Something about the Central and Eastern Europe region captures imaginations. Bookstores in the Anglosphere carry a disproportionate number of works on the topic, which is precisely why this reviewer stumbled upon Jacob Mikanowski’s Goodbye, Eastern Europe at a nearby chain store. With its handsome binding and cover design, and its plaudits from the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, Mikanowski’s book is a natural fit in such retailers.
The author, a Polish-American with both Catholic and Jewish family roots, aims to capture something of the region’s soul with a collection of historical and family anecdotes. In the former, he is largely successful, as the book is full of fascinating facts and obscure stories. Mikanowski’s family accounts are captivating too (surely that regional imagination-capture is at play here), but it doesn’t feel like this is the right venue for them. His leaps between third- and first-person narration feel disorganized at times. A separate personal account might have been a more valuable complement to the third-person history.
Mikanowski wields a gifted pen, which is a principal reason for praise here. The 300-plus pages are often enjoyable, sometimes charming. The author introduces the reader to “ursine pupils” at a school for bears and a rumor of “Christ reborn, come to establish his kingdom in the Grzybowszczyzna woods.” “Everything to do with Ukraine is complicated,” he asserts. This reviewer heartily agrees.
Enthusiasts of the region will find plenty of lines to highlight and file for later. For example, Mikanowski notes how, in at least one Austro-Hungarian regiment during World War I, officers communicated with Slovak enlisted men not in the prescribed German, but in English; the former knew the language from their aristocratic educational backgrounds, while the latter acquired their skills in American steel mills. Temesvár/Timișoara, an exemplar of the region’s convulsions if ever there were one, was the first European city to boast electric lights. The son of a Polish nobleman and a Transylvanian Saxon mother first translated the Icelandic Edda into Hungarian in the late 19th century. The collection of countless such anecdotes in one work is Goodbye’s most valuable contribution to the field.
Early on, Mikanowski positions his narrative as a counterbalance to nationalist accounts, and this is the first sign of trouble (if one doesn’t count the Washington Post plaudits). He scorns the “protestations of nationalist historians” and rejects the narratives on Ottoman rule of “historians from the Christian nations of the Balkans.” One gets the sense that Mikanowski—in devoting early chapters to “Jews,” “Muslims,” and “Heretics”—believes he is pushing boundaries with those whom he omits. Yet, this historical approach is eminently safe and predictable in modern anglophone discourse on the region. Those shadowy nationalist historians wouldn’t enjoy the handsome binding and artwork complete with the WaPo and WSJ testimonies, and they wouldn’t appear on the shelves of Barnes & Noble or Waterstones.
Even in some matters that aren’t expressly political, Mikanowski throws elbows that other editors might more diligently have refereed. According to the author, “Roma slavery remains one of the most understudied subjects in all European history”—a bold, if mostly inoffensive, assertion. More troublingly, he briefly explains the “equation of Jews with Bolshevism” as the result of sudden equality for Jews in the former Russian Empire. Surely an idea at the heart of so many dark moments of the 20th century deserves a more serious and thorough exploration. Practically speaking, the topic might simply have been left out of this work.
Thanks to his background, Mikanowski should be particularly well-positioned to capture the nuances of Polish history. Alas, on this score the book is deficient. This is most egregiously evident in the author’s treatment of the German occupation and Holocaust, which aligns neatly with the Jan Gross school of Polish historiography. Mikanowski claims Catholic Poles “quite literally held the power of life and death over their Jewish neighbors” and asserts that “Jews were denounced for as little as a pillow, a winter coat, or a few yards of silk.” He offers only examples of treachery on the part of Catholic Poles. There is no mention of Żegota, the only such organization to exist in German-occupied Europe; or the recently beatified Ulma family, who were martyred for their sheltering of Jews; or Poland’s status as the most-represented country of the Righteous Among Nations. Mikanowski might have noted meekly (and uncontroversially) that these issues draw considerable debate in Polish society every time there appears a new book or film on the topic; but he offers no such assessment, no admission of complexity.
Setting aside the author’s familial ties, the reader should expect a survey of so many nations and peoples to be uneven. Here the Slovaks might have particular cause for outrage. Mikanowski claims that Slovakia’s 1993 independence constituted the Slovak people’s first experience of statehood “in well over half a millennium.” Yet, the World War II era’s First Slovak Republic, for all its flaws, demonstrably impacted the events of 1993 and the political environment that exists today. He also calls that wartime regime “fascist,” an assessment that notable historians of the period don’t share. Fascism scholar Robert O. Paxton dismisses Fr. Jozef Tiso’s regime as “more clerical authoritarian than fascist.” Tiso biographer James Mace Ward, certainly no fan of his subject, diligently avoids the f-word; and this reviewer’s own reflection on Fr. Tiso’s legacy was previously published in The European Conservative. Perhaps most infuriating to Slovak sensibilities, Mikanowski calls Trnava a Czech town. Two small Czech villages indeed sport this name, but the municipality in question is surely Slovak. Given the supporting cast the author thanks in the acknowledgments, these are likely no mere oversights.
Therein lies the biggest shortcoming. Goodbye marches in lockstep with the prevailing Western journo-academic interpretations of the region’s history. If there is any doubt by the end, Mikanowski quashes it in the epilogue, when he ushers the reader to Budapest’s House of Terror and Poland’s landscape of national tragedy near Smolensk. He categorizes Hungary and Serbia with Belarus as places where “The state has effectively been captured by a single ruler or political party” (never mind that Orbán’s era in power far more closely resembles Merkel’s than Lukashenko’s). Surely his observations on these topics represent a rite of passage for establishment historians in the field. Anyway, they offer enough red meat to devotees of the Applebaum-Snyder milieu to make this account worth their while.
For the rest, though, the appropriate response might be something akin to how inhabitants of this “region defined by being part—but never at the center—of empires” eye the latest invading army parading through town. Mikanowski asserts, reasonably, that “History is never singular; it always provides multiple narratives with which to explain the present.” For an unhackneyed narrative about this region, the reader will need to look elsewhere.
