...witty and sagacious ... The persistence of anti-Semitism after the Holocaust has been an enduring theme for American writers, from Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth to more contemporary writers like Michael Chabon ... Gross earns a spot in that company because he grasps that the subject remains urgent ... a potent cautionary tale.

First-time novelist Max Gross is funny, insightful and mysterious in sharing what is essentially a coming-of-age story ... The Lost Shtetl is a fascinating combination of adventure, laughs and heartache, perfect for fans of Michael Chabon.

In presenting this entertaining 'what if' of a novel, Gross also asks readers to think critically about modernity and identity, community and transformation, and the meaning of home. He ponders cultural and familial inheritance and the modern condition, even while telling a delightfully improbable story. In the tradition of tall tales, The Lost Shtetl is silly and wondrous yet thoughtful and smart. Gross’ narrative is sprawling and still controlled --- engaging, funny and heartbreaking all at once. Only the authorial or editorial condition to unnecessarily footnote Jewish terms and Polish vocabulary may take readers out of this world ... Gross’ questions and answers here are profoundly Jewish, but they parallel so many universal concerns about what is lost and what is gained as nations and communities are impacted by the gifts and horrors brought with the march of time and as individuals are altered by the joys and aches of love.

... 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 the outdated ways of Kreskol’s provincial inhabitants and the absurdity of their general situation do make for some successful humorous sequences.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.

Gross’ debut novel unfolds with a transfixing, howlingly funny and achingly sad tale of incompatible cultures colliding with the looping, shaggy dog humor of Jonas Jonasson, and delightful echoes of Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, and Woody Allen’s Sleeper ... The Lost Shtetl’s funniest and saddest episodes concern Yankel’s misadventures in modern-day Poland, and his hapless pursuit of Pesha Lindauer through a 21st century world that is foreign and mostly unfriendly to both of them ... Gross captures his travels in the new world and his partial assimilation into it with estimable grace and humor and a strikingly perceptive sense of how such an encounter would go ... Gross also renders the other side of this culture clash with great acuity, intuiting how stumbling upon a thriving remnant of the decimated pre-war Jewry might strike contemporary Poles, particularly as suspicions of Kreskol’s authenticity and motives for presenting itself as a true lost shtetl come into question, and bring Jewish-Polish relations back to a familiar, if nearly forgotten boiling point. After all, given the painful, violent, and repressive history of Jewish shtetl life in often hostile European countries, the Jewish past is a lot easier to sentimentalize when it stays in the past and in the Pale ... Such a collision is indeed stupefying to consider in its tragically absurd impossibility, and in Gross’ able and lively telling, it makes for wildly provocative, comical, and absorbing reading.

If Gross’ debut novel is not an unambiguously happy story—not only the Holocaust, but the random cruelty of fate and the general stupidity of humankind have fingers in the pie—it is great fun, packed with warmth, humor, and delightful Yiddish expressions ... Yankel is an unlikely but endearing hero, and his adventures in the world of smartphones and underarm deodorant unfold in unexpected, entertaining, and sometimes very sad ways ... Imaginative and philosophical, funny and sad, old and new—mazel tov, Mr. Gross.

...lively and imaginative ... Gross’s entertaining, sometimes disquieting tale delivers laugh-out-loud moments and deep insight on human foolishness, resilience, and faith.