New Books In Eastern European Studies

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

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

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

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

In her new book, Beautiful Balts: From Displaced Persons to New Australians (NewSouth Publishing, 2017), Jayne Persian, a Lecturer in History at the University of Southern Queensland, explores the history of mass migration of 170,000 Displaced Persons from postwar Eastern Europe to Australia in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Utilizing archives and interviews with these migrants, Persian tells the story of a people looking for a new life after the horrors of World War II, and the challenges and opportunities they found in Cold War Australia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Language is one of the complex systems facilitating communication; language is a system producing the inside and the outside of the individual’s awareness of self and other. However, language is also a tool for and of ideological battles, shaping states and nations. A multifaceted nature of language is emphasized and explored in an interdisciplinary collection of articles The Battle for Ukrainian: A Comparative Perspective (Harvard University Press/Ukrainian Research Institute, 2017), edited by Michael S. Flier and Andrea Graziosi. This collection developed with the crucial contribution of Lubomyr Hajda, who highlighted the importance of the comparative aspect that goes beyond specific historical contexts. As the editors mention in their introduction, The Battle for Ukrainian presents the proceedings of the conference States, Peoples, Languages: A Comparative Political History of Ukrainian, 1863-2013. One of the starting points for the scholarly discussion was the history of the Ukrainian language, which hap

As Bruce R. Berglund, points out in his terrific book Castle and Cathedral in Modern Prague: Longing for the Sacred in a Skeptical Age (CEU Press, 2017), the Czech Republic is an odd place, religion-wise. It’s among the most secular in the world, yet Czechs have a long tradition of believing in “Something.” They even have a thing called “Somethingism.” Just what that Something is and what that Something means for Czechs to do, of course, is and long has been the subject of debate. Bruce takes us into the heart of that debate in the interwar period, a time of great intellectual ferment and creativity in what was then Czechoslovakia. It turns out Czech intellectuals (Masaryk being the foremost of them) wanted the Czechs the be guided by Something in all their affairs. Bruce does a great job of telling us why and how. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Not very many intellectuals really change their minds about anything. They have a big idea, often become well known because of it. Then their big idea becomes an integral part of their identity and they just never let it go. Evidence that doesn’t “fit” is either ignored or contorted in such a way as to make it “fit.” Too bad, that. But, as you’ll read in Adi Gordon‘s terrific book Toward Nationalism’s End: An Intellectual Biography of Hans Kohn (Brandeis University Press, 2017), not Hans Kohn. He had a several big ideas, most notably one about nationalism. But he never stopped evolving it to, well, reality. Kohn lived in several different worlds—a Habsburg one, a Zionist one, an American one—and in each of them he witnessed how nationalism played out in different ways. Kohn adapted as he moved from one world to another, and so did his thought. Very good, that. Listen in to our fascinating conversation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It seemed that everyone wanted Bosnia in the late nineteenth century: Serbian and Croatian nationalists; Ottoman, Habsburg, Muslim and Yugoslav movements. At the same time, they all felt frustration with the Bosnian peasants for not living up to their nationalist and political imaginations. In Whose Bosnia? National and Political Imagination in the Balkans (Cornell University Press, 2015),Edin Hajdarpasic makes a number of arguments about how we understand nationalism and political movements in contested spaces. By exploring how these different movements defined Bosnia and Bosnians, crafted narratives of suffering and engaged youth, he argues that nationalism was a productive, open-ended force even in the face of seeming failures to achieve the nationalists’ goals. Hajdarpasic discusses these themes, as well as “nation-compulsion” which he defined as “a set of political and moral imperatives that one grapples with as part of becoming and maintaining oneself as a proper patriot.” Edin Hajdarpasic is Associate

Pieter Judson established himself as one of the top scholars of the East Central Europe with his first two books Exclusive Revolutionaries (University of Michigan Press, 1996) and Guardians of the Nation (Harvard University Press, 2006). His latest book, The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Harvard University Press, 2016) provides scholars with the first major general history of the Empire since a new wave of scholarship began chipping away at the myths built up in various national historiographies. Not only does his book offer a reappraisal of Habsburg history that incorporate concepts like national indifference, but more than previous histories it gets out of the purely political realm to look at economic changes. In so doing beyond offering a new more nuanced understanding of how and why Austria-Hungary fell apart, he also suggests the the twenty years before 1848 were much more interesting than the conventional narrative has allowed. It was a pleasure to speak with Pieter again about this book. Learn more

In Serbia under the Swastika: A World War II Occupation (University of Illinois Press, 2017), Alexander Prusin delineates the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia during World War II. He starts from the medium-term background, reaching back to the unification of Yugoslavia, and covers both the chronological process and its wide thematic breadth, with issues ranging from collaborationism to resistance. The book is important, therefore, both for historians of Yugoslavia and Southeastern Europe and to historians of World War II and the Holocaust in general. Orel Beilinson is a historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Eastern Europe, particularly the Russian Empire, Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. His research interests include the encounter of communism, religion, and modernity; the social history of law and religion under communism; and the comparative history of communism. He can be reached at orelb@mail.tau.ac.il.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices