Searching for Butsnevits: A Shtetl Tale by Jack Rothman

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This is a story of discovery. Like many kids in immigrant families, I avoided dealing with “old country” family history–and like many of us, I was later moved to go on a quest to discover my roots. This book, Searching for Butsnevits: A Shtetl Tale, is part autobiography, part social history, and part detective story–where the search is for a missing community rather than a missing person.

The book is an encounter with the past, with the history of my family in Ukraine in the early 1900s, and includes information about Jewish life in the area and what’s happened since to the place and the people, as well as a rare firsthand account of the flight of my family from Ukraine in 1920 in the wake of the pogroms that swept the country following the Russian Revolution.