Max Gross
Max Gross’s ‘The Last Shtetl’ Is a Modern Yiddish Folktale Like You’ve Never Read Before
I can’t remember the last time I have read a more Jewish novel than Max Gross’s The Lost Shtetl. Broadly, the story is a modern-day Yiddish folktale. Specifically, Gross imagines a shtetl, a Jewish village in Eastern Europe (in this case, Poland), that lost all contact with the outside world and has been forgotten. In Kreskol, the villagers have no idea what happened in the 20th century: They missed the Holocaust, the establishment of the state of Israel, the invention of wifi, and so much more. When a woman, Pesha, disappears from Kreskol, followed by her ex-husband, an orphaned baker, Yankel Lewinkopf, is sent beyond the walls of the shtetl to find them. What he finds instead is modern day Poland.
As I wrote in Alma’s favorite books for fall 2020, The Lost Shtetl is a story of Jewish resilience, faith, assimilation, and, of course, antisemitism. The novel is at once funny and heartbreaking, gorgeously told by Gross in this debut novel.
I had the chance to chat with author Max Gross over e-mail about everything shtetls, Jewish fiction, and his own relationship to Jewishness and the wilderness.
