shtetl tells an almost unbelievable tale highlighting the almost unbelievable absurdities of modern life. The book reads as a sort of time travel as the characters interact with the technologies and social constructs that define contemporary life. Onto this framework, Gross is able to create a unique look at the Holocaust, no small feat given the extensive coverage the topic has received. Add a love story between two extremely sympathetic characters, and we have a rich, colorful, multi-faceted work that threatens to be too much, were it crafted by a hand less skilled than Gross’s. A very satisfying read.

Thank you to HarperCollins and NetGalley for the Advance Review Copy in exchange for an honest review.

In the 1970s, I became fascinated by the novels and stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Singer came to the US from Poland shortly before World War II, and wrote—in Yiddish—about the world of the shtetl in Poland. (I read Singer’s works in English translation.) When Singer left Poland, 10% of Poland’s population were Jews. But three million Polish Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. The shtetls of Singer’s books were lost.

Max Gross imagines that there was a shtetl that not only escaped the Holocaust, but also the ravages of continued Polish antisemitism after the war. Everything about the modern world passed Kreskol by, and the people live as if they were in one of Singer’s books. That is, until Pesha and Ishmael Lindauer’s marriage explodes spectacularly, they end up separately leaving town, and Yankel Lewinkopf is sent to the nearest town to report the disappearance (and possible murder?) to the police.

Once Yankel reaches the outside world for the first time, things spin out of control, both for him and Kreskol, which is finally discovered. What a culture clash! Just imagine what it would be like to suddenly experience modernity when your life has been straight out of Fiddler on the Roof. Imagine your reaction if you’d never seen a car, plane, electricity, television, telephones, advertising, revealing clothing, indoor plumbing, even deodorant and toothpaste. We see it all from the viewpoint of Yankel and other Kreskolites while, at the same time, we see the outside world’s reaction to the discovery of such a community.

Max Gross’s unnamed narrator is a resident of Kreskol, who also knows quite a bit of its history. He knows about the pogroms of the past and the antipathy of their Christian neighbors that led to Kreskol’s isolation and their voluntarily cutting themselves off completely from the outside world. He also knows about the residents of Kreskol. Like Isaac Bashevis Singer, he doesn’t idealize the shtetl life. He knows the townspeople’s foibles.

The story is dryly funny at times, but at other times heartbreakingly and acutely observant about antisemitism, past and present. Despite Poland’s Jewish population having been all but obliterated, antisemitism lives on. It even thrives in today’s era of nationalism and conspiracy theories.

I'm a descendant of shtetl folk and my childhood was filled with Yiddish-speaking, Old World Jews, so I was primed to like this story. And for the first 100 pages or so, the Fiddler-on-the-Roof-ish, Bashevis Singer-ish gentle, mocking humor was enjoyable - and familiar. (It reminded me that Yiddish has 100 ways to tell a child that they are precious and that they are an idiot and both are said CONSTANTLY. When it works just right, you get Mel Brooks. Other times, you get me.) I also liked the premise, which is broadly predictable but surprisingly fresh in detail. If this book had been a novella, say about 125 pages, it would have been a little Candide-like gem. Stretched out over 400+ pages, even this event-filled plot started to feel tedious. I didn't want to abandon it, so I skimmed over 300+ pages. It was a respectful skimming though - I didn't skip any pages, but I could glean all I needed with just a sentence or two per page.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC.

The Lost Shtetl
A Novel
by Max Gross
HarperCollins Publishers
You Like Them You Are Auto-Approved
HarperVia
General Fiction (Adult) | Literary Fiction
Pub Date 13 Oct 2020 | Archive Date 08 Dec 2020

What a great dubut for this author! This book will interest many people and I think it would lead to great book club discussion. Thanks to Net Galley and HarperCollins Publishers for the ARC.
5 star

In this novel Max Gross creates a single community of Eastern European Jews who are living their lives in the centuries-old shtetl tradition and who are so isolated that they are unaware of the Holocaust. Gross infuses his story with warmhearted humor, but the story itself is thoughtful and deep. It rests on the premise that, somehow, in a forgotten corner of Europe, shtetl culture has endured intact. Of course it's impossible to imagine that any shtetl survived Nazism and this contradiction infuses even the most gentle anecdote with sadness for what has been lost.

Gross's literary language is also infused with Yiddish rhythms and Yiddish words, and in this way he honors a nearly-lost literary tradition. The novel is like a tiny, fragile hope against a dark dark time of history, that a culture and a people will endure...and this book, the existence of this story, proves that it has. The publisher description compares Gross with Chabon and Shteyngart but I was reminded of the more lighthearted titles of Isaac Bashevis Singer.

What if a small Jewish community in Eastern Europe was passed over by the Nazis and the following regimes, completely separated from the rest of the world? What would happen if the modern world "discovered" it, and its people discovered the modern world? The Lost Shtetl poses these questions as a meditation on assimilation, colonization, and community. Focusing on a few characters and told in a first-person plural voice, the book is a triumph of imagination that engages in narratives of hope, tragedy, identity, and autonomy. A great read for book clubs and community reads.

Perhaps because this was an eARC, the asterisks that should have linked to definitions of terms weren't working. For print copies, it would disturb the reading flow less if the terms were footnoted at the bottom of pages, rather than set as endnotes that would require a read to flip back and forth in the book.

This has a great premise and it is well written. The story is told with an engaging style and it's bit unpredictable. This is literature so there no action but there is some nice humor. Recommended for literary fiction fans.

Thanks very much for the ARC for review!!

What a remarkable and creative premise for a book! A tiny Jewish town, untouched by the Holocaust and altogether forgotten by society! At the beginning,, it read like a fairy tale, with all its charms. But as society learns about this town, and starts making its mark on it, everything changes.
I will say that my favorite part of this book was the story of Yankel, his past, his journey into modern society and his love story. It was the other parts of the book that described how "everything changed" - that bogged me down, and felt very overwhelming. I was fully engaged until about 65%, and then it just felt very long.
I am, however, glad I read it, and it gave me much to think about.
Thank you NetGalley for this ARC!

This is an unusual book that will appeal to a variety of different readers. If you're Jewish, even more so. It starts with a small Jewish town in Poland that somehow has been so deeply hidden in the forest that there has been almost no contact with the outside world and it totally missed WW2. We get to know the different people living in the town and about their lifestyle and then due to a kind of Talmudic twist of an incident, one person leaves and another is sent out to find her. And then the town slowly learns of how the world has changed, and the world learns about this town. It's a great premise for a story and Gross does it well.
The book has an extensive glossary for the Yiddish and Polish words that the author uses. He does this well and most of the words define themselves from the context, but for language buffs, the glossary is fascinating.

The style of writing sounds like an old Rabbi telling a tale out loud in a winding way. It's very nice. And one could read it as a story or consider moral and societal issues. It's going to be a great book for book group discussion.

"What if there was a town that history missed?" The Lost Shtetl follows the rural Polish shtetl (Jewish village) of Kreskol and its inhabitants as they come to discover just how much they have missed due to their insular ways, including the destruction of WWII. After a newly divorced couple (Pesha and Ishmael) suddenly disappears from town, the Rabbi asks a misunderstood "orphan" named Yankel to venture out into the unknown world outside of Kreskol to alert the authorities about this disappearance. The remainder of the book explores how the three individuals who left Kreskow adjust to the new world and how the people still in Kreskow deal with the new world coming to them.

This is a powerful debut novel from Max Gross. While the premise is one we have seen before, in this context it is infinitely more effective. Not only does Gross explore the impossible position of the shtetl's inhabitants to make sense of the decimation of Jewish life in Europe, he addresses current movements of nationalism and Neo-Nazism to provide added context for the overall narrative. The book is a brave journey into what it means to survive, to cope, to learn, and to exist in our complicated world. The addition of the glossary of Yiddish, Hebrew, and Polish words and phrases is an invaluable addition to the text.

What starts off as a shaggy-dog story—a shtetl in the Polish woods has been cut off from the rest of the world since the 19th century—ends up as... an indictment of 21st-century life? of change? of unwillingness to change? Maybe all of the above. It definitely ends up being much sadder and more moving than the setup and the sunny narrative tone led me to expect. The author does a great job establishing this scenario, explaining how this outlandish premise could conceivably have occurred and then exploring the inevitable (and maybe not so inevitable) changes to the shtetl and its residents. The narrative veers among several storylines in a way that adds to the sense of life being off-kilter. I must admit I wasn't crazy about the ending, but it was definitely a bold choice. All in all, an engaging, transporting, and at times wistful read.

Thank you, NetGalley and HarperCollins, for providing me with an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.