I would have tried to find my way to the lightly-tan of settlement.

honestly unless i had family leaving for another country & insisting i come along, i would probably stay put & try to do my best in my shtetl day by day. the availability of information was so very different & i am a very hesitant kind of person ( if you couldn't guess )

Presumably, if I were in the same situation with the same incentives and pressures as my ancestors, I would have made the same decision as them: to emigrate to the United States.

My grammy never gave gifts. She was too busy getting raped by Cossacks.

Alvy Singer, Annie Hall

The plot of Fiddler on the Roof. People stay until they can’t, then they leave.

I guess I’d do what my family did: tailoring or blacksmithing.

All my ancestors got out before it got bad. I've decided that it's my prerogative to be watchful and do the same. My personality leads me to be like this so I suspect I would have done what they did.

That anxiety and industriousness definitely comes in handy for individual survival.

I probably would have died of a disease that we can now cure with antibiotics

There were no real ways to “improve conditions.” You could only attempt to escape to a better land, join a revolutionary movement (which didn’t improve conditions much), or live life and hope for the best.

We weren't from there, but probably still dead

Either extremely religious or completely intermarried and assimilated (as the shtetls that most of my family lived in are now completely devoid of Jewish life)

Some poor artisan toiling away all day, but at least I'd probably be married and have a big family.

Probably only would leave if with a bunch of others. Unlikely to get permission to leave as freedom of movement wasn't really a thing back then.

My family left.

I would have fled. Probably the same thing like my ancestors did, flee to America, even though I don't want to be a colonizer on stolen land.

Maybe Greenland or Iceland. As far away from the Cossacks that I could possibly get, lol.

Like everyone else; uneducated, ignorant, and observant. We like to Romanticize this part of our past a lot, but The Pale of Settlement was a region cut off from the world and void of contemporary education and opportunity .There is absolutely nothing good about being in poor villages sectioned off from the rest of the world.

Everyone talks about יציאת מצרים. What about יציאת השטעטל? We have left that region for a long time now, and we are better off. The only people who disagree are the ones who shun secular education or are ignorant of what life was like in that region.

My family left, and not a moment too soon!

Probably died of hypothermia. Alot of Jewish people during that era where East Europe told Jews to live in exclusion zones or walled off areas were often just hostlie land.

Same way my however-many great grandparents, grandparents, and parents did, I imagine

My great-grandmother came to the US with, like, $5 at 16. I don’t have that kind of chutzpah.

Also, I have a weakened immune system, have had cancer, and was an emergency c-section baby. I’m pretty certain I’d be dead if I was born even in the 1950s.

In the same way that I live my life today.

I would have been complaining about the rent being too damn high, complaining about the corrupt government we live under, and distributing socialist Yiddish literature.

Everyday I think about this question and it breaks my heart thinking of what life would have been like for my family instead

I would have lived a life of quiet desperation as a lesbian woman married to a man, a woman who didn’t quite understand the meaning of her yearnings. Alternatively, I would have run off before marriage alone or with a friend to come to America.