Abt. Geschichtswissenschaft

SHTTL directed by Ady Walter (2022)

Most of us have never heard a shtetl speak. Beyond a few strongholds – the Hasidic streets of Mea Shearim in Jerusalem and of Williamsburg in New York – Yiddish survives today in fragments: a handful of loanwords, a punchline, a scrap of song. The dense, everyday soundscape of Jewish life in East Central Europe was silenced during the Second World War along with the people who spoke it. SHTTL (dir. Ady Walter, 2022) sets out to give that world its voice back. The missing e in the title nods to Georges Perec's lipogrammatic novel La disparition – a book written without a single e, its absence standing for everything the Shoah erased. Presented as a single continuous shot and performed almost entirely in Yiddish, with snatches of Polish, Russian and Ukrainian, the film reconstructs a vanished community on the Ukrainian-Polish border on the eve of the German occupation. Over the course of one day – the last before Operation Barbarossa – we move through a living village: its market, tavern and synagogue, its loves and conflicts, its quarrels between the devout and the Sovietised young, between tradition and modernity.

What makes SHTTL unusual is how it binds historical imagination to present-day loss. The village was not a studio backlot but a full settlement of some twenty-five buildings, including one of the largest hand-painted synagogues ever built, raised near Rovzhi outside Kyiv and filled with objects gathered from across Ukraine. The plan was to hand it over as a museum and educational space. Instead, months after filming, the Russian invasion of 2022 destroyed the set and mined the land around it. A place built to remember one annihilation was consumed by another – a coincidence almost too neat, and one the film's admirers should resist reading as prophecy rather than tragedy

More Ideas & Insights recommendations could be reached at our Public History Unit webpage every week.