New Books In Eastern European Studies

How does a language develop? What are the factors and processes that shape a language and reflect the changes it undergoes? These seemingly routine questions entail a conversation that involves not only linguistic phenomena, but historical, sociological, and literary issues as well. Andrii Danylenko’s From the Bible to Shakespeare: Pantelejmon Kuliš (1819-1897) and the Formation of Literary Ukrainian (Academic Studies Press, 2016) offers a compelling investigation of the development of the Ukrainian language and discusses how the creative input of an individual writer and a translator may engage with the process of language creation. Pantelejmon Kuliš, as Danylenko emphasizes, is a controversial figure in the history of Ukrainian literature: he is attributed with persistent resistance against linguistic rigidity and stagnation. As From the Bible to Shakespeare demonstrates, Kuliš was driven by his passion for writing and translation that provided space for creative interactions, filled with a strong potential

Most of the Jews and other victims the Nazis murdered in the Holocaust were from Eastern Europe, and the vast majority of the actual killing was done there. In his new book,  The Holocaust in Eastern Europe (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), Waitman Beorn gives us a detailed overview of the Holocaust precisely here, in what he well called “the Epicenter of the Final Solution.” Waitman does an excellent job of describing Eastern European Jewry, the crooked path the Nazis took in deciding to attempt to obliterate it, the various ways in which they put that horrible decision into practice, and the ways the Jews resisted. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Wojtek Sawa‘s The Wall Speaks: Voices of the Unheard (National Center of Culture, 2016) is a bilingual Polish-English project that engages with the intricacies of remembering and forgetting as part of the individual’s personal history, which appears to challenge and collaborate with documented histories. Evolving out of personal memories, The Wall Speaks seeks to illuminate how the individual responds to overwhelming changes that shape and modify not only personal experiences but also collective memories. Although the emphasis is put on specific traumatic events—the core of the narrative constitutes stories of the Polish survivors who lived through World War II—this project reaches to individuals and communities which find themselves in a marginalized condition. The Wall Speaks is about Polish children and teenagers of World War II. It is also about people today who are prohibited from speaking with a voice of their own and are treated as less than fully human.” The personal stories/histories that Sawa assemb

How did Soviet Jews respond to the Holocaust and the devastating transformations that accompanied persecution? How was the Holocaust experienced, survived, and remembered by Jewish youth living in Soviet territory? Anika Walke, Assistant Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis, examines these important questions in Pioneers and Partisans: An Oral History of Nazi Genocide in Belorussia (Oxford University Press, 2015). Walke’s research is based largely on post-war oral histories and memoirs, and her sources include a number of interviews that she conducted herself. Walke examines the experiences of Jewish youth in a variety of contexts, including prewar daily life, ghetto persecution and survival, as well as participation in Soviet partisan units. In doing so, she reveals the complex interplay of (and at times, tension between) her subjects’ Jewish and Soviet identities. Walke highlights the enduring impact of 1930s Soviet policies of interethnic equality and solidarity, showing how memories

Sometime in the very early 1990s, while I was in grad school, I got a call from a student at Grinnell College, where I myself had graduated asking me about studying Poland. It was an engaging chat with a young woman very interested in exploring Poland and the relationship between Poles and Jews in contemporary Poland. Erica Lehrer‘s Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places (Indiana University Press, 2013) is the flower of that research, and it has been worth the wait. In the popular imagination, one of the most common tropes about contemporary Poland is that it is a land where Anti-Semitism thrives without any Jews. Sadly, the current PiS government’s policies regarding Polish history have only reinforced that judgment, but the story is much more complex, and in fact the first two decades of the post-Communist order saw a revival of interest in Jewish culture among Poles. At the same time, the end of Communism has also made traveling to Poland less daunting, with Jewish travelers among thos

How can war change women’s political mobilization? Using Rwanda and Bosnia as case studies Marie E. Berry answers these questions and more in her powerful new book, War, Women, and Power: From Violence to Mobilization in Rwanda and Bosnia Herzegovina (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Berry provides the reader with a solid history and background of how war came to be in each of these countries respectively. The book starts off by shedding light on the transformative nature of war and women’s political mobilization. Berry notes three major changes that are key throughout the book: demographic, economic, and cultural shifts. Starting with Rwanda, Berry sheds light on women’s roles as caregivers during and after the war, and how groups they formed for emotional support lead to starting programs and organizations. Moving to Bosnia, Berry lays out how this situation was similar and also different from Rwanda, noting, interestingly, that NGOs were basically non-existent there before the war. She concludes by notin

In what has become perhaps the most infamous example of modern anti-Jewish violence prior to the Holocaust, the Kishinev pogrom should have been a small story lost to us along with scores of other similar tragedies. Instead, Kishinev became an event of international intrigue, and lives on as the paradigmatic pogrom – a symbol of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. The facts of the event are simple: over the course of three days in a Russian town, 49 Jews were killed and 600 raped or injured by their neighbors, a thousand Jewish-owned houses and stores destroyed. What concerns Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History (Liveright/W. W. Norton, 2018) is less what happened and more the legacy, reception, and interpretation of those facts, both at the time and today. Pogrom is a study of the ways in which the events of Kishinev in 1903 astonishingly acted as a catalyst for leftist politics, new forms of anti-semitism, and the creation of an international involvement with the lives of Russian Jews. In an introduction th

In How the Wise Men Got to Chelm: The Life and Times of a Yiddish Folk Tradition (New York University Press, 2017), Ruth von Bernuth, Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures and Director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, presents the first in-depth study of Chelm literature and its relationship to its literary precursors. The Chelm stories surrounding the ‘wise men’ (fools) of this town constitute the best-known folktale tradition of the Jews of Eastern Europe. Bernuth’s book joins together a historical analysis of early modern and modern German and Yiddish literature to give us a compelling and insightful account of the history of these stories. Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingca

The cover of Amelia Glaser‘s new edited volume, Stories of Khmelnytsky: Competing Literary Legacies of the 1648 Ukrainian Cossack Uprising (Stanford University Press, 2015), bears a portrait of the formidable Cossack leader by that name. Inside the book, twelve contributing authors including Dr. Glaser, approach this legendary yet enigmatical figure from a number of perspectives—Jewish, Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Western—across the centuries, with plenty of overlap, assembling together a single, fragmented, but nonetheless collective narrative (3). Khmelnytsky’s seventeenth-century Cossack uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is—depending on your point-of-view—an event of national liberation, treacherous factionalism, murderous pogrom, or personal vendetta, (again) with plenty of overlap. And the image of the Cossack warrior, the free horseman on the open steppe, serves as many narratives, right up to the present day with Mr. Putin’s twenty-first century Ukrainian land grab. On today’s podcast

Today we talked to Dr. Anna Muller about her latest book, If the Walls Could Speak: Inside a Women’s Prison in Communist Poland (Oxford University Press, 2017). Using archival research as well as oral interviews with many of the women in her book, Muller paints a portrait of life within the walls of Polish prisons for political prisoners. From harrowing tales of interrogation, to the creation of friendships that outlast the length of prison sentences, Muller’s work illustrates how female political prisoners adapted to and survived lengthy prison sentences for various “political” crimes. Muller discusses the interrogation process the women experienced, how they adapted to life behind bars, the records written by spies placed in the cells with the political prisoners, and how the women attempted to redefine themselves within an environment that controlled their daily lives. Muller’s work is a fascinating look at women as subjects in the Communist period of Polish history as well as a glimpse into women as subje

In her new book, Imagining a Greater Germany: Republican Nationalism and the Idea of Anschluss (Cornell University Press, 2016), Erin Hochman, Associate Professor of Modern German and European History at Southern Methodist University offers a new perspective on state and national building in Germany and Austria during the interwar period. Hochman argues persuasively that nationalism and the goal of redrawing Germany’s borders was not only a goal of the radical right. She looks at how supporters of the Weimar and First Austrian republics used the idea of Anschluss as a way to support democracy. For these republicans their nationalism was in stark contrast to that of the radical right; it was inclusive and supported democracy. Hochman’s book convincingly demonstrates that the rise of Hitler was not certain and that the republics could have survived and thrived. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/

Names can be deceiving. Americans call the area where Moscow’s writ runs “Russia.” But the official name of this place is the “Russian Federation.” Federation of what, you ask? Well, there are a lot of people who live in “Russia” who are in important senses not Russians. There are Ingush, Buryats, Chechens, Mordvinians, Tatars, and many others. Russia, then, is a “Federation” of Russians and non-Russians. But even that’s not quite right. As Valerie Kivelson and Ronald Suny point out in their excellent book Russia’s Empires (Oxford University Press, 2016), Russia is really an empire, and has long been. Since the 16th century, Moscow has gathered, conquered, colonized, assimilated, or otherwise brought to heel a great number of places occupied by people who were not Russians. Russians built this empire for different reasons at different times; it grew and (especially recently) it shrank. But it was always there, and still is. Kivelson and Suny convincingly argue that nothing about Russia—past or present—can re

Who, or what, are Hasidim? A movement that was once mysterious and inaccessible has recently risen to the forefront of popular consciousness. Whether it be in last years acclaimed film Menashe, the Netflix documentary One of Us, or the latest episode of HBO’s High Maintenance, in addition to many popular memoirs, online forums, there is a new fascination with Hasidism. In a sense, this discourse centers around questions of religion and state, community and family, and “traditional life” in a modern context—larger themes that touch some of our most pressing problems. Hasidism: A New History (Princeton University Press, 2018) is the result of a monumental collaborative effort by seven scholars over the course of four years to compose the first total history of Hasidism. The team included David Biale, David Assaf, Benjamin Brown, Uriel Gellman, Samuel Heilman, Moshe Rosman, Gadi Sagiv, and Marcin Wodzinski. It shows the ways in which this movement, in its many distinct flavors, was fluid enough to adapt to its

In The Singing Turk: Ottoman Power and Operatic Emotions on the European Stage from the Siege of Vienna to the Age of Napoleon (Stanford University Press, 2016), Larry Wolff takes us into that distinctly European art form, the opera, to show us the reflection of European ideas of Ottoman Turkey in the modern period. Beginning in 1683 when Ottoman guns shook the walls of Vienna, through a long eighteenth century, and up to Napoleon’s military supremacy in the nineteenth, when Turkish conquest of Europe was “no longer really imaginable” (402), the singing Turk in one form or another, dazzled, terrified, and enchanted European audiences from Vienna, to Venice, to Paris. Professor Wolff’s discussion of the music—its creation, its reception, and its context—is richly entertaining and accessible to the layman. It also reveals important currents in political and cultural thought during the Enlightenment in a Europe with ever-broader horizons. Professor Wolff moves between decades and opera houses, to argue that, rat

In his new book, The Economy of Ethnic Cleansing: The Transformation of German-Czech Borderlands after World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2017), David Gerlach, Associate Professor of History at Saint Peter’s University, examines the expulsion of nearly 3 million Germans from the Czech-German borderlands. Dr. Gerlach looks extensively at the economic factors that led to the expulsion of Germans from this area. He argues convincingly how the promise of property and social mobility contributed to the course and outcomes of ethnic cleansing. Ultimately, he demonstrates how the conflict between Czechs and Germans helped to facilitate the rise of the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Russia in Flames: War, Revolution, Civil War, 1914-1921 (Oxford University Press, 2017) is a masterful account of the Russian revolutionary era by Laura Engelstein, Professor Emerita at Yale University. Spanning the pre-revolutionary period immediately prior the First World War to the end of the Russian Civil War, Russia in Flames provides a rich and comprehensive view of the whys and the wherefores of Revolutionary Russia. Russia in Flames provides both the academic and the general reader with a rich and flowing account of the seminal event of the twentieth century. All from the historian who is in the words of the periodical Kritika: “one of the most important figures in the field of Russian history” today. Charles Coutinho holds a doctorate in history from New York University. Where he studied with Tony Judt, Stewart Stehlin and McGeorge Bundy. His Ph. D. dissertation was on Anglo-American relations in the run-up to the Suez Crisis of 1956. His area of specialization is 19th and 20th-century European,

One of the most important developments in Holocaust Studies over the past couple decades has been one of scale. Rather than focus on decision making at the national or regional level, scholars are immersing themselves in the deep history of a small town or camp. In doing so you may miss the debates of diplomats and politicians. But you get a much better idea of how people actually experienced the Holocaust. Omer Bartov’s new book Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (Simon and Schuster, 2018) is a superb example of this trend. Bartov spent two decades immersed in archives across the world. He knows his characters, Polish, Jewish, German and Ukrainian, inside and out. His explanations for their actions and descriptions are fully convincing because they are so fully imagined and described. It is because of this attention to detail that his conclusions are so sobering. He describes policeman, soldiers, neighbors and victims living lives that were intertwined. The killers here were

In Bad Rabbi And Other Strange But True Stories from the Yiddish Press (Stanford University Press, 2017), Eddy Portnoy, Academic Advisor and Exhibitions Curator at the YIVO Institute for Yiddish Research, delves into the archives of the Yiddish press to reveal the passionate and tumultuous world of Yiddish cultures in New York and Warsaw in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Portnoy describes this world as Yiddishland, a nation in which all the high and low expressions of culture not only occurred but were carefully and colorfully relayed by Yiddish journalists, including the young Isaac Bashevis Singer and his older brother, Israel Joshua Singer. A treasure for both researchers and general readership, Bad Rabbi brings to life the passionate, chaotic, and sometimes violent communal life of the Yiddish-speaking urban world that flourished prior to World War II on both sides of the Atlantic, and that was documented by some of Yiddish culture’s keenest eyes and finest writers. David Gottlieb

In Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Postsocialist Ukraine (Indiana University Press, 2010), Sarah D. Phillips offers a compelling investigation of disability policies and movements in Ukraine after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Scrupulously studied and researched, the data that the author presents reflect social and political changes that have been taking place in the country. Most importantly, this study is centered around people, around the lives of people who change our perception of life, love, and care and our understanding of self and other. In this regard, Sarah Phillips explores how official policies and informal movements, connected with the framing of the concept of disability, shape the ways people with physical impairments are integrated into social consciousness. As Sarah Phillips’s study shows, the concept of disability in Ukraine has undergone considerable transformations which were conditioned and triggered by historical circumstances. A particular attention is given to the Sovi

On March 4, 1953, Soviet citizens woke up to an unthinkable announcement: Joseph Stalin, the country’s all-powerful leader, had died of a stroke. In The Last Days of Stalin (Yale University Press, 2016), Joshua Rubenstein recounts the events surrounding the dictator’s death and the sociopolitical vacuum it opened up at home and abroad. After Stalin did not emerge from his room on the morning of March 1, a maid who was sent into his room found him lying in his own urine; doctors’ efforts to save him, including the application of leeches, proved hopeless. The following weeks brought mass grief and halting attempts at reform, including a mass amnesty of Gulag prisoners. Rubenstein argues that the months following Stalin’s death were a missed opportunity for a de-escalation of the Cold War. While Pravda published Eisenhower’s famous chance for peace speech and Soviet officials expressed willingness to negotiate, the State Department under John Foster Dulles viewed Soviet concessions as a moral challenge to resist