A Czech diplomat once introduced me to a colleague. I told the colleague that it was a pleasure to meet him and that I covered U.S. foreign affairs with a focus on Russia and Eastern Europe. “And Central Europe,” the first Czech diplomat smilingly but firmly cut in. His point was clear: He and his colleague were not to be considered — by me or themselves or anyone else — Eastern European.
I thought of this while reading the prologue of “Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land,” a new history by Jacob Mikanowski, which shares the first part of its title with a gorgeous essay the author wrote for the Los Angeles Review of Books in 2017.
“This is a history of a place that doesn’t exist,” Mikanowski asserts at the start of the book. “There is no such thing as Eastern Europe anymore. No one comes from there.” The term “is an outsider’s convenience, a catchall used to conceal a nest of stereotypes.” No country once associated with the place wants the label. “Even before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland all declared themselves part of Central Europe” (my apologies again to my Czech diplomat friend). The Baltic states want to be thought of as part of the Nordic zone. And so on. Why wouldn’t they, when “Eastern European” is used to connote backward, or stuck in the past, shrouded in some kind of undesirable gray? The idea permeates not just politics but popular culture. “Dear sweet mother of God. We’re in Eastern Europe,” one character says with dread in the 2004 movie “EuroTrip.” He and his friends proceed to walk down a dreary street. The camera cuts to a dog holding a human hand in its mouth.
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“With this many defections, Eastern Europe is pretty much a dead letter. And yet not too long ago its existence was self-evident,” Mikanowski writes, recalling arriving in Warsaw in 1986 to the smell of “brown coal burning in winter.”
Mikanowski’s undertaking is a massive one: He’s set out to tell the history of a part of the world over thousands of years — Chapter 1 begins in 170 AD — in just a few hundred pages. He does not approach this task chronologically, but thematically. The book is divided into three sections: faiths; empires and peoples; and the 20th century. While this approach can be disorienting at first, it proves effective, letting the reader take in all that the region’s history has to offer, skipping lightly between large subjects, moving from glittering capitals to tiny towns. The final section, on the more recent past, proceeds more chronologically, though the chapters are still thematic; the 21st century is left for the epilogue.
While the amount and specificity of detail could, in the hands of another writer, make the book too academic for a general audience, Mikanowski sprinkles in color and humor. “But where did Slavs come from? This question vexes historians, since it has no solution but many competing claims.” Mikanowski offers some of these claims and then adds, “I used to imagine them emerging out of a bog wearing great leather waders, with water dripping down their mustaches, ready to conquer Thessaloniki as soon as they toweled off.” The chapter on “Heretics” is especially colorful, sparkling with the magic its subjects claim to have performed.
And though the book is not a memoir, Mikanowski mixes in his own family story to moving effect. “For centuries, shtetl life was everywhere. And then all at once, it was gone for good.” It’s a powerful line, but still more powerful is that it’s followed with the admission that his grandfather was from one such vanished shtetl and that, growing up, he did not even know his grandfather’s real name.
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If there is a weak point of this book, it is its framing device. Eastern Europe was inherently different from its Western counterpart, Mikanowski announces early on, and its distinguishing quality was its diversity, especially of faith. Different people lived together in a way they didn’t in much else of the world. The book closes with this, too: Eastern Europe was once “characterized by endless diversity. … Here, many peoples and faiths and languages lived together, arranging themselves in a loose symbiosis, whose bonds were nonetheless strong enough to last for centuries.”
The trouble with this argument is not that it is untrue, per se, though there are moments in the book that seem to cut against it, and others when the meaning of “coexistence” seems to shift shape. We learn, for example, that the separation of Jews and Christians was enshrined by law, with Christian conversion to Judaism punishable by death before the 19th century. Elsewhere Mikanowski writes, “Eastern Europe is a powder keg, a nest of assassins, a tangle of murderous animosities.”
No, the larger issue is that one could just as easily argue that diversity makes Western Europe distinct, too: One could write that what makes Germany or Italy unique, for example, is that they are nations that came about by mashing different groups together, or that France was forged through a contest of ideas. The same central concept — that what is special about the place is the mix of types of people — is also found in books about the United States and books about India. Their authors probably do not mean “diversity” or “different people living together” in quite the way Mikanowski does, of course. But diversity is a slippery concept, which makes it hard to accept as the singular, defining, inherent quality of one particular region.
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The idea that it is the singular quality, or that there is any singular quality, is also, I think, undermined by the rest of this otherwise impressive book, which one cannot read without understanding that there is nevertheless something special about the place that was once called Eastern Europe. Try to name that special quality and it turns to ash in your mouth. But try, this book seems to say, to hold onto it anyway, even if it’s both in your grasp and slipping away.
Goodbye, Eastern Europe
An Intimate History of a Divided Land
By Jacob Mikanowski
Pantheon. 376 pp. $30
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