In August 1939, the Polish novelist Witold Gombromicz arrived in Buenos Aires. He had anticipated a two-week stay, but instead remained there for more than two decades, his return to Europe delayed indefinitely by Hitler's invasion of Poland. While in Argentina, he would write his acclaimed Trans-Atlantyk, a semi-autobiographical account of the Polish expatriate community. Links such as these between Eastern Europe's “natives” and remote “lands and populations” form the analytical foundation of Irene Kacandes and Yuliya Komska's edited volume, Eastern Europe Unmapped (4). Reading the book, one quickly realizes that our understanding of Eastern Europe's place in the world—our mental map—is distorted, or at the very least incomplete.

The argument advanced by Kacandes and Komska is provocative: our “geocoding” of “Eastern Europe”—our tendency to define this region in relation to neighboring geographical constructs, such as “the West,” and to reduce the region's history to the simple product of geopolitics—obscures historical and contemporary realities. The two dominant frameworks for thinking about East European history and society—“borderlands” and “neighbors”—derive, according to the editors, from the “cartographic logic” of “betweenness” and “contiguity,” and are responsible for our limited perception of the full range of activities underway in this region. The borderlands approach, they contend, privileges the analysis of stable, sedentary, proximate groups, while the literature on neighbors glosses over the fraught and sometimes violent relationships between national(ized) groups in these zones. To overcome these analytical limitations and ultimately remap Eastern Europe, the editors propose examining “discontiguous” relations between the region and the rest of the world.

This spatial reconfiguration of Eastern Europe unfolds over five thematic parts and ten chapters. Part I blurs the geographic lines between Catholic West and Orthodox East. Miriam Udel's essay argues that the plasticity of religious identity depicted in Yiddish-language novels reflects the spatially fragmented identities of the novels’ authors, and of East European Jews more generally. Piro Rexhepi's essay relocates Balkan “European” Muslims in the transnational context of Islamic politics and political thought. Part II takes up the familiar theme of East European dissent but approaches it from the perspective of “distancing” strategies. Through the concept of tuteishyia (“locals”), Belarussian intellectuals, Tatsiana Astrouskaya shows, imagined a new space of belonging, one neither rooted in the “nation” nor in the Soviet Union. Jessie Labov's quantitative analysis of the geographically discontiguous transmission of the Polish dissident journal Kultura demonstrates, as she aptly puts it, “how little congruity has to do with identity” (104).

The two essays that form Part III of the volume deal with the chronologies and mental geographies of East European “insiders.” The first, by Daniel Pratt, analyzes the role of temporal (dis)continuities in the writing of Bohumil Hrabil, Josef Kroutvor, and Milan Kundera, while the second, by Iona Luca, examines how Miroslav Penkov and Aleksandar Hemon's Anglophone works reconfigure Eastern Europe in a transnational matrix of local and global networks. Part IV deals with Eastern Europe's built environment. Sarah M. Schlachetzki examines debates surrounding the preservation of synagogues in Olsztyn and Poznań, cities whose Jewish and Prussian-German architectural heritage serves as a constant reminder of ruptured cultural contiguities. Adam Zachary Newton's essay considers the life of the Galician-Jewish artist Bruno Schulz, whose murals, painted for a Gestapo officer's residence and relocated in 2001 to the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem, mirror Schulz's own fragmented biography. Part V explores the affective ties that bind nonlocal scholars to Eastern Europe. Ann Cvetkovich recounts her experiences road-tripping through former Yugoslavia and interrogates what it means to “know” a place. Irene Kacandes uses a chance encounter with a woman born in Poland to ask whether we underestimate the role “elective affinities” play in determining our research interests. The volume ends with an epilogue by Vitaly Chernetsky, who proposes “cognitive mapping” as an alternative to geocoding.

Eastern Europe Unmapped lays the conceptual and empirical groundwork for a substantial new body of research. Building on a trend in the field of East European history away from the old East-West diffusion paradigm and toward transnational history, it offers an insightful critique of two dominate scholarly paradigms. Further, the collection provides an example of how we can displace geographic contiguity as the basic conceptual building block of historical and cultural analysis, the primary causal factor to which all other relations are subordinated. In this respect, the volume speaks not only to scholars in the field of Slavic and East European Studies, the volume's primary audience, but also to historians, social scientists, and literary scholars specializing in other regions.

The reader may wonder, however, whether its editors underestimate the analytical gains to be made from the “borderlands” and “neighbors” approaches. It is precisely through the examination of borderlands in works such as Pieter Judson's Guardians of the Nation (Cambridge, MA, 2006) and Tara Zahra's Kidnapped Souls (Ithaca, 2008) that we learned to see Eastern Europe not as a patchwork of self-contained, contiguous small nations, but rather as a dynamic space of evolving geographic and nongeographic identities deeply integrated into global networks. The critique of the “neighbors” paradigm likewise seems to fall short of fully engaging the complexity of this literature, which emerged out of desire to provide a counternarrative to Western scholars’ pathologizing overemphasis on interethnic conflict. Finally, the collection hints at, but does not systematically address, the logics behind Eastern Europe's discontiguous relationships. Here, the discourse of center and periphery may prove useful for understanding these historical processes because the “geocoded” notion that Eastern Europe suffered from a developmental delay structured how local and nonlocal agents, from the eighteenth century onward, interpreted this space. Might Eastern Europe's discursively constructed “peripherality” explain, at least in part, why regional actors forged certain discontiguous relationships, for example with Latin America, a region similarly seen as peripheral?

These criticisms aside, Kancades and Komska's timely collection presents an ambitious methodological challenge to historians and literary scholars and a promising framework for integrating Eastern Europe into wider global narratives.