Over the Rainbow

Simon Schama plunges us into the lost world of the shtetl, the Jewish towns and villages sewn across the hinterlands of eastern Europe which became the seedbed of a uniquely Jewish culture.

Shtetl culture would make its mark on the modern world, from the revolutionary politics of the Soviet Union to the mass culture of Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood. It was also the birthplaces of Hasidism, the most visible, iconic and, arguably, most misunderstood expression of Jewish faith and fervour.

This episode takes us from the forests of Lithuania, where Simon's own family logged wood and fought wolves, to the boulevards of Odessa, where shtetl kids argued the merits of revolutionary socialism over Zionism. From the Ukrainian city of Uman, where today thousands of the Hasidim chant and sing over the tomb of the wonder-working Rabbi Nachman, to the streets of Manhattan's lower east side, where the sons of shtetl immigrants wrote the American songbook. We return, with grim inevitability, to eastern Europe in 1940 where the genocidal mechanisms of the 'final solution' were beginning to grind the shtetl world into dust and ash.