To locate a shtetl (a small town or village where there was a Jewish community), the free, nonprofit Jewish genealogy web site JewishGen has several useful tools.
First, as has been recommended on similar questions, the JewishGen Communities Database and JewishGen Gazetteer (https://www.jewishgen.org/Communities/) allow you to search among approximately 6,000 places where there were Jewish communities, with options for searching by what the name of the town sounds like, and by restricting geographically, or seeing results with the distance from a city or town you specify, so that you can find another place which is nearby.
Second, the mailing lists on JewishGen allow you to ask questions like this to an audience who are familiar with the use of the tools above, and with the geography of many former Jewish communities. To sign up to read and post to those mailing lists you will need to register for an account on JewishGen, which is free. In addition to a general mailing list, there are also mailing lists for special interests, many of which are by country such as Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, etc.
Third, it may be possible to either speak to a relative who remembers the name of the town differently, or to find documents which list the name of the town. Documents which could include a person's town of birth include naturalization documents, death records, and immigration records. (Finding those documents is a huge topic which is better covered outside this answer.)