How did a people branded as marginal by their neighbors for centuries grapple with the marginal members of their own community when the advent of modernity upended their familiar social structures and compelled a rethinking of what it meant to be counted among the stigmatized? This is the overarching question in Natan M. Meir's Stepchildren of the Shtetl: The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800–1939. In this enlightening, provocative, and often disturbing study, Meir explores the physical and symbolic communal spaces occupied by Polish and Russian Jewry's social outcasts who, under the mercurial gaze of rabbis, scientists, philanthropists, and artists, were at times ignored, despised, venerated, and showered with disproportionate attention. “The Jewish marginal people of eastern Europe,” Meir argues, “became a symbol for East European Jewry as a whole,” a subset of people who “were pulled to the center of the conversation … about what Jews should look like, or what they should not look like” (2–3). Through a comprehensive source base spanning a half-dozen languages, including petitions, newspapers, anthropological studies, theological texts, memoirs, and fiction, Meir reconstructs the realm of the unwanted, a key site where anxiety over a volatile present and uncertain future unfolded, thus demonstrating the central role of marginality in shaping the contours of modern Jewish history.

Stepchildren of the Shtetl is structured chronologically and thematically. Meir's opening chapters address communal responses to marginal Jews before the second half of the nineteenth century, first in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (chap. 1) and then in the conquering Russian Empire (chap. 2), when the tsarist state sought to transform the Jews into loyal and productive subjects through frequently harsh and invasive legislation, such as military conscription. Chapters 3 to 6, the heart of the book, examine how Jewish marginality—and who, precisely, was “marginal,” orphans, beggars, vagrants, the mentally disabled, the chronically sick?—was debated and countered through various forms of communal intervention, including the so-called cholera wedding, “an apotropaic ceremony in which the community's undesirables were wedded to each other in the town cemetery in a bid to end epidemic” (13). In these chapters, which span the twilight of imperial Russia (roughly the 1850s through World War I), Meir illustrates how the Jewish community did not abandon traditional approaches to the unfortunate and unwanted, but inventively combined them with the knowledge and tools provided by modern medicine, sociology, and statecraft. In the final chapter, Meir widens his gaze and tackles the symbolic role of marginal Jews through the interwar era, when fretful observers, eager reformers, and ethnographers in search of authenticity came to see them as the embodiment of east European Jewry. Whether representing the so-called polluted Ostjuden despised by antisemites, the sickly ghetto Jews Zionists sought to transform into a vigorous organic nation, or the remnants of folk traditions on the cusp of vanishing through the disintegration of the imagined shtetl, the Jews who once occupied liminal spaces were now in the spotlight, and what was once a liminal space was now the landscape of collective anxiety, fantasy, social experimentation, and literary invention. On the eve of the Holocaust, marginality was at the heart of the Jewish question.

Meir's study is not, however, merely about the central role of marginality in the modernization of the Jews, nor is his intent solely to use marginality as a lens to view the Jewish question. Stepchildren of the Shtetl excavates a facet of Jewish society long neglected by historians. And therein lies the most important aspect of Meir's methodology: his mining of a dizzying array of sources for fragments of insight. Where necessary, he frames Russian Jewry's approach to the disabled, destitute, and downtrodden against the backdrop of their premodern ancestors, drawing from medieval rabbinic commentary, the Talmud, and the Bible to illustrate how marginality did not always connote invisibility in Judaism. Meir is equally well versed in disability studies, a relatively young discipline, whose conceptual frameworks can provide historians with new tools to paint a more complete picture of a civilization decimated during the Holocaust. His objective is to give voice to those who have hitherto remained voiceless.

Listening to the voices of the voiceless accounts for what is perhaps Meir's most unconventional source: fiction. Although using literature as a window into the past is commonplace among historians today, Jewish fiction, primarily set in the proverbial shtetl, makes up a conspicuously large percentage of the book's material in most chapters. Stories such as Mendele Moykher Sforim's Fishke the Lame, I. L. Peretz's “From the Madhouse,” as well as early modern Purim-shpiels (comedic popular plays performed on Purim, replete with irreverent jokes and songs) are given ample space and analyzed as if they are based on events that may have transpired. Meir is well aware of the methodological quandary this raises. “How was the voice of a beggar, a poor orphan, or a disabled person to enter into the historical record?” (240), he asks in his conclusion, given that their voices are almost always mediated through a relative, a rabbi, or a judge in our more conventional sources. Yet literature (fictional or otherwise) is no less mediated than police reports. The cholera wedding in Fishke the Lame may be the most graphic depiction we have of this seemingly bizarre ritual, and, however accurate it may be, it is nonetheless recounted through Mendele's mediation. Meir realizes this, and, he concedes, literature reconstructs these voices in “extraordinary ways, but ultimately it has its limitations” (241). And although we must accept these limitations, imperfect material does not worthless material make; discarding it would severely impoverish the historical record. Meir should be commended for maximizing this resource while acknowledging its shortcomings.

Natan Meir's Stepchildren of the Shtetl is a remarkable work. Drawing from Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish sources, equally anchored in the deep recesses of the Jewish past and the latest innovations in disability and gender studies, Meir has given us as much of a glimpse into the margins of east European Jewry as possible. And he links what he finds to the larger story of the Jews at this juncture: the tortuous and ambivalent entry of a historically Othered people into a modernizing region of Europe that often continued to see its Jews as marginal.