New Books in Eastern European Studies

In YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Cecile E. Kuznitz, Associate Professor of Jewish History and Director of Jewish Studies at Bard College, offers the first book-length history of YIVO, the center for Yiddish scholarship founded in the 1920s by a group of Eastern European Jewish intellectuals.  Could scholarship serve as the foundation for a diaspora nationalism? Kuznitz traces the ups and downs of YIVO, using unpublished documents from the center’s archives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

In 1636, King Wladyslaw IV’s quartermaster surveyed the houses of Wilno in advance of the king’s visit to the city. In Kith, Kin and Neighbors: Communities and Confessions in Seventeenth-Century Wilno (Cornell University Press, 2013), David Frick begins with this house-by-house account to reveal the complex relationships among the city’s multi-ethnic and multi-confessional inhabitants. He weaves in birth, marriage and death records, litigation filed by citizens against each other, as well as guild and poor relief roles, to demonstrate the “practices of toleration” that allowed Vilnans to cross confessional boundaries and to define separate identities. Frick reveals how Wilno’s Poles, Lithuanians Germans, Ruthenians, Jews and Tartars – representing Catholic, Uniate, Orthodox, Calvinist, Lutheran, Jewish and Muslim confessions – were able to live together in a mostly peaceful coexistence. Kith, Kin and Neighbors received the 2013 Przegl Wschodni Award, the 2014 Joseph Rothschild Prize from the Association for the Study of Nationalities, and the 2014 Kulczycki Book Prize in Polish Studies from the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

In the conventional narratives of Communist Poland, and Eastern Europe more generally, student activism tends to get short shrift. While the role of students in 1956 is unavoidable and widely acknowledged, after that their role and their relationship to the society at large has been minimized. The famous Kuron-Modzielewski letter of 1964 is treated first and foremost as an intra-elite affair, while the failure of the student protests in 1968 to provoke a broader movement as well as students’ subsequent lack of involvement in the protests of December 1970 have been taken as evidence of students’ lack of connection to broader society. Only in the late 1970s did was that gap bridged, first with founding of KOR after the strikes of 1976 and then during the Solidarity era. This account has been pervasive since the 1970s, and even people with only passing knowledge of Polish history have been exposed to it through Andrzej Wajda’s 1981 film “Man of Iron.” There the student turned factory worker Maciej Birkut recounts first being told by his father the former Stakhanovite turned worker activist that 1968 is not the right time to challenge the governments and then stands by in spite during the strikes of 1970 only to learn of his father’s death. Yet as so often happens when a historian take up a topic that has become so engrained that most people do not even stop to question it. In his new book Student Politics in Communist Poland: Generations of Consent and Dissent (Lexington Books, 2015), Tom Junes reveals that received narrative to be a myth that bears only partial connection to the truth. Covering the development of student politics in Poland from 1946 until the end of Communism, Junes argues that there were 8 distinct generations of students during that period, beginning with the students of the immediate postwar period whose worldview was shaped by their pre-War and War experiences to the students of the 1980s who embraced Solidarity, but felt betrayed by the roundtable negotiations that brought an end to Communist rule in 1989. It is a scrupulously researched book drawing on oral history as well as conventional primary source documents, and it was a pleasure to speak with Junes recently about his research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Prague, according to Derek Sayer, is the place “in which modernist dreams have time and again unraveled.” In this sweeping history of surrealism centered on Prague as both a physical location and the “magic capital” in the imagination of leading surrealists such as Andre Breton and Paul Aluard, Sayer takes the reader on a thematic journey from the beginning of the 20th century to the immediate post-war era. In this interview, Sayer talks about why surrealism – and, more importantly, why Prague – is central to understanding the 20th century and modernism. Through works of literature and works of architecture, Sayer demonstrates how Czech modernists pluralized visions of what modernist art should be. These Czech artists and architects were largely ignored in post-World War II exhibitions and histories of surrealism and modernism. With this book, Derek Sayer returns them to their proper place in the narrative. Prague, Capital of Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History (Princeton University Press, 2013) received the 2014 George L. Mosse Prize from the American Historical Association. The prize is awarded annually for an outstanding major work of extraordinary scholarly distinction, creativity, and originality in the intellectual and cultural history of Europe since the Renaissance. The book also received an honorable mention for the 2014 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize, awarded to the “most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline in the humanities or social sciences,” by The Association for Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Normally I don’t try and talk about two books in the same interview. But, in discussing the interview, Anton Weiss-Wendt suggested that it made sense to pair The Nazi Genocide of the Roma (Berghahn Books, 2015) and Racial Science in Hitler’s New Europe, 1938-1945 (University of Nebraska Press, 2013) together. His instinct was sound. While they deal with different subjects, they share a common approach and structure that casts new light on each subject individually and on the war more generally. Often, works on the Holocaust focus on Germany, Poland and the USSR while marginalizing smaller and weaker countries. The two books here certainly address these countries. But they do the topic a great service by bringing other areas to the forefront. Each book is structured geographically, with contributors examining the course of racial science or the genocide of the Roma in a specific country. This allows the authors to look in depth at the historical context that led to different decisions and ideas. And it allows them to honor the agency of Rumanians or Croations or Latvians rather than simply surveying German actions in specific regions. Such an approach might have led to a series of essays that ran parallel to each other without ever touching on common themes. Fortunately, Weiss-Wendt (and his co-editor, Rory Yeomans) make sure that doesn’t happen. Instead, the careful construction of the essays and the thoughtful introductions shed light on patterns of behavior and the interactions that shaped genocide across Eastern Europe. In doing so, they’ve added to our knowledge not just of the genocide of the Roma or of racial science, but of the role and actions of peoples heretofore largely ignored in the literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Jerzy Grotowsky and Tadeusz Kantor were influential in avant-garde theater in the West in the 1960s and 1970s, receiving high critical regard despite the fact that audiences could not understand the Polish language of the performances. In The Post-Traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor: History and Holocaust in ‘Akropolis’ and ‘Dead Class’ (Anthem Press, 2014), Magda Romanska bridges the disciplinary divides between theater studies and Slavic studies, between the history of Poland in the twentieth century and the history of avant-garde theatre, to place these works in a Polish and international context. Romanska asserts that critics and audiences in West, while appreciating the theater productions of Grotowski’s Akropolis and Kantor’s Dead Class, missed the “obscure, difficult, multi-layered, funny-sounding Polish glory, with all of the complex and convoluted contextual and textual details” of these works. She traces the Polish cultural and literary roots and the Jewish history and culture on which Kantor and Grotowsky drew. She also reveals how Polish audiences would have understood words, images and actions in these productions differently than audiences in the United States, France or Germany. In doing so, The Post-Traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor contributes to a deeper understanding of post-war Poland, its troubled engagement with the Holocaust and treatment of Polish Jewish citizens, and its interaction with the West. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Historians have spent the last two decades detailing and explaining the actions of the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union.  We now know much more than we used to about the escalation of violence in 1941 and the so-called “Holocaust by Bullets.” The actions of the Einsatzgruppen in Poland, in contrast, are less well known.But they are crucial to understanding the evolution of violence against Jews and others.JuergenMatthaus, Jochen Boehler, and Klaus-Michael Mallmann set out to fill this gap.Their work War, Pacification and Mass Murder, 1939:The Einsatzgruppen in Poland (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014)–part of theUnited StatesHolocaust Memorial Museum’s excellent Documenting Life and Destruction series–sets carefully chosen documents into a richly described military and institutional context. By doing so, they illustratenot just what the Einsatzgruppen did, but how theiractions evolved over time, how they interacted withWehrmacht and political leaders and how this violence impacted people on the ground. In the interview, I talked with Juergen Matthaus about the origin of the volume, the nature of violence in Poland and the way in which this violence set the stage for the escalation of persecution and destruction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

I’ll be leaving soon to take students on a European travel course. During the three weeks we’ll be gone, in addition to cathedrals, museums and castles, they’ll visit Auschwitz, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and a variety of other Holocaust related sights.  And I’ll ask them to think about what we can say about how people in East-Central Europe remember the Holocaust based on the places they’ve visited. This is not simply a matter of historical reckoning.  The responses to the recent op-ed by FBI director James Comey show how important the question is in contemporary politics.   They also show how limited our understanding of the dynamics of memory in Eastern Europe has been. My answers to the students’ questions will be enormously more sophisticated and thoughtful after having read the work of John-Paul Himka and Joanna Beata Michlic.  Their recent edited collection titled Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe (University of Nebraska Press, 2013) is a remarkable collection of essays.  The book surveys the state of memory and memorialization in each of the countries of the former Soviet Block.  It highlights broadly similar responses while explaining differences between the countries.  And the editors explain why they believe it is so important to, as they say, bring the dark past to light.  In doing so, they begin the process of bringing our understanding of the memory of the Holocaust in this region to the same level of sophistication we now bring to the subject in Western Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

In the late 1940s, tens of thousands of people – mostly young male peasants – streamed to southeastern Poland to help build Nowa Huta, the largest and most ambitious of Stalinist “socialist cities” in the new People’s Democracies. The town, built to house workers at the Lenin Steelworks (also under construction), was designed to implement economic and social change, but many of the plans went unfulfilled or even awry. In Unfinished Utopia: Nowa Huta, Stalinism and Polish Society, 1949-1956 (Cornell University Press, 2014), Katherine Lebow provides a fascinating analysis at the expectations and experiences of the Communist Party planners, the nationally-minded architects, the rural youth, women and Roma who created Nowa Huta. She places the construction of Nowa Huta more broadly in Polish history, linking it to visions of modernization in the interwar period, as well as situating it in the context of post-war Europe. Lebow argues that, in the end, “utopian visions of a new town for the masses were a luxury that Polish communism could not afford.” Unfinished Utopia received the 2014 Barbara Jelavich Book Prize from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

The period from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries witnessed a mass migration which carried millions of Jews from central and eastern Europe, north Africa, and the Ottoman Empire to new lands. Hasia Diner’s new book, Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migrations to the New World and the Peddlers Who Forged the Way (Yale University Press, 2015) examines this migration through the prism of the oft overlooked peddler. For the Jewish men arriving in the United States, Great Britain, South Africa, and Latin America, peddling was among the most prevalent of professions. It allowed those without large amounts of capital to quickly start their own businesses. Jewish men took to the roads, selling household items door to door in small towns, rural areas, mining camps and on Indian reservations. In the process, these men learned about the languages and cultures of their new homelands. At the same time, peddlers were agents of change and modernization, introducing their customers to new products, tastes and kinds of consumption, while linking rural areas to the cosmopolitan cultures of the big cities. Diner’s book analyzes the symbiotic relationship that developed between Jewish peddlers and the women whose homes they entered. Their intimate interactions facilitated Jewish integration, while often upsetting racial and gender norms. Peddling changed the lives of the peddlers and their customers during a transformative moment of modern Jewish history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies