Shetl Days is an Alternate History short story by Harry Turtledove. It can be read for free online here
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Jakub Shlayfer is a Polish Jew in the small village of Wawolnice in the early 20th Century. He ekes out a living as a knife sharpener and Jack-of-all-trades dealing with the daily struggles of poverty, his unpleasable wife Bertha, arguments with his fellow Jews over the finer points of theology and tension with the Polish majority in the village. Except that's not true at all. Jakub Shlayfer is actually Veit Harlan, and Bertha is his real-life wife Kristina Söderbaum. They are German actors who, along with dozens of others, play Jews in a theme park built by the Greater German Reich a hundred years after the glorious victory in the War of Retribution.
Veit and his coworkers have been playing their roles for years now, and what started out as just a steady gig has become very different. It's hard to tell where Jakub ends and Veit begins anymore, and he's not the only one. All the real Jews were exterminated long before any of the park employees were born, but if you pretend to be a Jew every day of your life for years on end, when do you start to become one?
This story contains examples of:
- Alternate-History Nazi Victory: The Nazis won the war and appear to have Taken Over The World.
- Becoming the Mask: A group of actors spend their days portraying the inhabitants of a small Jewish community, for the entertainment of citizens of a triumphant 21st-century Third Reich. All of the Jews who actually lived in the region have long since been slain. But the entire group of actors, unbeknownst to the Reich, have begun adopting Jewish customs, attitudes, and beliefs in their own lives, and think of themselves as heirs to the Jewish tradition.
- Big Brother Is Watching You: The Reich's system of surveillance is basically identical to Oceania in Nineteen Eighty-Four. They have microphones everywhere, and they're always listening. Of course, they can't listen to everyone all at once, so they're probably not listening to you right now, but can you take the risk? Several times Veit/Jakub weighs the risk of saying what he wants to say, and whether he trusts the person he's talking to.
- The Church: The German Christian Church is the state religion of the Reich, no other religions or even permitted Christian denominations are mentioned. It's explicitly stated that the Church really worships the Reich, not God.
- Crapsaccharine World: The Reich provides a high material standard of living (for Aryans), but it's artistically bereft, the SS can detain and interrogate anyone they like whenever they feel like it, and everyone is constantly fearful and suspicious of their neighbours. This is why the actors started to prefer their roles to their actual lives- they may be poor, but they're part of a real community which nobody in the outside world is.
- Creative Sterility: The television, films and plays produced by the Reich are described as nothing but "pap and revivals". That's one reason why Veit/Jakub and Kristina/Bertha took the jobs with Wawolnice. It was a chance to do something else.
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Dyeing for Your Art: Kristina/Bertha shaved off her natural blond hair for the role of an Orthodox Jewish woman, and presumably the other actresses at the park did too. - Gone Horribly Right: The park from the Nazi's perspective. They systematically exterminated all the Jews in the world, then decided to have actors pretend to be them in order to show the world the inferior people they destroyed. They had the actors perfectly replicate a Jewish community until they basically became one, essentially recreating a people that had successfully wiped out.
- Good Shepherd: Reb Eliezer (real name Ferdinand Marian) as the "Rabbi" of the "Jews" in Wawolnice. Unlike the others, he wasn't an actor before coming to the park, he was a Christian minister who was chosen for the role because his training and consequent knowledge of Hebrew and Aramaic made him perfectly suited to play a Rabbi. He also becomes their unofficial leader outside the park as well.
- Japanese Tourist: The park is a popular attraction for them.
- Made a Slave: The few surviving Slavs in the Reich are used as slave labour.
- Method Acting: The "Jews" never break character on the job. Even when Veit/Jakub is being interrogated by the SS he won't drop the act without direct instructions from his boss.
- Misaimed Fandom: In-Universe, the Nazis love Frederick the Great and Voltaire, both of whom would have been horrified by the Reich. Albeit not entirely for the same reasons modern people would be.
- The Mole: Veit/Jakub strongly suspects that at least one of the actors is actually a plant by the SS. For a while he thought Reb Eliezer might be it, but eventually realises that if Eliezer was going to turn them in he would have done it by now.
- No Woman's Land: Downplayed. The Nazi-ruled world is clearly very patriarchal. Even in the mid-21st Century it's taken for granted that the wife does all the cooking and cleaning
- Properly Paranoid: The Judaised actors are well aware that they'll be executed if they get caught, so they're very careful not to arouse suspicion. Veit and Kristina fast on Yom Kippur; but they turn on their oven for as long as it should take to cook something, sit at the table and talk for an appropriate amount of time and wash their perfectly clean dishes, so anyone who listens in or checks their utility usage won't see anything unusual.
- When Veit briefly falls under suspicion, he and Kristina make a point of going to a crowded restaurant that night and ordering two very non-Kosher meals, making sure plenty of people see them eat every bite. Then they go a few more times over the next couple of weeks, as either a one-off visit or going every night would also be suspicious.
- Public Execution: Hangings and beheadings are broadcast on TV along with football and bad sitcoms. The park occasionally stages "pogroms" where the actors playing Poles "riot" and beat convicts dressed as Jews to death in front of paying spectators.
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Spiritual Successor: To In the Presence of Mine Enemies by the same author. Both stories deal with a secret "Jewish" community in a world ruled by Nazis, albeit from completely different angles. The protagonists of Enemies are crypto-Jews hiding from the Reich by pretending to be Aryans; however, the "Jews" in Shetl Days are ethnic Germans who have adopted Jewish traditions and culture and are Hidden in Plain Sight as certified Aryans whose job is to pretend to be Jewish. - State Sec: The OG Schutzstaffel are alive and well in this timeline.
- Theme Park Version: Subverted, Wawolnice is a painstaking historically accurate representation of an interwar period Polish village down to the smallest detail. It's mentioned that when it was first starting out, the actors played their characters as over-the-top antisemitic stereotypes, but as time went on they made them more nuanced.
- 20 Minutes in the Future: It's set at some point in the 2040's.
