Shtetl Love Song

In ‘Shtetl Love Song’ Grigory Kanovich tells the story of his mother and in doing so peels back the surface of the Jewish community that lived in pre-war Lithuania. Set against the backdrop of the political turmoil of 1930s, Kanovich lovingly recalls his native Jonava; its rich merchants and impoverished cobblers, the beggars and the gossips.

He traces the growing fear of the Nazis, the Russian invasion, the political persecution and the arrests and the exiles that shaped a nation. ‘Shtetl Love Song’ is a requiem for the pre-war Jewish shtetl, for a people and a way of life that was destroyed in the maelstrom of war.

‘I had intended for quite a long time to write about my mother with that joyous enthusiasm and abundant detail with which it is fitting to recall one's parents, the people closest and dearest to you’