Memory, the City and the Legacy of World War II in East Central Europe is an interdisciplinary study on memory making in several east European cities that saw destruction, mass violence, displacement, and demographic change during and after the Second World War. With its main focus on Wrocław, Warsaw, L΄viv and Kaliningrad, the monograph examines literary texts and memory projects that deal with the cities’ “lost others,” including Holocaust victims and German expellees. It discusses how a range of mnemonic actors have strived to develop a “‘difficult love’ for unfamiliar places and pasts” (particularly in the locations that saw border shifts) and how, in so doing, they constructed “powerful and effective place-based memories” (2).

In the course of six chapters, Blacker provides fine analyses of literary sources and urban commemoration, as well as discussing a rich body of scholarship in memory studies (Maurice Halbwachs, Andreas Huyssen, Paul Connerton, Aleida Assmann, and others) and literary theory (Mikhail Bakhtin, Yuri Lotman, and Roland Barthes). In Chapter 1, he offers a theoretical discussion of the city as text. Here, urban memory work is construed as an exercise in reading and translating, both to unearth foreign pasts and to preserve the traces of the “other.” Chapter 2 examines physical ruination using the case studies of Kaliningrad and Warsaw. Through his elegant analyses of works by Joseph Brodsky, Zinovy Zinik, and Yuri Buida, Blacker makes a convincing argument about how Kaliningrad has been fashioned into a city of ruptured history and fragmented identity. In a similar way, his examination of projects that focus on Muranów, the post-war district built on the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto, shows how Jewish absence stimulates creative and imaginative forms of remembrance. Chapter 3 looks at the reverse side of the coin, focusing on victimhood, which is said to be a prominent (and exclusionary) trope in memorial narratives surrounding Kyiv, L΄viv, and Warsaw.

Chapters 4 and 5 investigate “memorial entrepreneurship,” including nostalgic cafes, restaurants, festival culture, and crime fiction. According to Blacker, the “carnivalesque spirit” (150) of many such undertakings, as well as their commercial dimension, do not only make the unknown pasts easily accessible but also pose the danger of erasing the inconvenient memories of violence and death. Chapter 6 examines the photograph as an important instrument of postmemory, as seen in the literary texts of Piotr Szewc, Piotr Paziński, and Yuri Buida, as well as in various urban projects in Warsaw, L΄viv and elsewhere. The Conclusion contains several useful insights on the pitfalls of memory work, including the danger of sanitizing the past (206), the mnemonic indifference of the wide sections of urban population (207) and, by association, the largely elitist nature of such remembrance (208).

This is a beautifully written book that contains sophisticated analyses of urban memory work from three different cultural settings. Considering the current plethora of scholarship on Jewish-themed commemoration in Poland, Blacker's comparative focus, including the use of Ukrainian and Russian case studies, is particularly refreshing. So is his choice of literary analysis as one of the methods with which to study memory (Chapters 2 and 5 are two standouts). Some topics remain elusive, however, including the figure of “the ghost” included in the title but discussed in the monograph only in passing (see references to the work of Svetlana Boym on 149). On this topic, scholars in the Polish context have shown that hauntology can be a useful approach with which to study the political, affective, and aesthetic legacies of “lost others” (Zuzanna Dziuban, ed., The “Spectral Turn”: Jewish Ghosts in the Polish Post-Holocaust Imaginaire, 2019). A more substantial discussion of the political context surrounding “the ghosts of others,” municipal governance in particular, would be a welcome addition to this monograph. In a similar vein, the role of writers and artists in city branding deserves more attention, particularly given the ubiquity of such practices in contemporary east European culture (on related issues see, for example, Dominik Antonik, Autor jako marka. Literatura w kulturze audiowizualnej społeczeństwa informacyjnego, 2014).

Memory, the City and the Legacy of World War II in East Central Europe is an interesting new contribution to the scholarship in east European memory studies. The author has brought an invaluable comparative focus and impressive linguistic expertise into the field. This interdisciplinary book will be of interest to a variety of readers in area studies, urban studies, and comparative literature.