Daughter of the Shtetl

Doba-Mera Medvedeva belongs to a vanishing group of memoirists who are neither elite nor highly literate, but whose observations from the ground cast a vivid light on a lost world. A born story-teller whose first language was Yiddish, Medvedeva kept Russian-language notebooks to preserve her past for her Russian-speaking grandchildren. We see in the book the quarrelsome underside of shtetl life—family divisions in a time of scarce resources—and also her attempts to break free, through work, revolution, and, eventually, marriage. She lived through pogroms and two world wars, but she endured, remembered, and wrote.