Is anatevka a real town

Answer 1

Anatevka is a fictional "shtetl", or small Jewish town, in what what once known as the "Pale of Settlement", an area of Imperial Russia where Jews were allowed to set up restricted, but permanent, settlements. Jews were generally not allowed to reside in Russia outside of the Pale.
The area of the "Pale" was about 20% of what was then European Russia, and is today areas of Poland, Ukraine, Baltic countries, western Russia, etc.
The Pale was first created by Catherine the Great in 1791, and continued to exist until 1917 when it was officially dissolved by the post Czarist Provisional Government.
The concentration of Jews in the Pale made them easy targets for pogroms and persecution, but also fostered the development of a distinct culture, and many of the continuing institutions and traditions of Jewish life.
At it's peak, about 40% of the world's Jews lived in the Pale (about 5 million). But between 1881 and 1914 due to the harsh conditions, the violence of the pogroms, and the anti-semitic "May Laws", 2 million Jews migrated from the Pale, mainly to the United States.
The book of stories ("Tevye and his Daughters") on which "Fiddler on the Roof" is based was published in 1894. The author, Sholem Aleichem, was born in 1859 to a poor family in a town called Pereiaslav, near Kiev and later lived in Odessa and Kiev (all in today's Ukraine). Anatevka, although a fictional name, would most realistically be a "shtetl" village located in this area around Kiev of the now extinct "Pale of Settlement".
The story in Fiddler seems to take place around the time of the massive pogroms of 1881-1883 (sparked by the assassination of the Czar in 1881, which was blamed on the Jews) and the enactment of the "May Laws" in 1882. But the story also seems to include events that took place in the early 20th century, leading up to the Russian Revolution 0f 1905.

for more see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Revolution_(1905 )
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_of_Settlement
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sholom_Aleichem


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