Can the border town speak? In the census-taking, border-patrolling, electorally minded gaze of the metropole, Grenzstädte are sites of statistical overabundance and therefore causes of great anxieties, real and imagined. Histories of largely Jewish towns pose special problems for East Central European scholars of a reconstructionist bent, writing after unplottable multicultural demographies have been permanently altered—or, to put it more bluntly, erased. This project, funded by the Austrian government and led by Professor Andreas Kappeler (who contributes the preface) and a team of international researchers, provides a solid microhistory of late Habsburg and Romanov (mis)governance. The central focus for the study are the pairings of Brody-Radzivilov, Podwołoczyska-Voločisk, and Husiatyn-Gusjatin, today all located in Western Ukraine and along the Zbruch River. This thoughtfully arranged book offers a prism through which scholars of multiethnic empires can examine key issues such as infrastructural development, mobility, governmentality, protectionist commerce (both legal and illegal), formation of confessional identity, anti-Semitism, and “mental mapping” in Galicia, Volhynia, and Podolia.

The authors include a historiography of these Ukrainian-Jewish “frontiers” and imperial “contact zones” (terms used interchangeably) and the towns' socioeconomic, demographic, religious, and cultural histories. The border towns had substantial Jewish and Ruthenian/Ukrainian populations. Brody, for which Börries Kuzmany has written a separate history, is probably the best known of those selected. In the time period, none of the towns in the study had a population exceeding 20,000 souls. The authors show how these towns were refashioned territorially by the centers after the late-eighteenth-century partitions of Poland-Lithuania. They show lasting effects of Habsburg and Romanov confessional and linguistic diversity and the emergence of regionally based identities and specialized economic roles.

The book has an impressive array of sources in English, French, German, Polish, Ukrainian, and Russian. Jewish-language sources in Yiddish or Hebrew are not used, though the incorporation of secondary literature in East European Jewish history is laudable and extensive. The sources are a balance of state and regional documents, statistics and reports, and memoir literature. Useful “ethnographic” photos and maps, historical and contemporary, are included. The coauthors detail the totalizing effects of World War I—described as “catastrophic” for the border towns and their multiethnic roles—and a final section (“Was bleibt?”) offers impressions of Western Ukraine in 2006. The final chapter is very much a European “usable past” appeal, against past Sovietization and Ukrainian ethnonationalization. These specialists on Habsburg-Romanov border interfaces effectively show how peripheries, however labeled, categorized, and therefore simplified for the optics of statecraft or self-serving purposes of electoral politics, are at base multidimensional places with recalibrated identities, mobile populations, and fluid frontiers.

If there is a point one can quibble about, it is what this finely arranged “micro” of the long nineteenth century contributes to the “macro” of Vienna Congress Europe. The authors rely heavily on state documents and do not seem to leave their region of choice. The occasional result is a kind of strained comparative state-imperial paradigm of Entwicklung, as seen in the expeditions of old-fashioned geographical societies seeking European development of commerce, road building, taxation, and infrastructure. Of course, it is hard to make such banal moments of state building sexy, and the authors document a fair amount of imperial regulatory porousness from Vienna and St. Petersburg, but the performance of identity in marginal space (à la Stasiuk) is itself not historicized. Border towns are liminal, to put it another way, but only if one accepts the fixing of “natural” borders (as the empires once did, at the Zbruch River) in the first place. The authors have executed a scientific-geographical study, not an ornamented archaeogeographical album, but there are traces of both genres. Still, they understand that these border town geographies must account for demographic transformations during the world wars and under Communism, and that lost “multicultural” pasts of Habsburg lands need not be an archaic exercise in recovery.

No single map can entirely “fix” a place. The three authors of Getrennt und doch Verbunden detail the legacies of the Habsburg and Romanov empires in their microstudy of six border towns. Reconstructing the towns over 150 years, hardly a small task, the authors have meticulously researched state and regional documents in Russia, Ukraine, and Austria. The artificiality of frontiers is the book's leitmotif, for in such contested lands, one must study not only the demographic presence, but also the “mental maps” of traders, migrants, pilgrims, smugglers, and ordinary denizens.