Early on in the introduction to this at once luminous and elegiac book, Jeffrey Veidlinger notes that since World War II, the shtetl has been commonly portrayed as lost, vanished, or erased. In place of a tangible, physical existence, the shtetl, or eastern European market town with a significant Jewish population, has instead loomed large in both imagination and memory, shaped more by fictional portraits such as Fiddler on the Roof or quasi-ethnographic ones like Life Is with People, than by historical research, though a slew of recent publications has begun to address this imbalance. It is this almost mythical quality of the shtetl, a place saturated with meaning but seemingly outside history, which has created the “shadow” in which the flesh-and-blood subjects of Veidlinger's study have lived and, in an ever dwindling number of cases, continue to live.

In the Shadow of the Shtetl makes an important contribution to the growing body of literature that seeks to treat the shtetl as an object of historical research, joining recent works by Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Jeffrey Shandler, and others, just as it also adds to another body of research by scholars such as Anna Shternshis, David Shneer, Zvi Gitelman, Elissa Bemporad, and Kenneth Moss, that has reexamined the lives and cultural production of Jews in the Soviet Union. Likewise, its ethnographic component may be seen as an American counterpart to the contemporary fieldwork done among Jewish inhabitants in the same regions by Russian ethnographers such as Valery Dymshits and Alla Sokolova.

Working in collaboration with a team of researchers on the Archives of Historical and Ethnographic Yiddish Memories Project or AHEYM (which means “homeward” in Yiddish), Veidlinger, the project's codirector along with the linguist Dov-Ber Kerler, participated in a series of fieldwork expeditions to the towns of eastern Europe, focusing on the territories of the former Soviet Union which had earlier constituted the Pale of Settlement, an area that the Russian Jewish historian Simon Dubnow referred to as a kind of Jewish “Dark Continent.” Taking up the mantle of earlier figures such as the pioneering ethnographer S. An-sky, who led an expedition into the Pale from 1912–1914, Veidlinger and the other members of AHEYM succeeded in recording interviews with nearly four hundred Jews living in towns like Bratslav, Uman, Lutsk, and Berdichev. In the eastern European Jewish imaginary, these towns are rich with associations, both historical and legendary. They still exist on the map and, at least when the interviews were conducted, they still had some Jewish residents, but are they still shtetls in any meaningful way? Or does this aspect of their existence only persevere as a kind of shadow? These are some of the provocative and, at times, painful, questions raised by Veidlinger's book.

Combining historical and ethnographic methods, Veidlinger manages to create a collective portrait of several generations of Jews whose lives spanned most of the twentieth century and extended into the beginning of the twenty-first. While a large majority of those interviewed were born in the 1920s and ‘30s during the first decades of the Soviet Union, a few were born as early as 1912, which is to say, in the waning years of the Russian Empire. Along the way, they experienced collectivization, the rise and fall of a distinctly Soviet Yiddish culture, the Great Famine of 1932–33, the Holocaust on Soviet soil (a number survived ghettos or concentration camps), and, eventually, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the creation of the new-old (or is it old-new?) nation states that took its place. Taken together, their stories constitute an oral history of a long century of Jewish life in the towns of eastern Europe.

At the same time, Veidlinger succeeds in bringing to life the distinctive characteristics and experiences of individual interviewees. Thus, to give only one example, as children, some individuals attended a kheyder or even a yeshiva, where they were exposed to traditional Hebrew and Aramaic texts; others were educated in Soviet-era Yiddish-language schools; while still others studied in Russian or Ukrainian. Soon, the last of these individuals will pass away, their children and grandchildren having moved to larger cities, assimilated, or immigrated to Germany, Israel, the United States or elsewhere, and those who once lived in the shadow of the shtetl will also become history.