Central Europe Archives

A toast to …

According to his birth certificate, my paternal grandfather was born in 1892 in Lanovetska, a town near the city of Kremenets in the Ternopil region of Ukraine. It lies about 50 miles east of Lviv, itself only a few miles east of Poland. A few days ago a Russian missile attack killed at least six people in Lviv. My paternal grandmother was born in eastern Slovakia, and my mother’s family originated in Lithuania, so it’s likely that I have at least a few blood relatives left in the immediate region (I think my father’s father left behind a brother and sister when he left Ukraine for America in the spring of 1914) — perhaps that’s why I follow the Russo-Ukrainian War so closely. There has been a great deal of distance and time between Lanovetska and New York, 1892 and 2023. Nonetheless, as I’ve written before, I feel an uncanny affinity for the region, and I watch events unfold there with increasing fear.

The Wikipedia links above will reveal that there was a strong Jewish presence in the neighborhood of Lanovetska and Kremenets at least through 1921. I was baptized into the Russian Orthodox church myself, but my children self-identify as Jewish, like their mother, and indeed one of my best friends, also Jewish, claims an ancestry in the region. As I learn more about my family’s history and the history of western Ukraine, I grow increasingly curious about my family’s behavior and presence there through the first and second world wars — and, indeed, the war there now. Victoria Amelina, who died last week in a missile attack in eastern Ukraine, described my thoughts perhaps better than I ever could, in an essay called “Ukraine and the meaning of home”:

My family lived through the trauma of the Holodomor, also called the Great Famine, which took place from 1932-33, but my grandparents never talked in detail about it. Silence creates cracks so deep that it is hardly possible to feel at home. When stories about the Holocaust or Holodomor are not fully revealed, we’re bound not to trust each other. Who were you in 1933? The hungry one or the one taking all the food? The one who shot Ukrainian activists in 1941, or the one who searched for their loved one among the decomposing bodies? The scared one watching from the window when Jews were taken away or the one who took them? The one who wrote to the KGB about your neighbour or the one who helped Ukrainian dissidents? There were silences instead of the much-needed stories. And where there’s a lack of true stories, there is a lack of trust. We are bound to believe the propaganda and draw all the wrong borders again and again, never feeling completely at home.

It is comfortable to think that, here in America, these questions remain abstract, but of course they don’t and they never did. Just recently, newly-passed laws reward men and women for informing on the activities of women seeking abortions; the 1950s Red Scare contributed to general paranoia, and not merely in the entertainment industry; internment camps for Japanese citizens were constructed and populated in the 1940s; and let’s not even discuss the era of slavery and the persecution of abolitionists in the 19th century.

We may like to pretend that these never existed, that these events have been relegated to a distant past with no bearing on our country today, that somehow we’re beyond this kind of culture. But the kinds of questions that Amelina asked herself — “Who were you in 1933? The hungry one or the one taking all the food?” — are questions that my research has caused to occur about me and my family’s own behavior. I like to think that all of it was purely humanistic, brave, and just. But I know more about human beings than that. And it’s only by asking myself these questions that I can prevent anything like it from happening again, even if I contribute so little through my own individual choices.

As Ukraine battles for its right to self-determination and cultural integrity, so too is it fighting that battle for all of us. Today marks the 500th day of the Russo-Ukrainian War; according to the United Nations, “More than 9,000 civilians, including over 500 children, have been killed since Russia’s February 24, 2022 attack, but … the real number could be much higher.” That’s nearly 10,000 innocent worlds destroyed so far. It is with this in mind that I raise my glass with sadness to the memory of Victoria Amelina and her urgent work one more time. Slava Ukraini.

Women and the Russo-Ukrainian War

When the time comes for the histories of the Russo-Ukrainian War to be written, historians will find a great many of the first-person accounts of the war to have been composed by women. The prose generated by these writers reveals a tough-as-nails approach to the violence of the war; perhaps the first drafts of these accounts can be found today on Twitter, on feeds by the likes of Olesya Khromeychuk and Dr. Olha Poliukhovych. Both of these women are academics, but both provide meditations on the war that reach deep into personal experience — both their own and ours, if we read deeply enough. (I also note that the best reporting to come out of Kyiv during the early days of the war was from the BBC’s Lyse Doucet.)

The courage of these women is beyond dispute. Over the weekend Victoria Amelina, a writer who abandoned her interest in fiction at the start of the war to document war crimes and the lives of children in the war, was killed by the Russians in a Kramatorsk missile attack on a restaurant, dying in Dnipro. She is far from the only artist to be killed in the conflict. It is only fitting that you take ten minutes to read her essay “Nothing Bad Has Ever Happened,” an undated meditation published by Arrowsmith Press. She writes:

We still need to talk about the past. A lot. We can help each other mourn our dead, as Raphael Lemkin and Hersch Lauterpacht helped me and millions of others around the world, regardless of nationality.

How can I return the favor? As a citizen of Lviv, I want to accept responsibility for the city’s past — with all its stories, beautiful and ugly, with all its guilt. As a writer what I can do is to listen to the silences rising from the city’s ground, and do my best to translate them into a tongue the living understand.

To honor her memory and return the favor Amelina bestowed on us, we should listen to those silences too.

Independence Day

The US Declaration of Independence was signed on or about this day 246 years ago, and Ukraine formally declared its independence only in 1991, but I thought I’d mark the day by passing along holiday greetings from Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of a country in the midst of its own crusade for freedom:

It seems to me that this is a good day to remember the history of the current Russo-Ukrainian War, and I found no better way to do that than to share this talk by Dr. Marci Shore, delivered at Fairfield University in November of last year. “I Need Ammunition, Not a Lift: Jews and the Ukrainian Question” is a personal journey through recent Central European history, and Dr. Shore thoughtfully and often delightfully describes her own intimate and professional history and the ways in which they intertwine with what’s happening in Ukraine now. Dr. Shore (so personable is her delivery that I nearly called her Marci) offers a story that oddly enough reminded me most of another monologue about the individual’s role in a bloody human history, Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia.

Dr. Shore also directly confronts questions about anti-Semitism in Ukraine’s history towards the end of her hour-long talk, and I can’t recommend highly enough her book The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution, which I read several years ago. I can’t think of a better introduction to — and reminder of — the deeply important issues at play in today’s Europe. Here’s hoping that by next year the guns will have fallen silent over a truly independent Ukraine.

A history of the present

Timothy Garton Ash’s Homelands: A Personal History of Europe, published on May 23 by the Yale University Press, is either a historically-informed memoir or a memoir-infused history, take your pick, reflecting Garton Ash’s own personal experience of the Europe he has chosen as his professional interest. Many of the essays here — as in his longer books like The File — also reflect his status as an interested observer: a journalist who, as a European, has skin in the game. The fall of the Berlin Wall? Garton Ash was there. Prague during the Velvet Revolution? There too. Brexit? Garton Ash was a dedicated Remainer, knocking on doors to convince Britons to stay in the European Union prior to the referendum. So he observed, but was often an actor in this history as well.

Conceived during the Covid pandemic, Homelands consists of nearly 50 short essays, divided into five sections: Destroyed (1945-1960), Divided (1961-1979), Rising (1980-1989), Triumphing (1990-2007), and Faltering (2008-2022). This creates a narrative arc from the fall of the Third Reich to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, from one European land war to another. Along the way, Garton Ash discusses the push-and-pull of signal events in the postwar era, some of the more recent of them from a participant’s eye view: the discovery of the concentration camps, the death of Stalin, the Gdansk shipyards through to 9/11, Charlie Hebdo, the migrant crisis, and Vladimir Putin — “a short thick-set man with an unpleasant, vaguely rat-like face,” Garton Ash reports as his impression of his first meeting with Putin in 1994. Overlaid on this is a conceit about the four age groups who experienced the events of the past eighty years: “Today’s Europe has been shaped by four key political generations: the 14ers (with their life-changing youthful experience of the first world war), the 39ers (the second world war), the 68ers (1968, in all its different manifestations) and the 89ers (influenced by then Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution and the end of the cold war).” I wrote more about this here; I’m an 89er myself.

Through the essays Garton Ash traces the development of fascism into a populist nationalism, and admits that the historian is always damned by what he doesn’t recognize, especially in the reconsideration of happier geopolitical days. “It’s not that we liberal internationalists were blind,” Garton Ash explains in a chapter entitled “Hubris”:

We saw many of the gathering problems and discontents … But after a quarter-century in which history had so gloriously gone our way, we did tend to assume that these would be temporary setbacks, obstacles on an upward path, delaying but not reversing the larger course of historical development. In other words, deep down we somehow thought — or more accurately, felt — that we knew which way history was going. That is always a mistake and one that historians should be the last people on earth to make.

It will come as no news to anyone familiar with Garton Ash’s work that his prose style is fluid and wry, his tone self-effacing and ironic, as the last sentence of the above excerpt indicates. And he is just as likely to report on his conversations with aging German farmers and teenage refugees as he is his conversations with Tony Blair and Donald Tusk — a ground-level perspective he shares with Anne Applebaum, Timothy Snyder, Masha Gessen, and Marci Shore, historians of Central Europe who followed in his footsteps.

Homelands closes the “Faltering” chapter with a report on a visit with his wife Danuta to the archaeological remains of the oracle at Delphi. Musing on the oracle’s often ambiguous advice to seekers of the truth, he recommends that we “remember both lessons of Delphi. First, we don’t know what will happen this afternoon, far less in a few years’ time. Second, we need intelligent, historically informed guesswork to prepare for the challenges we seem likely to face.” Prognostication is a fool’s errand, he admits, so perhaps our best attitude is Romain Rolland’s “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” And hope? “Hope is not prognostication,” Václav Havel wrote in a prison letter than Garton Ash quotes. “It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. … an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. … It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

While Garton Ash’s subject is Europe, the US is implicated in these thoughts as well, from the weaponization of the Constitution itself by today’s Supreme Court to the chilling of discourse on college campuses. As for my own crystal ball, well, I don’t find it hard to imagine that Joe Biden might not make it through to the Presidential election next year, fragmenting the Democratic field and providing a path to another Trump victory. There’s pessimism of the intellect for you. And so far as Europe goes, I’m immensely saddened by the death of Ukrainian novelist, essayist, and war crimes researcher Victoria Amelina in Kramatorsk this past weekend, as I’m saddened by the thousands of deaths the Russians have visited on Ukrainians over the past decade. US and international interest in the war seems to be waning nonetheless. I’m hoping I’m wrong. One more difference between optimists and pessimists is that pessimists are never happy when they’re proven right.

Homelands is a fine personal chronicle of the ways in which one individual has negotiated the promises and disappointments of liberal democracy in our lifetimes. It encourages readers to think deeply about their own negotiations with these promises and disappointments, and the role they might play in “working for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed,” as Havel has it. Or, as T.S. Eliot once put it, “there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.” Keeping that something alive, as Garton Ash tries to do in books like his, is really all that counts.

A view from …

George W. Hunka, “An impression of Prague,” March 1993. Pencil, ink, and watercolor on paper.

I was not the only Hunka to revisit the land of our forefathers in the early 1990s. In early 1993, my father visited Europe for the first time in my company — he was, at the time, 63 — and, after visiting Budapest, Prague, and Vienna, I told him that of the three I liked Vienna most; he disagreed, to my surprise.

“I prefer Prague,” he said with a shrug. “Vienna is a city for old men.”

I think I understand what he meant, though I confess the implications temporarily stung. Prague, although further to the west geographically than Vienna, was nonetheless a somewhat less formal city culturally despite Prague’s years of Soviet occupation; Vienna’s push to appeal to a more youthful cohort of tourists was still a few years in the future (its MuseumsQuartier, for example, didn’t open until 2001), and because of the cramped nature of Prague’s Staré Město, that city possessed more mystery and therefore more of a sense of possibility — an earthier possibility, too, even in its literature. The interwar literary masterpiece of Vienna was Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, an urbane, high-culture satire redolent of café intellectuals; Prague’s was Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Schweik, a ribald, subversive satire redolent of anarchic working-class beer-swillers. (In more recent years, one might see the same difference in the work of Thomas Bernhard and Bohumil Hrabal.)

In neither of my journeys to Europe so far have I been able to get to places like Poland and Ukraine; the larger cities of those nations, too, appear to share in that unique Austro-Hungarian milieu; their literatures lean closer, it seems, to Hašek and Hrabal than Musil and Bernhard. I’ll be travelling to the region again later this year, and it doesn’t seem that a journey to Krakow will be possible, nor to Lviv. I doubt I’ll book tickets to the latter soon to commingle with the ghosts of Hunkas past, but hope to do someday, if it still exists.

Or maybe it’ll be sooner than I think. Ukrainian YouTube personality Orest Zub, based in Lviv, has been posting an eye-opening series of videos about the Russo-Ukranian War from a street-level perspective, and most recently “How safe (or dangerous) is [it] for Americans to visit Lviv, Ukraine,” recorded only four weeks ago, reveals an Austro-Hungarian capital still relatively untouched by the war (though Zub doesn’t ignore the criminal suffering that Russia has inflicted on the country over the past decade). I’m tempted to book a train and hotel. You can see the video below, and his other videos can be found here.