History as a Story without an End

Abstract

Vladyslava Moskalets reads Omer Bartov’s Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (New York, 2018) from her perspective as a social historian of Galicia. She commends the author for returning agency to historical actors but questions his nondiscriminating and generalizing approach to constructing social groups. Moskalets believes that the book is more a longue durée synthesis than an “anatomy” of the complex society of Buczacz. Although it describes the actions of the homogenized “neighbors,” the book avoids explaining them.