PositiveThe Chicago Review of Books... imaginative ... While on the whole a well-executed first novel, The Lost Shtetl is not without its flaws. The dialogue lags at times, and there are a few scenes that would have benefited from substantial further emendation ... Gross deserves credit for bringing some novelty and nuance to a milieu where cliché is the order of the day. Though stuck in the 1890s, the provincial inhabitants of Gross’s Kreskol are neither rubes nor yokels and resist easy pigeonholing as Tevye or Motel Kamzoil lookalikes. Throughout the novel, Gross endows Kreskol’s residents with intelligence and an ability to make judgments based on interests rather than passions. This sets The Lost Shtetl apart from the many trope-ridden works in which the denizens of the shtetl — and Yiddish speakers more generally — are denied their rational faculties, whether as happy-go-lucky hicks or perpetual sufferers ... the outdated ways of Kreskol’s provincial inhabitants and the absurdity of their general situation do make for some successful humorous sequences. But more often Gross’s characters are busy trying to figure out how to make their way in a world that has long since left them behind. Their triumphs and travails in the face of encroaching modernity are alternately amusing, affecting, and convincing ... Indeed, modernity even obliterates the ability of the author to imagine an ending in which the shtetl survives; though free to develop his magical-realist timeline however he so wishes, Gross cannot bring himself to let Kreskol continue any further into the twenty-first century. This is perhaps disappointing. But we shouldn’t blame the author for the town’s second, final disappearance; we knew, on some level, what we were getting into. The book is called The Lost Shtetl for a reason.
