TALES FROM THE BORDERLANDS

A powerful combination of history and personal memoir of a small town in Galicia, a representative narrative of the multilayered stories of the Jews who populated a region decimated in World War II.

Bartov’s mother came from the small town of Buczacz, on the Strypa River, now in Poland and depopulated of the diverse Jewish community that once thrived in the area largely from the 16th to the early 20th centuries. The author, a professor of European history at Brown, uses this agricultural center as a point of departure to create a fascinating cultural and social history of Galicia, a swath of territory stretching from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea, once known as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Originally ruled in the 16th century by Polish nobles who invited Jews to run their estates, then annexed by the Austrian Empire in 1772, the land was always on the “periphery, made up of a bewildering mix of humanity of dubious loyalties.” Bartov refers frequently to the work of Hebrew-language author S.Y. Agnon, also from Buczacz. The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1966, he minutely delineated the lost shtetl life of Eastern Europe just as Bartov’s mother had experienced it. (The author’s excavation of his mother’s difficult life is especially poignant.) As Bartov demonstrates, the ethnic makeup of Galicia underwent numerous convulsions over the centuries. These changes included the growth of Hasidism as a reaction to the forces of Enlightenment currents from the West; “the revolutions of 1848 that swept across Europe” and the full emancipation of Jews in 1867, when the Hapsburgs were defeated by Prussia and the empire of Austria-Hungary was created; and the rise of nationalism (especially in Ukraine) and antisemitism. Bartov deftly employs much of the relevant literature to show how disastrous the rise of nationalism was in vilifying the Jews as outsiders.

A richly contextual, skillfully woven historical study.