Rotti Michaels in The Teeth of Beasts speaks with nostalgia about Mstislavl, his home town, known to Rotti in Yiddish as Amtchislav.
A short Jewish history of what was then a very poor, shrinking, muddy little town, can be found in the Encylopaedia Judaica. All Jewish life in the town was ended on 15th October 1941 with a massacre by shooting of hundreds of people.
Here are some pictures and a mention of this defunct shtetl, from Rotti's time and ours.