In her excellent new book, The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World, Tara Zahra presents a genuinely new interpretation of the East European exodus to the new world, primarily to the United States. Far from a celebration, this is an account that emphasizes a history of dashed hopes, unscrupulous middlemen, immense hardship on both sides of the Atlantic, the imbrication of human movement and governmental plans to deport whole populations, the relation of free and unfree labor in the mass movement of peoples, and the role of government in ransoming, encouraging, and hindering exodus. It is a wide and sweeping book, covering the whole of the twentieth century, and much, but not all, of Eastern Europe, with Czarist Russia not as central as the title might lead one to suppose. But for that, emigration from Austria-Hungary, hitherto less considered, is illuminated all the more clearly. With an acute sense for aspects of the story that have not been told—such as the gendered dimension of the great departure—Zahra has remapped our understanding of migration in significant ways. She also makes an overarching argument that is somewhat negated by the title, namely, that there were many great departures, and that they do not tell a simple story of the attainment of freedom. New interpretations always bring to the fore some aspects of a history at the cost of others. The following review explores Zahra's interpretation against an older work, to give contour to the gain and the loss.

An insufficiently appreciated masterpiece, Eugene M. Kulischer's Europe on the Move (1948) is a work with a history. Kulischer was born in Kiev in 1881 just as the first major pogroms hit the Russian Empire, causing waves of Jewish emigration. With his brother Alexander, he fled from St. Petersburg after the revolution and settled in Berlin, where he was a professor of international law. Their father, a historian and ethnologist who had worked on demographic issues, died in St. Petersburg in 1919, and his older brother, Joseph, an important economist, seems to have stayed in St. Petersburg as well. The two younger brothers continued their scholarly work in Russian and in German in the 1920s, culminating in the publication of Kriegs- und Wanderzüge. Weltgeschichte als Völkerbewegung (1932).

Their thesis was that war and revolution were great engines of human movement, and that the reigning consensus about demography, forged in and reflecting peaceful periods of history, had not taken this into sufficient consideration. Not continuity but rupture marked the great migratory flows of their time, they insisted. It also defined their lives. After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, the Russian scholars, who were also Jewish, fled to Denmark and then to Paris. In 1940, at age sixty, Eugene Kulischer crossed the boundary of Nazi-occupied France into Vichy with his manuscript, now reworked again and partly written in French. His younger brother was less fortunate. Marshal Philippe Pétain's men arrested Alexander as he crossed the same line, and he subsequently “died in a concentration camp,” as his brother laconically stated, adding only that “it would be impossible to overemphasize the value of his contribution to this book” (Europe on the Move, vi). Some materials and chapters had been sent from Paris to Cambridge, England, where they were kept in the files of the Society for the Promotion of Science and Learning. To prevent confiscation by the Vichy censors, a full copy of the manuscript was also sent to Martinique, and, through the American Consulate at Fort de France, on to New York. Eugene fled to the United States, where he collected the materials and published an extended, up-to-date version of the work in English. In the middle of the twentieth century, as a result of World War II, there were nearly thirty million uprooted people in Europe, Kulischer concluded. His figure did not include the Jews who had lost their lives in the Shoah, or the vast number of foreign and forced laborers who had worked in German factories and fields between 1939 and 1945.

To read Kulischer is to enter into a very different conceptual world from Zahra's The Great Departure. In the first place, Kulischer lived in the middle of the era of territorially defined nation-states and felt he had to undo the assumption of a natural link between land and people. He thus informed his readers that, in A.D. 900, “not one German was in Berlin; not one Russian in Moscow; not one Hungarian in Budapest.” Moreover, “no population is ever at rest” and “every epoch is a period of ‘great migrations’” (Europe on the Move, 8). The links historians now make between place and people came later and were the result of movement, Kulischer argued. Zahra is less interested in links of national identity. Especially in the earlier chapters of her book, she emphasizes that, while one might imagine migrants as Poles or Slovenes or Germans, they were, in fact, many other things as well: fathers, mothers, Catholics, Jews, or simply hard-working people. Just as important, according to Zahra, many were indifferent to nationality. Animated by the numbers and bold maps with prominent black-inked arrows in his book (“carefully drawn by Miss Kay Goldman” [vii]), Kulischer assumed the stability of identity, even as he rejected its natural connection to place. He could thus offer a picture of the flows of human movement and give the reader a clear sense of their dimensions.

Zahra's book lacks well-presented statistics and maps, except for one conventional map of the European nation-states in 1922. The relative proportions and timings of the great departures are therefore less clear. But for that, the individual stories—like that of the dismayed Faustina Wiśniewska, with which the book opens—emerge all the more prominently and guide us into an analysis of the experience of migration that would have complicated Kulischer's confident arrows. Rather than the “great departure,” we are, for example, told just as often about the great circulation, the back-and-forth of migration from the new land to the old. And rather than the pursuit of a dream of prosperity, we are told of ambivalence and the persistent longing for home.

Part of the difference between the works of Kulischer and Zahra derives from their respective points of departure. For Kulischer, it was the Russian experience. For Zahra, despite the claim in the subtitle to cover all of Eastern Europe, it is the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its successor states. She glances at the rest of Eastern Europe, but tells us surprising little about Russia—a country that arguably had little reimmigration. Zahra pushes beyond Kulischer's certainties in other ways as well. Whereas he focused on events, and especially war, as the great initiator of movement, Zahra pays more attention to policy and to those who carried it out. She writes of often nefarious middlemen and of the capriciousness of officials at the border. In short, where Eugene Kulischer dealt in aggregates, and lived the roulette of fate—he making it through the border, his brother not—Zahra makes the unpredictable aspects of the journey, the messiness of the mechanisms, as well as the cruel turns in individual lives, a central part of the narrative. In an eye-opening chapter, she also shows how a surprising policy consensus arose around the idea that there was a Jewish problem in Central and Eastern Europe, and that its solution was resettlement—with a wide range of countries, including the United States, giving serious consideration to a long-term policy that would have sent the Jews of Europe to Africa. We also see a close connection between the European exclusionary movements of the present and the xenophobic agitation of earlier eras, in what Zahra calls “one hundred years of anti-emigration activism in Eastern Europe” (289).

As Kulischer might have done, one may ask Zahra whether the emphasis on continuity comes at the expense of too faint a stress on revolution and war. Zahra treats World War II and its explosion of human movement too curtly, Kulischer might have pointed out, and the excellent pages covering expulsion—what Zahra calls the “first final solution” (143)—are not followed by an even cursory reflection on human movement in the second, and actual, “final solution.” A missing World War II and the near absence of the Holocaust raise, in turn, what is perhaps the greatest difference between the two works—something one might characterize as “tragic” versus “comic narrative,” with the latter term referring not so much to humor but rather to an emphasis on the gap between idea and practice, initial hope and the reversal of outcomes. For Kulischer, the possibility of movement was largely unidirectional; it was about departure forever, even though he knew that the history of migration involved, in certain times and places, return as well.

When Kulischer died in Washington, DC, in 1956, he was working on a multivolume study of human movement that started with the post-glacial dispersion of mankind. Zahra's book does not come together into a unified historical vision that might compete with other general theories of historical development. She does not, for example, explain how the experience of movement illuminates the series of interpretive paradigms—such as modernity, totalitarianism, and democracy, or civil society and its fragility—that historians and publicists use to make sense of the first half of the twentieth century. With her analysis more focused on individuals, she emphasizes instead broken hopes—and the ways in which larger concepts hide so much.

There is a final aspect of Zahra's story that resonates with my own sense of the experience of emigration and immigration. I came to the United States as a four-year-old and grew up next to a railroad track, no longer in operation, on Brown Street in a small town north of Boston. I did not think of it in these terms at the time, but walking down the street was like a stroll through a European great departure. Next door were the Bianchis, then the O'Sullivans, then the LeRoys, across from them the Moreaus, and in the other direction the Kowalewskis and Wojtoniks, and one more house down the Dimitris (names changed except my own). Most of the families were large, and all were first- or second-generation immigrants, except my father, Edward Smith, who was, as he said, “an American.” When I was twelve, we left that street and moved two blocks away. The youngest Bianchi stayed there until she was sixteen, then fled for New York and ultimately California. She saw something as endemic to the whole street that I only saw as unique to my own family: namely, that the stresses and strains of uprooting and movement played out in gender violence. To protect her mother, she ultimately had to call the police on her father. Others should have done so as well.

One of the remarkable aspects of Zahra's book, something Kulischer never touched on, is that the immigrant experience was different for women and men, and that violence, sex trafficking, and disappointments of an entirely different kind were also part of the story of the great departures. To bring this to light is perhaps Zahra's most enduring contribution.