Börris Kuzmany's book is the first study of a provincial Galician town published in English. Although understudied, provincial towns were just as important to the image and experiences of nineteenth-century Galicia as Lvov, its capital city, or the province's villages. At the same time, the book makes clear that Brody was much more than just an ordinary Galician town: it was, in fact, highly unusual in many respects. The second largest Galician city at the end of the eighteenth century, Brody was located on the border to the Russian Empire and enjoyed the status of a free trade port. Moreover, it was the most Jewish of all Austro-Hungarian cities: even after significant demographic gains at the turn of the twentieth century, Christians constituted a mere third of its population.

The story of Brody in the nineteenth century, as told by Kuzmany, is also quite unusual in the context of modern urban history. Instead of demographic explosion and territorial expansion, rapid social and spatial transformation (the dominant themes of that field), we find in Brody a story of economic stagnation and decline. The book reminds us that the rapid growth of some modern cities stalled the development of others. By 1914, Brody had slipped to being merely the eleventh largest of all Galician cities and towns. It faced fierce competition from new industrial, commercial, and administrative centers such as Ternopil, Kolomyia, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Drohobych. Even the coming of the railway, the engine of modernity, did not help Brody: because the Pidvolochysk-Volochysk railway border crossing provided a shorter route to Odessa and southern Ukraine than the route via Brody, it accounted for the lion's share of cross-border trading.

Brody's economic heyday had been during the Napoleonic wars, and the city's centrality to the region had been waning ever since. One of the book's central questions is whether the relative economic decline of Brody was accompanied by a parallel social crisis. Kuzmany answers this question by looking at the city's social and confessional groups, and at municipal institutions—schools in particular. He traces how these groups, and the city at large, successfully accommodated themselves to changing circumstances. This adaptation also implied greater integration into the province, a “Galicianization” of Brody, which had to reorient itself from being a major imperial capital that dealt with foreign metropolises toward greater interaction with the provincial capital Lvov. Despite the decline of Brody's supraregional importance, the town managed to maintain its special status among the region's urban centers.

Brody's economic problems did not automatically transfer into the social and cultural domains. The town's newly acquired provinciality provided a fertile ground for intellectual reflection and cultural production. The town's strong Jewish character, memories of Brody's former commercial glory, and the presence of the state border were among the most important factors that helped to maintain its unique profile. Brody's Jewish community defined the town's character, in fact, while the town played an important role in the shaping of Jewish society in Eastern Europe as a whole: Brody was an indispensable transfer point for intellectual and cultural trends that traveled from East to West and vice versa. It also served as a combined center of Jewish enlightenment (Haskalah), as well as rabbinical Orthodoxy and Hasidism, which resulted in conflicts but also interaction and cross-fertilization between these traditions. Kuzmany shows, for example, that Brody shaped the Haskalah in the Russian Empire to a much greater extent than the original centers of the movement in Central Europe did. The story of nineteenth-century Brody is, finally, also the story of the Jewish community's transformation, its changing interaction with Christian communities, its assimilation, as well as its resistance to assimilatory pressures. While sharing in larger pan-Galician trends, Brody remained, at the same time, more conservative than the average Galician town. This conservatism manifested itself in the perseverance of traditional Jewish education, in the very late switch to the Polish language in the city's high school, as well as in the unusual strength of the Russophile orientation of the local Ruthenian peasantry—even on the eve of World War I.

The panoramic history of nineteenth-century Brody that this book paints would have benefited from an analysis of personal narratives and the individual experiences of its inhabitants. Personal reflections are introduced, but only in the final part of the book, which deals with perceptions of Brody. As a “much-visited” (248) border town, Brody saw a fair number of prominent travelers, including Honoré de Balzac. But the town owes most of its literary fame to native-born Joseph Roth. Kuzmany shows how Brody served as a prototype for the numerous border towns and shtetls in Roth's fiction. Roth did not have to invent the topoi of provincialism and exoticism for his hometown: by the end of the nineteenth century, such associations were firmly entrenched in descriptions of Brody. Kuzmany shows that travelers from both the West and the East saw Brody as the first provincial glimpse of a different world.

While the book identifies common topoi in descriptions of Brody, it does not integrate them with the “real” Brody described in the first two parts of the book. The same observation holds true for the analysis of Brody as a “place of memory” in twentieth-century reminiscences and historical narratives. As Kuzmany shows, these memories and histories are firmly positioned in Jewish, Polish, and Ukrainian national narratives, and this position within the national narration explains the varying degrees of mutual blindness that each demonstrates toward ethnic “Others.” Nothing in the story of nineteenth-century Brody, as told in this book, would have suggested that outcome. The book ends with a “promenade” that explores the dilapidated, neglected, and kitschy landscape of Brody as a typical, post-Soviet, western Ukrainian town. The physical reality of today's Brody is approached as a material manifestation of the working of collective memory—a heavily rewritten, nineteenth-century cityscape that can barely be excavated, even by a knowledgeable visitor.

Kuzmany handles the voluminous scholarly literature on the region with impressive ease and shows a thorough familiarity with all the relevant national historical narratives. The author's linguistic proficiency is equally impressive and fully adequate to the task he has set himself. As a result, Kuzmany not only has written the best existing history of Brody but also made an important contribution to the already sizeable literature on Habsburg Galicia, providing a fresh take on the nature of its historical experience and legacy.