The shtetl: Mostly fabricated?

 As regular readers here know, I sometimes blog about art, classical music and literature (like poetry) as well as philosophy and critical religion.

I'm not a big movies buff, but I do have a few favorites among classics and semi-classics. A biggie? "Fiddler on the Roof." (I fancy myself as a bit like a thinner Topol when wearing my Greek fisherman's cap.)

Of course, the "typical" East European shtetl is the backdrop.

What if much of our received ideas about the shtetl were essentially fabricated? That's the claim of a long-ago New York Times piece about the 1930s photography of Roman Vishnaic, including its framing, selective editing, selective juxtapositioning, misuse of cutlines, commissioning and more. The piece is here at Scribd to dodge paywalls. Beyond all that, I didn't realize that in Yiddish, a "shtetl" isn't a "village." That would be a "dorp," straight up from German. A "shtetl" is halfway between it and a "shtot," straight up from the German "stadt," or city. (I'm unsure of the etymology of "shtetl.") Anyway, that alone says that the "framing" of "Fiddler on the Roof," while charming, is really not true. It should have a community with 5-10 times that population, probably.