SOURCE: Review of Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews, by Eva Hoffman. Publishers Weekly 244, no. 35 (25 August 1997): 53.

In the following review, the critic lauds Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews as objective and well-researched.

Anticipating controversy like that engendered by Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, Hoffman sets out to determine Poland's complicity in the Holocaust in Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews. Although her Jewish parents had been harbored for two years during the war by a Polish peasant, and she herself was born in Cracow, Hoffman proves to be objectively tough-minded in weighing both documented and anecdotal evidence, observing that the country is the embattled terrain of three competing sets of memory: Jewish, Polish and Western.

Historicizing her well-researched study, Hoffman...