(Jewish Group) Yiddish film offers authentic recreation of shtetl life before it was destroyed

The title leaves the ‘e’ out of ‘shtetl’ as a symbol of what was lost.

A new film called SHTTL takes a dramatically different approach to telling the Holocaust story: It depicts the Eastern European Jewish world on the day before it disappeared.

Why did writer-director Ady Walter leave the “e” out of the word “shtetl” in the title? Inspired by an experimental French novel in which that letter never appeared, Walter interpreted this as an absence that left a hollow — an empty space — in much the same way the Nazis did by eradicating the great European Jewish civilization in its midst.

“In order to pay proper respect to the victims, the movie should not only be about death, but more importantly about how they lived,” film producer Jean-Charles Levy said.

The marketplace, shul and houses all seem authentic
Unlike the majority of films about Jewish life of an earlier era, all the dialogue in SHTTL is in the languages that would actually have been used by the characters: Yiddish and Ukrainian. The filmmakers did a stunning job of recreating the shtetl itself. The marketplace, shul and the houses all seem authentic. The actors look like ordinary people, not like actors. And the shtetl community is portrayed not as a cartoonishly monolithic stereotype, but as it really was: riven by factional conflicts between Hasidim, Zionists, socialists, assimilationists and other political movements and trends that were popular at the time.

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