SOURCE: Anders, Jaroslaw. “Poles Apart.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (12 October 1997): 10.

In the following review, Anders discusses Hoffman's theories about the roots of Polish anti-Semitism in Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews.

[Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews] was conceived as a companion volume to a documentary of the same title made by Marian Marzynski that aired on the PBS news show Frontline in April 1996. It has become much more than that three-hour film; Shtetl is a thoroughly researched and powerfully written guidebook to one of the most contested areas of recent European past.

Marzynski, a Polish filmmaker living in Chicago, visited Bransk, one of the former shtetls, or Jewish settlements, in eastern Poland to probe the memories of its now exclusively Polish population about their former Jewish neighbors whose...