Book Beginnings: Goodbye, Eastern Europe by Jacob Mikanowski

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Sep 8

Not only does Gilion host the European Reading Challenge and TBR 23 in 23 Challenge on her Rose City Reader blog but also Book Beginnings on Friday . While I'm no stranger to her European Reading Challenge, last year I decided to finally participate in Book Beginnings on Friday. This week I'm back with another post.

For Book Beginnings on Friday Gilion asks us to simply "share the opening sentence (or so) of the book you are reading this week, or just a book that caught your fancy and you want to highlight."

MY BOOK BEGINNING

This is a history of a place that doesn't exist.
There is no such thing as Eastern Europe anymore. No one comes from there. People·come.from countries: Slovakia, Latvia, Bulgaria. Or they come from cities: Sarajevo, Łódź, Mariupol. Sometimes they say they come from regions or landscapes: the pine woods of Mazovia, the rain-soaked hills of Maramures, the bare rock of the Albanian Alps.

But wherever they come from, people don't identify as Eastern Europeans. The phrase Eastern Europe is an outsider's convenience, a catchall used to conceal a nest of stereotypes. Some of these stereotypes- poverty, gangsterism, ethnic strife-are genuinely damaging. Others are merely sad. A friend of mine, a professor of Polish and German history, once had a student ask, in all seriousness, whether it was true•'that Eastern Europe was "a gray place, where no one ever laughed."

Last week I featured Frank Wynne's 2006 I Was Vermeer: The Rise and Fall of the Twentieth Century's Greatest Forger. The week before it was Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan's 2015 ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror. This week it's Jacob Mikanowski's 2023 Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land.

How could I NOT resist borrowing this book when I spotted it among the other new books at the public library. I'm hoping it will be the first in a series of excellent books on the history of Eastern Europe, Central Europe and the Balkans you'll see featured in the coming future on my blog. Here's what Amazon has to say about Jacob Mikanowski's Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land.

Goodbye, Eastern Europe is a masterful narrative about a place that has survived the brink of being forgotten. Beginning with long-lost accounts of early pagan life, Mikanowski offers a kaleidoscopic tour recounting the rise and fall of the great empires—Ottoman, Hapsburg, and Russian—the dawn of the modern era, the ravages of Fascism and Communism, as well as Capitalism, the birth of the modern nation-state, and more. A student of literature, history, and the ghosts of his own family's past, Mikanowski paints a magisterial portrait of a place united by diversity, and eclecticism, and a people with the shared story of being the dominated rather than the dominating.