Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land by Jacob Mikanowski (review)

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• Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land by Jacob Mikanowski
• Joseph W. Moser

Jacob Mikanowski, Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land. New York: Pantheon Books, 2023. 376 pp.

In Goodbye, Eastern Europe, Jacob Mikanowski tries to historically define the part of Europe that was behind the Iron Curtain. Then it was readily labeled “Eastern Europe,” but today it is often subsumed under the umbrella term of “Central Europe,” and many of the countries in the area have joined the EU and even NATO, in large part to distance themselves from Russia. This makes it more difficult to define what Eastern Europe represents today and where exactly it is located. In this fascinating study, the author links countries from the Baltic States, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, and the former Yugoslav states, drawing connections that are fascinating and likely new to many readers.

Mikanowski starts his history of Eastern Europe with the Christianization of the various countries, a process that generally came later than in Western Europe. There are very few documentary testimonies of life in Eastern Europe prior to Christianization. In general, Eastern Europe was less centrally ruled than the countries to the West. In the eighteenth century, it became the area between empires (the receding Ottoman, Russian, and Austrian Empires). In this regard the book is also of great interest to Austrian Studies scholars studying the former lands of the Habsburg Empire. [End Page 147]

The book is loosely organized in three parts. Part I, on “Faiths,” is subdivided among the topics of Pagans and Christians, Jews, Muslims, and heretics. This part addresses the late Christianization of Eastern Europe as well as the fact that Ashkenazic Judaism found a home without a country there. The Ottoman Empire also brought Islam to Eastern Europe. Part II, on “Empires and Peoples,” covers the topics of empires, peoples, wanderers, and nations; here the author discusses the many peripatetic peoples and the late emergence of national identities in a region that is too diverse to be subsumed into any one nation-state. Part III, on “The Twentieth Century,” includes subheadings on moderns, prophets, war, Stalinism, and “thaw.” While this part covers the more commonly taught ideas about Eastern Europe, the author manages to show how the various Soviet satellite states diverged from one another and from Soviet directives.

The challenge in writing this book certainly came from the fact that it would be easy to focus too much on any specific country in the region, yet Mikanowski manages to link Poland with Hungary, draw connections to the former Yugoslav states and Romania, and seamlessly interweave his narrative with the history of Albania and North Macedonia, drawing fascinating connections. He does so despite also making this a very personal book, referring to his family’s Polish and Jewish background. His narrative is extremely balanced over all the countries of the region, and this is in itself quite an achievement, as any writer on this topic will have to navigate a variety of regional languages, not all of which are related. Tracking similar phenomena in Eastern Europe allows the author to transition from one country to another without making the reader feeling as though the book is bouncing all over the map. One of the linking connections between these countries is that they engage in national myth building, constructing memorials and statues and drawing on a national literature in order to prop up their national identities, even as these current nation-states overlap ethnically and are in some cases too diverse for the construction of a single nation-state. The quintessential difference from Western Europe is that Eastern Europe lacks big old nation-states.

The author provides fascinating examples of literature from the various countries, such as Mihail Sebastian’s For Two Thousand Years (1934), which deals with antisemitism in interwar Romania. Sebastian, who was Jewish, criticizes the thoroughly antisemitic Romanian intelligentsia of the time, which however accepted him as a writer, because the intellectual Romanian [End Page 148] sphere was too small to exclude anyone. This paradox of rejection and inclusion, which ultimately can still end in violence, plays out in many of...