Back in the shtetl, you were too busy trying to make a living to spend much time in the beis medrash. The reality of shtetl life doesn’t shtim with your romantic vision. For the vast majority of Jews in the Russian empire, formal Jewish education ended at bar mitzvah. Only the very few who either had wealth or were from rabbinic families were able to continue learning into young adulthood. Of course, informal learning continued. There were chaburos for Mishna, Gemorah, etc. but the idea that the the shtetl was some kind of idyllic Jewish refuge is nonsense. To paraphrase Dickens, life in the shtetl was “Like an English winter day. Dirty, dark and short.”
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