This book presents the work of a younger generation of scholars, participants in an interdisciplinary seminar on East Central Europe at Oxford University from 2006 to 2010. With the exception of two full professors, Maria Bucur (Indiana University), who contributed a reflective, autobiographical piece that explores the role of academic historians as challengers of mythic memorialization, and Robert Evans (Oxford), who wrote a similarly personal “Afterword” about the study of East Central Europe, most of the contributors completed their terminal degrees in the last decade or will shortly defend them, and their articles reflect the rigor and detail of new scholarship. On the whole, they make much of the rich complexity of borders, changing governments and regimes, minority peoples, and other aspects of East Central European history that do not fit neatly into the political, national, and statist narratives that have dominated the field for several decades. As Pyrah and Turda note in their useful introduction: “It is no longer enough to abandon Cold War historiography, to study what was previously banned or inaccessible, to reconstruct narratives of national and nation-state identities in their mutual exclusivity” (xi). Rather, they suggest, East Central European historiography needs to join larger interdisciplinary, scholarly discussions, or, as often seems to be the case in this book, mine the lesser-known stories of minorities and liminal groups for larger significance.
Temporally, the book ranges from Jan Fellerer's tight reconstruction of the “Ruthenian Alphabet War of 1834” in Galicia to a fascinating contemporary anthropological study of “folk lingerie” from a mountain region of southern Poland, and it includes a rather heavy dose of scholarship from the interwar period or about Romania. The articles reflect the complexity of minority perspectives, whether it be the hopeful turn to leftist politics among interwar Romanian Jewish writers, as discussed by Camelia Crăciun, or the nationalization of the Hungarian- and Romanian-speaking Roman Catholic Csango minority in Moldavia. When majority groups receive attention, such as Marija Petrović's study of the Serbs of the Karlovci Gymnasium during the interwar period, the reader sees that school loyalty trumped ethnic pride. The book also includes a useful topical bibliography that seeks to go beyond the traditional country-by-country breakdown common for this region.
The editors have divided the text into four parts: “Religion and Education,” “Minorities,” “Language and Literature,” and “Tradition and Memory.” The first chapter, by James A. Kapalo, about the “‘Canonization’ of the Gagauz language in Southern Bessarabia” could just as easily have fit into the section about minorities. As a case study of the linguistic capital accorded the Gagauz language, thanks to one cleric's early-twentieth-century effort to translate Orthodox scripture into the essentially Turkish language of his minority coreligionists, Kapalo's research illustrates how the complex nexus of empire, religion, language, and national sentiment shifted over time. As the political masters of Bessarabia changed, so too did Mihail Çakir's orthography for Gagauz, shifting from a Cyrillic to a Latinate script. Yet if the Orthodox Church's initial support for a translation of scripture into Turkish gave Gagauz nationalism quite a boost, today its lack of support for these translations has given Protestant groups, who are happy to promote translations of scripture into the vernacular, a foothold among Gagauz-speakers. R. Chris Davis's study of the Csangos demonstrates the ways that authorities—Romanian and Hungarian politicians, anthropologists, Catholic clergy, and linguists—sought to codify and simplify the status of this localized group, with very real results, including discrimination and deportation.
The remaining chapters in the “Minorities” section further illustrate the contingency of national, religious, and state identities in the region, demonstrating the failure of institutions to assert simple, monolithic forms of identification. For the Hungarian minorities living outside of the rump interwar Hungarian state, as Eric Beckett Weaver shows, the standard “black and white” dichotomy that presents them as either victims or scheming irredentists fails to capture the “lush diversity” of their lives as minorities. Although “conservative and radical revisionists in Hungary [decried this diversity], preferring a monochrome unity of thought and aims in the march to re-establish the lost motherland,” their mutual separation “had [in fact] brought a bountiful blossoming of thought and expression” (49–50). Tudor Georgescu's chapter similarly demonstrates that the Transylvanian Saxon “Self-Help” eugenics movement, far from being derivative and dependent on outside German input, was a “distinctly Saxon fascist movement,” reliant upon “indigenous, rather than imported ideology” (55, 70).
Nicolette Makovicky's brilliant analysis of the increasingly famous handmade lace g-string bikinis of Koniaków, Poland, subtly illustrates how what has been pitched in the media as an apparent conflict between generations over morality and folkways is much more than a “metonym for post-socialist change” (138). Rather, it is emblematic of the ways that people in a small border community have taken advantage of their peripheral relationship to the state. The shift from doilies to panties masks the ways that, under either regime, inhabitants of this community have used their marginality to promote forms of entrepreneurialism and the mixed economy. Thanks to their liminal status within Poland, the lace-makers of Koniaków actually found it easier to move into the European and global marketplace.
The essays in this volume demonstrate the growing range and sophistication of Anglophone scholarship on East Central Europe, particularly in their presentation of minority experiences, based on rigorous research in multiple, often lesser-known languages. Taken together, they amply illustrate the contingency of national, religious, state, and group efforts to control narratives of identification in the region.
