Omer Bartov, the eminent Holocaust scholar and professor of European history at Brown University, has written a personal chronicle of his recent journey through Eastern Galicia, where he sought out vestiges of Jewish life in this region (now located in Western Ukraine). Part travelogue, part essay, Erased explores the culture of remembering and forgetting in contemporary Ukraine, arguing that Western Ukraine's multiethnic past has been largely forgotten and Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis largely suppressed. Instead, the public museums, memorials, and monuments present narratives of “Ukrainian self-glorification” and Ukrainian victimization, while systematically “erasing” Jewish life and death from public memory. Even Holocaust memorials tend to “conflate Nazi and Soviet crimes and Jewish and Ukrainian victims by linking them all to the very same site” (49).

Bartov visited twenty towns in Western Ukraine, including Buchach (where his mother grew up), in an effort to survey the remnants of Jewish material culture (synagogues, cemeteries, etc.) and to look for signs of the once vibrant multiethnic communities from the Habsburg and interwar periods. In Erased, he documents the neglect, destruction, and suppression of the Jewish past, presenting a litany of charges against “the nationalists of Galicia” who have rehabilitated Ukrainian nationalist organizations, such as the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which collaborated with the Nazis and played an active role in the destruction of Ukrainian Jewry. Adding insult to injury, in some towns, monuments to these Ukrainian nationalists have literally displaced (and erased) the Jewish past. In Kosiv, for example, an exhibition on the “heroic” exploits of the UPA is located in the former rabbi's house. In Drohobych, a statue of Stepan Bandera, head of the OUN and a Nazi collaborator, stands on the territory of the former Drohobych ghetto. Other examples abound.

In Bartov's view, these examples are emblematic of the worrisome trend of rewriting the historical narrative “cleansed of the populations that had once been an integral part of it” (33). These populations (Jews, Poles, Germans, and others) had been dramatically reduced through murder and migration, making Western Ukraine more ethnically homogeneous in the postwar period than it had ever been before. Moreover, in the post-Soviet period, Western Ukrainians began asserting a regional identity, harking back to the OUN and UPA, and glorifying these organizations as vanguards in the struggle for Ukrainian independence. As Bartov argues, the rehabilitation of these “heroic” organizations has entailed ignoring their virulent anti-Semitism and their active involvement in the murder of the Jews. It has also entailed erasing or distorting traces of a vibrant Jewish past.

After reading Erased, one is left with the feeling that Bartov ignores (or dismisses) elements of the Ukrainian Jewish present that do not fit nicely into his argument. He praises Poland for preserving, embracing, and celebrating its Jewish past, even touting Ukraine's western neighbor as a model to be emulated. However, he pays little or no attention to similar developments in Ukraine itself. As Ruth Ellen Gruber has recently documented in Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to Eastern Europe (Washington, DC, 2007), there are plans to open “a full-scale Jewish museum” in the old Jewish quarter in L'viv, a Jewish museum and cultural center at the site of the Great Synagogue in nearby Belz, and a museum of Galician Jewry in the seventeenth-century fortress synagogue in Zhovka. (Bartov mentions the plans for the Zhovka museum in a footnote.) There are plans to rebuild the Golden Rose synagogue in L'viv, and efforts have been underway for some time to protect and preserve the overgrown Jewish cemetery in Brody. Furthermore, a hospitality center (with kosher restaurant and ritual bath) was opened in Belz in 2006 (for Jewish pilgrims), and the several thousand-strong Jewish community in L'viv has an active synagogue, a progressive Jewish community, a Jewish cultural center, a Hesed Arieh Center, a Jewish Revival in Galicia Center, and of course, a Jewish cemetery that is still in use. Surprisingly, these institutions of a greatly diminished, yet still active, Jewish community in Western Ukraine merit no mention in Bartov's book. Nor do the efforts by non-Jewish Ukrainians to preserve and celebrate the Galician Jewish past.

At the end of his book, Bartov calls on Ukraine to liberate itself from “the stranglehold of a distorted and semi-concealed past” and to recover “the true tragedy as well as the full glory of its history” (210). It appears that this process may already be underway, and perhaps Erased (which was recently published in Ukrainian) will provide an additional stimulus.