Shtetl Revealed | Language of the Village (inset), by Tom Glick

Tom Glick, who taught history at Boston University, is an artist as well as a historian. He uses pages of the Forward, an iconic Yiddish daily, in his layered art. Melted white beeswax provides a transparent surface over the Yiddish words. “I wanted the language to be elusive,” he writes, “for the viewer to have to struggle to understand the writing. The writing, like the language itself and those who spoke it, was under attack.” He layers in drawings of shtetls, small rural villages inhabited by Yiddish speakers in Eastern Europe. Glick was founder and director of the Shtetl Economic History Project, which documented shtetl life in the late 19th century through the 20th century.