The return of the gods: Greco-Roman mythology in eighteenth-century rabbinic lore

Voice of the Silenced Peoples in the Global Cold War: The Assembly of Captive European Nations, 1954–1972

A Revolutionary Narrative of European History: Bonneville's <i>History of Modern Europe</i> (1789–1792)

The assumption that Israeli Hebrew literature has a unique and transformative significance in Israeli culture is argued sociologically, historically, theoretically, and aesthetically. It was only in the eighteenth century, with the Hebrew Enlightenment, the Haskalah, that secular Hebrew literature was able to develop. Before then, Jewish intellectual activity had been confined almost exclusively to religious writings. This literature grew in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries mainly in the areas of Jewish settlement in Eastern Europe. Today, there are over 3 million Hebrew-speakers in Israel alone. A flourishing literature is being written there in Hebrew, composed of fiction, poetry, and drama. The growth of the Hebrew language has contributed to the viability, and therefore to the adoption, of new literary genres. Modern Hebrew literature has established a clear national identity, responsive at last to its own territorial conditions, expressed in a literary language which is finally also a vernacular.

Ivan T. Berend. History Derailed: Central and Eastern Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. xix, 330 pp. Illustrations. Maps. Tables. Bibliography. Index. $39.95, hardcover.This synthesis of nineteenth-century Central and Eastern European history by Ivan T. Berend complements his two other works on the history of this region in the twentieth century and thus provides us with the complete authorial vision of the region's modern history. The value of this book is increased by the fact that, in comparison with a few general works dealing with the region in the twentieth century, there had been a definite lack of generalizing narratives about the area's nineteenth century. This wonderfully written book is the first synthetic work on East Central Europe's nineteenth century that has managed equally successfully to integrate social, cultural and political aspects of the region's history.Since the task of this book was to give the region its proper nineteenth-century history, the author avoids wading into hot discussions on the region's discursive construction and its political implications. Berend does believe that there are some objective features shared by all parts of the region and allowing one to speak about Central Eastern Europe. In his opinion, the countries of this region faced similar economic, social and political problems-all deriving from the developmental lag between them and Western Europe, they designed similar responses to these problems, and they faced similar consequences. Berend's Central and Eastern Europe consists of Austria-Hungary (usually excluding Austria proper), the Balkans (usually excluding Greece), and Poland.The book starts with an explanation of how the basis for the distinctiveness of the region was laid down in the early modern period. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the region's leading intellectuals were well aware of their own countries' backwardness. Just as for these intellectuals, for Berend the most important distinctive features of the region can be revealed through comparing it with the Western European core. Every chapter begins with a brief outline of the developments in Western Europe against which trends in Eastern and Central Europe are discerned and measured.First the author looks at culture. Here the differences between Eastern and Western Europe seem less unbridgeable than in social or political structures. Local thinkers were part of European intellectual life. At the centre of Berend's story is the epoch of Romanticism, which, he believes, in the ease of Central Eastern Europe was conflated with Enlightenment. This particular intellectual blend gave birth to the phenomenon crucial for understanding most of the region's developments throughout the modern period, namely-to nationalism. The author believes that romanticism left its imprint not only on this nationalism but on the totality of the region's mental pattern throughout the whole long nineteenth century.Nationalism was the intellectual movement guiding political responses in theregion to the challenges of the West. Despite the fact that the author is well aware of difficulties in distinguishing between good civic and bad ethnic nationalisms, he believes that because of their belatedness and the specific social structure of the region, the local nationalisms differed significantly from the civic and democratic nationalisms of the West. …

The paper deals with the possibilities of closer integration and deeper cooperation of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe - Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria and Austria. The paper will address the alternative of integration in the form of regional cooperation, independent of the patronage of Western Europe and major powers such as the US, Russia and Germany, which could act as a balancer in international relations and as an element of European security and lead to the creation of new security structures as well as a new European security architecture based on a strong Central European peacekeeping force. It is based on the idea of Milan Hodža, who in his work on the Danube Federation proposed the creation of a federation of Central and Eastern European countries in the Danube basin with common institutions and common policies. However, Hodža extended the project of this cooperation in Central Europe to the area from Gdańsk to Thessaloniki, even in Ankara. His proposal can be considered partially fulfilled in the current European Union. The beginnings of this federation can be considered Little Entente from the years 1921 - 1939, in which Hodža participated. The paper will work with the hypothesis based on the Hodža’s opinion, that “… the Central European Federation must be a bastion of the national and social security of its peoples" and that "European security cannot build on Western democracy alone. Its construction requires further reliable support. It is Central Europe. The same is in the interests of European democracy: in addition to the West, it must have strong support in Central Europe, and therefore the unity, if not the identity, of the democratic ideals and institutions of Western and Central European democracy provides satisfactory prospects ... Every nation, big or small, must survive and will only survive if it contributes an appropriate share to the common moral and material values of humanity. A capable nation excels only in international competition, but in order to excel, it must have moral support ...“

The form of racism the book calls Eastern Europeanism assumes that anything that happens in ‘Eastern Europe’ also happens in all other parts of it, and that most developments there have causes different from the West. This exaggerated East–West distinction incorporates as a matter of course Central Europe in ‘Eastern Europe’. Doing so serves the interests of Western business, seeking to exploit Central European labour within the framework of the EU free market, while also delegitimizing potential competition from local businesspeople. At the same time, the rhetoric of East–West difference helps to turn Western European labour against perceived competition from Central European migrants. Against this background, the chapter explores scholarship in ‘Central and Eastern European Studies’ that claims, incorrectly, that the East–West difference seen during the Cold War actually goes back, in much the same form, to the Enlightenment period. Like Orientalism, sometimes Central and Eastern European Studies produces its own object, and so justifies a distinction embedded in global inequalities.

PurposeThis paper aims to assess how a hotel geographical location in different parts of Central and Eastern Europe influences the complexity of perception of pro-environmental behavior.Design/methodology/approachTo find out, whether hotel location in a specific country influences the complexity of environmental practices, this study used two closely connected multivariate statistical techniques analyzing gradients: principal components analysis and partial redundancy analysis. The research comprises data collection from seven countries in Central and Eastern Europe. In all, 25 randomly selected hotels (based on star rating) from various countries were approached to complete a questionnaire. Environmental practices were studied based on motivations, perception of barriers, perception of support from different levels of public sector, will of managers to promote pro-environmental measures based on sufficient funding, perception of legislation and perception of various other important factors.FindingsThe study reveals significant differences between hotels in Central Europe and Eastern Europe in the perception of the complexity in implementation of the environmental practices by hotel managers. The character of the present study, however, needs to address the identification of particular aspects that are relevant to the geographical differences among the studied countries.Research limitations/implicationsResearch was limited to a selection of Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. There is still probability that managers in hotels from Poland and Croatia could possess different preferences. Other limitation of this study is that only special part of hotels were asked – hotels certified by star grading, out of our scope remained other hotels. It is also known that important factor is precise location of hotel within country – hotels in established tourism destination behave other way that those outside recreational areas. These factors deserve further study within this topic. There are many aspects of sustainability and environmental protection regarding hotel industry. As we have found in our principal correspondence analysis, different environmental measures were different location in biplot – some were affected by country, the other by star grading and affiliation to hotel chain. The complexity deserves to be studied in depth.Practical implicationsThe importance lies first in the identification of the aspects that are governed by geographical differences among the countries studied. These aspects are the initiatives and support from the government and the local governments, which counteract the perception that there is a lack of financial resources and the return on investments is slow. So, based on the data, which included information from various types of hotels from seven CEE countries, the activities of national and local authorities were identified to be the main differentiating variable. The support of the environment-friendly conduct of business in the hotel industry is appreciated by hotel managers from Central Europe. On the other hand, hotel managers from Eastern Europe do not feel any significant support from either national or other public institutions. The second factor of differentiation is represented by the perception of the lack of funds. Hotel managers from Eastern Europe feel strongly about funds limitation. The coherence of both those factors is obvious in the results, as they show the same direction but opposite orientation. It has already been discussed above. When looking at the results, the authors find the perception of availability of funds to be a fundamental difference between hotel management in Central Europe and in Eastern Europe. The lack of funds is perceived more intensively in Eastern Europe than in Central Europe, particularly because of a stronger awareness of direct or indirect support for such activities by national and other public institutions in Central Europe.Social implicationsThe differentiation of the aspects mentioned above comes from the social and culture policies, company policies and business cultures between these two sub-realms. Pro-environmental actions are apparently promoted less publicly in Eastern European countries than in Central European countries. The reaction to the trend for demand of greener hotels is stronger in the West, and its hotels are more likely to have legislation requirements and public support as an incentive to adopt pro-environmental measures in their business operations.Originality/valueThe study is based on data obtained from seven countries. The results revealed a problem of the macro-environmental influence on hotels’ potential to implement environmentally sustainable approaches and procedures throughout the industry.

SEER, 97, 4, OCTOBER 2019 778 Janevski, Ana and Marcoci, Roxana, with Ksenia Nouril (eds). Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe: A Critical Anthology. Primary Documents. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2018. 408 pp. Illustrations. Figures. Notes. Index. $40.00: £31.00 (paperback). The difficulty of defining Central and Eastern European art after the region’s transition from socialism to neoliberal capitalism hangs over the introduction to Art and Theory of Post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Ana Janevski and Roxana Marcoci with Ksenia Nouril. Keen to avoid reifying the East/West binary, the editors of this ambitious follow-up to MoMA’s Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s (New York, 2002) turn to Jelena Vesić, an independent curator and member of the Belgrade-based Prelom collective. Vesić claims that ‘Eastern European art’ can refer to everything from all art made in conditions marked by socialism to only art that engages with the socialist legacy — or even only those practices that were supported by the Soros Centers for Contemporary Art (SCCAs), a network of twenty institutions established around the region to grease the wheels of post-socialist transition in the 1990s (p. 13). Wisely, the volume avoids any clear consensus on the meaning of Central and Eastern Europe and its art as it divides its seventy-five contributions into seven themed chapters rather than organizing them into geographical or chronological schema. Certain themes, particularly the focus on activism and collectivity in the second chapter, reflect the collaborative structure of the book itself, which is a product of multiple research trips and seminars organized by the Central and Eastern Europe group of MoMA’s Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) project between 2015 and 2017 (these exchanges are listed at the end of the book). Each section comprises a mix of re-publications from English and other languages and newly commissioned texts. Each chapter begins with three new texts: the first is a theoretical introduction by an outside adviser and expert in the field, the second a chapter summary by a C-MAP member and the third an interview with an artist or collective. The first chapter, titled ‘Reckoning with History’, delves into the legacy of the socialist era. In an email conversation with compatriot Jonas Valatkevičius from 2000, Deimantas Narkevičius emerges as the rare Lithuanian artist ready to violate a major taboo on the country’s art scene by engaging with history through the prism of personal experience. Exploring the extra-legal codes that guide interpersonal conduct in post-Soviet society, Narkevičius frames them as a kind of popular truth that protects against both the obligatory rule of law and the trauma of processing past events (pp. 37–38). Socialist baggage remains a topic of interest in the second chapter, ‘Exhibiting the “East” since 1989’. In one highlight, Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski argues that REVIEWS 779 the unstable nature of borders after the fall of socialism compelled Central European artists to submit their work for Western inspection, and that the thematics of transition and EU integration of the early 1990s and early 2000s, respectively, were informed by geopolitical lines that ‘exist and at the same time do not exist’ (p. 85). As the post-Communist context began to retreat from view, interest shifted from centre/periphery relations to relations between various peripheries (p. 85). Through all this, the concept of Central Europe only maintained coherence from the perspective of actually existing socialism. Once its memory began to wane, the concept was kept alive by nostalgia for the Hapsburg Empire in countries like Hungary and Czechoslovakia (p. 84). Chapter three expands this look at the ideological value of exhibitions to consider the value of archives. Slovenian curator Zdenka Badovinac leads the charge with a look at the strategy of self-historicization adopted by artists at a time when state institutions either ignored or condemned the neo-avant-garde (p. 145). Key projects include Romanian Lia Perjovschi’s Contemporary Art Archive (begun in 1985) and East Art Map (begun in 2001) by the Slovenian retro-avant-garde group IRWIN. The Romanian collective...

Introduction: There has been wide recognition of the health divide between Western Europe and the former socialist countries from Central and Eastern Europe. However, these have not been assessed in terms of burden of disease, and the effect of stroke has not been fully elucidated, especially in terms of time trends. Methods: The West-Eastern European stroke burden was analysed using data from the Global Burden of Stroke (GBD) Study 2019 in terms of disability-adjusted life years lost (DALYs) and years of life lost (YLL) over the period 1990–2019 by gender. Data were extracted on a regional (West, Central, and East Europe) and country level for the twenty former socialist countries from Central and East Europe according to GBD regional definitions. We focused on the trends of age-standardized stroke DALY rates across the three decades and compared them with the average rates for West Europe. Main Findings: All Central and East European countries experienced a decline in all-cause disease burden between 1990 and 2019, and a gap was confirmed between the East, the Central, and the West European region for men but not for women. The age-standardized stroke DALY rates declined in the three European regions and in all twenty Central and East European countries but at a different pace. The stroke DALY rates among women exhibited the greatest decline in the West −59% (95% UI [−60; −57]) followed by the Central European region −48% (95% UI [−53; −42]) and lowest among women in East Europe −37% (95% UI [−43; −29]). The decline in men was even higher than among women −61% (95% UI [−63; −60]), while in Central Europe it was −43% (95% UI [−50; −37]) and in the East −25% (95% UI [−34; −14]), leading to widening of the gap between East, Central, and West Europe in relation to stroke burden. YLL represented more than 70% of stroke DALYs and more than 90% of DALYs for men in East European countries. Conclusions: The burden of stroke contributes to the European health gap through preventable premature stroke deaths. There are some very successful countries in stroke burden management from both Central (Slovenia, Czech Republic, and Hungary) and East Europe (Estonia), suggesting that closing the health gap between East and West is a realistic aim.

SEER, 99, 4, OCTOBER 2021 764 Rady, Martyn. The Habsburgs: The Rise and Fall of a World Power. Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books, London, 2020. xvii + 397 pp. Maps. Tables. Illustrations. Notes. Further reading. Index. £30.00. Facing the daunting challenge of chronicling the fortunes of a dynasty whose rule once spanned the globe, Martyn Rady has responded with a balanced, incisive and eminently readable account of the Habsburg family and its significance. Beginning with the dynasty’s obscure origins in the extreme southwestern corner of the German lands, he traces its ups and downs through the centuries. He follows the Habsburgs as they moved the centre of their power into Central Europe, raised their prestige by gaining the title of Holy Roman Emperor, and expanded their reach globally with the addition of Spain and its possessions in the New World and the Pacific. With the crowns of Hungary and Bohemia added to their Austrian titles, the Habsburgs faced the challenge of the Protestant Reformation and the pressure of the Ottoman Turks, but the dynasty’s good fortune in its marriages ran out for the Spanish branch in 1700, and the world-wide footprint of the Habsburgs shrank back to European dimensions. Narrowly escaping the fate of their Spanish cousins, the Central European Habsburgs survived the wars of the eighteenth century, the French Revolution and Napoleon, eventually transforming their realm into the composite Austrian (after 1867, Austro-Hungarian) Empire. In that form, it weathered the revolutions of 1848 and the rise of nationalism until, along with the other empires of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, it succumbed to the strains of the Great War of 1914–18. Rady, Emeritus (formerly Masaryk) Professor of Central European History at University College London, accomplishes this feat in a narrative of just over three hundred pages, accompanied by detailed family trees and wellselected illustrations. Each of the twenty-nine chapters is focused largely on one member of the dynasty (some, particularly in the more recent periods, feature in more than one chapter), but this is not merely a modern version of a ‘great man (or woman)’ approach to history. Rady weaves the personal foibles and accomplishments of the subjects into a wider context, without ever losing the focus on the dynasty and the evolving understanding its representatives had of their place in history and mission to rule. To accomplish this, he draws on a wide range of international scholarship in multiple languages. While the narrative includes high politics and warfare, Rady also brings in art, literature, the sciences and music, embedding his Habsburg subjects in a richly pictured networkofbroadersocialandintellectualdevelopments.Withaneruditionthat sits lightly on the narrative, he draws on unexpected examples and connections, from Emperor Maximillian’s colour-coded allegories, the Hermetic court of Rudolph II, the automata that prefigured the ideal of bureaucracy to Maria REVIEWS 765 Theresa, the vampire craze of the early eighteenth century, to Franz Joseph’s electric cigar lighter. Rady enlivens the text with telling anecdotes and effective quotations that humanize his subjects and help create a work that holds the reader’s attention. That reader would do well to have some familiarity with general European history, not only because the Habsburg dynasty is so intimately involved in so much of it, but also because Rady has chosen to keep his focus on the dynasty and its representatives. As a result, the major challenges and influences the Habsburgs faced — whether the Protestant Reformation, the Thirty Years War, the Enlightenment, the rise of modern nationalism, or something else — receive attention primarily insofar as the Habsburgs had to cope with them. That said, Rady creates a fascinating series of portraits reminiscent of the Heraldic Wall of St George’s Church in Wiener Neustadt mentioned in the text, or the panoply of portraits of illustrious ancestors on the walls of a castle gallery. In their cumulative impact, these portraits provide an insightful panorama of European and even global history as refracted through the prism of this famous dynasty. The family’s legacy may still be noticed throughout much of Europe, Central and South America, the Philippines and even Taiwan, but it is perhaps most strongly present in Central Europe. There the...

The successes of right -wing populist parties in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as a repeated distancing from the European Union, raise the question of whether there is such a thing as European citizenship at all. Citizenship is not understood as formal nationality, but as a sense of belonging. This ties in with the considerations of political cultural research. This article uses representative surveys to address the question: What about European Citizenship in Central and Eastern Europe? The results show that the feeling of belonging to the European Union in Eastern and Central Europe is better than its reputation and not lower than in Western Europe. However, there are differences in the recognition of plurality between the majority (not all) of Eastern European states compared to the majority of Western European states. In particular, the integration of Muslims is more strongly rejected. The same applies to the social acceptance of homosexuality. This partly explains the success of right -wing populists in Central and Eastern Europe and marks a certain cultural difference, which is primarily directed against a wet model of democracy that is considered too open to plurality. In short: Central and Eastern Europeans also see themselves as Europeans and EU members, but their ideas of a European democracy differ from Western ideas – especially in peripheral regions.

Was the Eighteenth Century Long Only in England? Joan DeJean When I was a graduate student looking for a dissertation topic, in the early 1970s, the eighteenth-century French novel was just barely on the map. I had the feeling, however, that a great deal of that largely virgin territory was about to become terra very much cognita. I remember my advisor, Georges May, saying things like: "I don't think you should work on Marivaux"—or Diderot, or Prévost (the figures I was considering most seriously)—"because a French thesis is soon to be published on him." In those days, a forthcoming thèse d'état was thought to be the kiss of death for an American doctoral candidate trying to decide where to begin a career: the sum of knowledge each of them contained was so vast, or such was the then accepted wisdom, that a French thesis on Marivaux would have completely overshadowed a comparatively far more modest American effort. And so it was that, in my quest for an eighteenth-century novelist on whom no French thesis was about to appear, I came to settle on Paul Scarron: if the eighteenth-century novel was still underexplored, its seventeenth-century counterpart was almost completely off the charts. Now, I was of course aware that Scarron's Roman comique, published in 1651 and 1657, was clearly a part of seventeenth-century literature. Since, however, I thought of Scarron's novel (and still do) as so much closer to the eighteenth century than the seventeenth in both form and character, it never for a moment occurred to me that writing on it would automatically cut me off, as far as the job market was concerned, from the eighteenth-century EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, volume 13, numéros 2-3, janvier-avril 2001 156 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION prose fiction that I had planned to have as the focus of my intellectual life: I was quite frankly stunned to find that universities that advertised for specialists in eighteenth-century literature did not even want to see my dossier. Thirty years later, I am still not convinced that doing a dissertation on Scarron should have made it initially impossible for me to be hired to teach the eighteenth century. The minute I heard of the concept of "the long eighteenth century," I realized that I was not alone in my belief that some parts ofthe eighteenth century's territory were stranded, as it were, in earlier or later time zones. The only problem has been that the idea that the eighteenth century could be allowed to overflow its traditional boundaries has not been quick to catch on as far as French eighteenth-century studies are concerned. We all know that periodization is a notoriously slippery business, and the notion of a "long" eighteenth century is no exception to this rule. Thus, it should come as no surprise that, in English studies and in history, the fields in which the concept originated and in which it has already gained wide critical currency, there appears to be no universally accepted idea ofexactly how long the newly long eighteenth century is supposed to be. Although most say that it begins in 1660, some situate the starting point closer to 1680. The long century's end is similarly contested: my sense is that 1789 is now the most generally accepted date, though 1798 (the date of the publication of Lyrical Ballads) is often proposed and, of late (particularly among historians and particularly in England), the long eighteenth century is sometimes thought to have ended only in 1832 (because of the First Reform Bill, which signalled the death of the ancien régime in Britain).1 Now it is obvious that many of the markers used to denote the chronological limits ofa given academic field ofinquiry are not equally useful to the members of the various disciplines that share this field. Thus, for obvious 1 I will not thank those who were kind enough to serve as informants on this question on the grounds that they might prefer to remain anonymous; simply raising the issue of a change in periodization can provoke surprisingly hostile reactions. Formal considerations...

FISHERIES DEVELOPMENT AND THE FORMATION OF THE FISH PRODUCTS MARKET IN UKRAINE AND IN THE CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES

Introduction Marianne Henn (bio) and Sabine Sievern (bio) Migration, in the words of W. M. Spellman, has been "a constant of the human experience at least since the appearance of Homo sapiens some 50–70,000 years ago" (1). In relation to German(ic) culture, the phenomenon dates back to the Germanic tribes that moved across Europe from the second to the fifth century, expanding their influence and settling in new territories. This search for new land was, until 1500, the main reason for all major migrations (Spellmann 2). Since then, so-called push-and-pull factors have become more diversified to include economic, social, and political reasons, but, as Douglas S. Massey and his collaborators explain, migration has almost always been motivated by some material gain (1). For modern migration since the sixteenth century, Massey and his colleagues have determined four different periods of migration in all of which Europeans played a significant role. The first era, called the mercantile period, stretched from 1500 to roughly 1800 and was characterized by the conquests and colonization of the different parts of the world, in particular North and South America (Massey et al. 1). The second and industrial period, lasting until the early twentieth century, was determined by the search for "new opportunities outside of a continent [Europe] experiencing both inordinate demographic growth and the hardships of an urban, manufacturing lifestyle" (Spellman 6; cf. Massey et al. 1). Third, the period of limited migration (Massey et al. 2) – that is, the time of relocation during the two world wars – was determined mainly by the so-called "forced" or "intellectual migration" (Ash and Söllner 1). Apart from this coerced form of migration, movement from Europe to other countries of the world largely stopped after 1925 because of the more restrictive immigration laws and the onset of the world economic crisis in 1929 (Massey et al. 2). Finally, the fourth era of immigration, labelled post-industrial migration, emerged after 1945, in particular during the 1960s, and must be considered a global phenomenon with Europeans accounting for only a small fraction of international migrants (Massey et al. 2). In the context of international migration, two factors are in play: the causes for migration as well as the consequences of such migration – that is, issues concerning "migrant adaptation, integration, and assimilation" (Massey et al. vii). In the German context, beginning with the eighteenth century, citizens of [End Page 189] the respective states emigrated to colonies and later countries in the New World "in search of a better life" (Massey et al. 4), as well as to areas in Central and Eastern Europe, in particular Russia, in quest of a new home (Wolff 6). Causes for their departure were varied and ranged from seeking religious freedom, escaping military service, and fleeing political oppression to searching for new employment opportunities after the industrialization in Europe left many people without work. Throughout the nineteenth century, an increase in population and the resulting lack of cheap land combined with high taxation enhanced the attractiveness of migrating to the New World, in particular to the United States, as well as to Central and Eastern Europe and Oceania. While most emigrants until the revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries left their native lands on economic and religious grounds, the politically tumultuous times of the 1800s further contributed to the desire to emigrate and resulted in an exodus of Europeans to countries abroad. In the German context, the revolution of 1848, which sought to replace the existing monarchies with a republican form of government and ended in even less freedom for the German population at large, constituted a political event that, in its aftermath, forced many, free-thinking individuals to leave their homeland. Of the countries chosen for immigration, the United States attracted the majority of the European immigrants (roughly 60% of all immigrants between 1800 and 1925), while others sought new opportunities in the countries of South America, in particular Argentina, as well as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to a lesser extent (Spellman 6; cf. Massey et al. 1–2). The second marked event and grounds for migration for political reasons was the rise of the...

Reviewed by: Women's Narratives and the Postmemory of Displacement in Central and Eastern Europe ed. by Simona Mitroiu Tomas Balkelis (bio) Women's Narratives and the Postmemory of Displacement in Central and Eastern Europe Simona Mitroiu, editor Palgrave Studies in Life Writing, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, xvi + 272 pp. ISBN 978-3319968322, $109.99 hardcover. This thematic edited collection features contributions by seventeen women authors from different countries, most of them with personal backgrounds in Central and Eastern Europe. Edited by Simona Mitroiu, known for her earlier research on memory and life writing, it presents a welcome addition to the growing fields of life writing, memory studies, and population displacement. What makes this volume special is that it focuses on Central and Eastern Europe, which is still underrepresented in the three fields mentioned above. It may be compared to similar scholarship by Vieda Skultans, Simeon Vilensky, Veronica Shapovalov, Tiina Kirss, Dalia Leinarte, Gabriele Ripple et al., Violeta Davoliūtė et al., and others that have focused on various cases of population displacement in Eastern Europe through the lens of life writing. For the contributors to the volume, Central and Eastern Europe is a political rather than a geographic designation and encompasses the space of Europe dominated by communist regimes. This space is broadly understood as postsocialist and postcolonial. However, as often happens with volumes carrying such broad geographic titles, only some Eastern European countries (mostly southeastern) are covered. The volume's thematic focus is on the role of women's narratives of displacement and their place in public memories. In their explorations of the life writing of different women, the authors are asking how these women dealt with the traumatic memory of WWII; how their memories were transmitted on individual and collective levels; and why they occupy such a marginal place in the collective memories of Central and Eastern European countries. These are broad questions that tie together a history of population displacement and women's and memory studies. The contributors should be applauded for their ambition to cross the disciplinary boundaries of these academic fields. The focus here will be on the chapters that, in my view, offer new methodological insights on how to study women's displacement in general. The key concept that reverberates throughout all the chapters is postmemory. [End Page 912] As defined by Marianne Hirsch, postmemory "describes the relationship of children of survivors of cultural or collective trauma to the experiences of their parents, experiences that 'they remember' only as the narratives or images with which they grew up, but that are so powerful … as to constitute memories of their own right" (16). Throughout the volume the authors put Hirsch's theory of postmemory into practice, and indeed, they do it quite consistently and creatively. Mitroiu's introduction sets a firm theoretical agenda for the whole volume by placing an emphasis on offering a comprehensive perspective on women's untold stories of displacement and the mechanisms of their memory mediation. It sets up a historical context of post-totalitarian Central and Eastern European societies, where socialist regimes heavily interfered in the private lives of women and their families. The introduction also provides a brief and useful overview of major population displacements in Central and Eastern Europe, though it contains some stylistic and factual oddities, such as the "massacre of … Balkans" and "the German expulsion" that happened in "almost all of Europe" (14). The eleven chapters are divided into three thematic sections: on generations and narratives of postmemory, sites of postmemory and history, and postmemory. This division is useful because it helps to shift readers' attention from generational to spatial and temporal aspects of postmemory's transmission. In essence, the book offers three key arguments: postmemory is important because it creates identities; it is transmitted in various ways and uses diverse textual resources in cultural space; and postmemory is always gendered. The last point is especially significant because it addresses a theme barely examined in the academic literature—not only the physical displacement of Central and Eastern European women, but also the displacement of their traumatic memories from socialist and postsocialist societies. In Chapter 3, Sasha Colby makes the point that Hirsch's theory of postmemory...