How to Use shtetl in a Sentence

shtetl

noun
  • The story is set two hundred and fifty years ago, in a Polish shtetl.
    — Deborah Treisma, The New Yorker, 13 Sep. 2021
  • That was the solution as well for the headstones of the fake shtetl’s cemetery.
    — Cnaan Liphshiz, sun-sentinel.com, 11 Aug. 2021
  • Gnesye, an aging grandmother, has spent her life at the gates of the shtetl cemetery.
    — Literary Hub, 22 Jan. 2026
  • As many of us have begun to look back on our roots, the food of the shtetl has made a comeback in recent years.
    — Rachel Ringler, sun-sentinel.com, 7 Apr. 2021
  • Although my mother was born in a tiny shtetl on the outskirts of Kyiv, this was my first visit there.
    — Byjeffrey Sonnenfeld, Fortune, 27 Sep. 2023
  • Michtom was born Moshe Charmatz, in a shtetl in what is now Belarus.
    — Alexandra Schwartz, New Yorker, 9 Feb. 2026
  • He was born in 1896 in Poritzk, a shtetl in what is now northwestern Ukraine.
    — Raffi Khatchadourian, The New Yorker, 15 Nov. 2021
  • One of her brothers’ friends lived in a neighboring shtetl, where the soldiers forced the Jews into a mass grave and shot them.
    — Shari Rudavsky, Indianapolis Star, 23 Dec. 2019
  • Over time, gefilte fish became synonymous with the shtetl and with Sabbath and holiday meals.
    — Rachel Ringler, sun-sentinel.com, 7 Apr. 2021
  • Trybal is like a modern millennial shtetl, where gesundheits fly.
    — Rachel Levin, New York Times, 18 Sep. 2019
  • My father was born in a shtetl outside Kyiv — didn’t speak Russian, spoke Yiddish.
    — Mikael Wood, Los Angeles Times, 2 July 2026
  • Apart is about a shtetl—a village of Jews—in 19th century Europe.
    — Eli Reiter, Wired, 21 Jan. 2021
  • How did Boyle decide what town in the former Yugoslavia would serve as the setting for Tevye’s shtetl?
    — Peter Keough, BostonGlobe.com, 2 June 2022
  • In this masterful retelling of Peretz’s Yiddish tale, Goldin takes readers back to an old world shtetl.
    — Penny Schwartz, sun-sentinel.com, 10 Mar. 2021
  • What if the Yiddish-speaking poets and songwriters had electric guitars and amps in the shtetl?
    — Joe Baur, sun-sentinel.com, 1 Sep. 2020
  • Others criticized the show for transforming the misfortunes of shtetl life into the language of song and dance.
    — Nelson Pressley, Washington Post, 23 June 2023
  • Out of the shtetl and into the mainstream of European life the new citizen-Jew duly emerged.
    — Roger Cohen, New York Times, 18 Dec. 2017
  • Strasberg, twenty-one years old, was born in a Polish shtetl and brought up on the Lower East Side.
    — Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker, 31 Jan. 2022
  • Its center was not the nostalgia of the shtetl but the mysterious resonance of a more ancient landscape.
    — Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The New Yorker, 15 Feb. 2024
  • The truth is that this musical is a piece of American culture, not of shtetl culture; any appropriation was in the making of it in the first place.
    — Kwame Anthony Appiah, New York Times, 17 May 2023
  • In her shtetl, only young boys were indulged in their maniacal pursuit of mastery that led them to spend every waking moment poring over the Talmud.
    — WSJ, 22 Nov. 2018
  • Those of us who take an interest in changes in contemporary language are in a condition not unlike that of the village idiot of Frampol, a shtetl in Poland.
    — Joseph Epstein, WSJ, 24 Mar. 2021
  • The shtetl is renamed Gedenkrovka in the novel (in what is now Ukraine), but the horrific events that devastate the Jewish village are largely the same.
    — Rachel Raczka, BostonGlobe.com, 17 Nov. 2022
  • Peres says his early idol was his grandfather Zvi, the rabbi of the Polish shtetl of Vishneva, who later perished in the Holocaust.
    — Washington Post, 12 Sep. 2017
  • Her voice is unmistakable, a Valley Girl’s vocal fry mixed with Bernie Sanders’s metropolitan shtetl twang.
    — Liana Satenstein, Vogue, 15 Feb. 2022
  • The banal village tunes that Mahler altered into sinister mock vulgarities—did these not recall the raffish klezmer bands, the wandering musicians who played at shtetl weddings?
    — David Denby, The Atlantic, 1 Apr. 2025
  • My father lived in a type of shtetl in Bedford Stuyvesant, once a home for poor Jewish immigrants and others long before its recent hipster gentrification.
    — Longreads, 29 July 2019
  • The play follows the life of dairyman Teyve and his family in Anatevka, a fictional shtetl outside Kyiv, until the anti-Semitic czar kicks then out.
    — Mike Wagenheim, Sun Sentinel, 18 Aug. 2022
  • Its early donors might have been very rich, but the money was mostly new, and the donors themselves were likely themselves not far removed from the farm, the tenement, or, in the case of the many Jews supporting the Met, the shtetl.
    — Brian T. Allen, National Review, 3 Oct. 2020
  • The Polish shtetl was created by having the designers read the script and look for references of 1930’s Poland, and having a historian fact check their work.
    — Wilson Chapman, Variety, 17 May 2022

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'shtetl.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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