This study suggests how traditional language-rich narrative histories of the Pale of Settlement
can benefit from drawing on the large vocabularies questions theories and analytical methods
of human geography economics and the social sciences for an understanding of how Jewish
communities responded to multiple disruptions during the nineteenth century. Moving from the
ecological level of systems of settlements and variations among individual ones down to the
immediate built environment the book explores how both physical and human space influenced
responses to everyday lives and emigration to America.
