Välkommen to My Old Shtetl

Here’s a great blog post from Frances Archer about the neighborhood up in which I grew, North Park, in Chicago:

A few weeks ago I told you I grew up in what amounted to a shtetl, an Old World Jewish town, on Chicago’s Far North Side. That’s not quite the whole story. A single point of origin never is the whole story for one of the city’s ever-evolving ethnic neighborhoods.

In the sixties my neighborhood, Hollywood Park, was predominantly Jewish but it also had a good number of Scandinavian, specifically Swedish and Norwegian, families. Danny Miller, another former Hollywood Park resident and one of the bloggers who inspires me, humorously recalls a battle between Swedes and Jews during the annual Christmas carolling at our elementary school.

For more click here.

Other posts by Frances Archer about Chicago’s North Park and Hollywood Park neighborhoods:

That Old Swedish-Jewish Neighborhood

Mom and Pop

Mom and Pop Part Two