From a historical point of view, Brody, the birthplace of Joseph Roth, was an extremely interesting place. The most Jewish town in the entire Habsburg Empire, it was simultaneously a center and a periphery during the long nineteenth century. The imperial elites in Vienna considered Brody to be a backward city in the least attractive province. To the East European Jews, the town was an important center of traditional Jewish orthodox scholarship and, at the same time, the capital of the Haskalah in Galicia and Ukraine. Between 1779 and 1880, Brody enjoyed the status of a “free trade city” (freie Handelsstadt), but in the late nineteenth century it became underdeveloped and destitute. All these contradictions make it an attractive but also difficult topic.

The book under review is based on a PhD thesis written by an Austrian historian, Börries Kuzmany, at the University of Vienna and the University of Paris IV Sorbonne. The book consists of three thematic parts: (A) the economic rise and fall of Brody; (B) an unusual Galician little town; and (C) the perception of historical Brody. Part A is preceded with a preface and an introduction, which explain the importance of the topic and describe the author's methodological approaches toward time, space, and definitions of town, ethnicity, myth, and memory. Part A is devoted to the economic development of Brody before the First Partition of Poland in 1772; to Brody's best era between 1772 and 1851, when the town became an important trade center of international importance; and to the period of stagnation and crisis between 1815 and 1914. Part A also offers an interesting section that explains why modernization “bypassed” Brody and, after years of impressive success, the city became poor and unimportant.

Part B describes the integration of Brody into the Habsburg Empire, Brody's importance to East European Jewry, the town's Christian minorities, the transition from ethnoreligious to national communities, and Brody's border character. Part C analyzes the descriptions of the town made by various travelers, including Emperor Joseph II, and the literary reception of Brody. It shows how the Soviets, Ukrainian emigrés, Poles, Jews, and contemporary Ukrainians remember the town's history. The final part also offers a “walk” through today's Brody, describing its most important sites. The book has a conclusion, appendices (several historical documents and numerous statistical tables), a large bibliography, lists of pictures, maps, tables, and diagrams, and geographical and personal indices.

The book is an instant classic. Anyone working on Galicia or East European Jewry has to examine it. Many of Kuzmany's conclusions concerning Brody, such as his theses on the failure of modernization or the transition from ethnoreligious-linguistic communities to national groups, apply to the whole of Galician history. The analysis of Brody's economic life in the last years of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries is excellent. The picture of Brody's life during the Napoleonic era is very interesting. The explanation of the economic background of the development of Haskalah adds some important points to our knowledge. Also, Kuzmany's presentation of the Habsburg educational policies in this overwhelmingly Jewish town helps us understand the history of Galician education. The book offers an enormous amount of statistical material, which can be useful in future studies. The author performed meticulous research in various archives and used a plethora of methodological approaches to transform his findings into a sophisticated scholarly analysis.

Yet, the book also has weaknesses. The overwhelming amount of detail makes the narrative sometimes difficult to follow, particularly for readers who are not experts on Galicia. Many names and numbers mentioned in the main body of the text do not help explain the analyzed phenomena and should be included in the footnotes or appendixes. It appears that Kuzmany assumes that his readers know Galicia's political history very well (which is not necessarily true) and almost ignores it. He does not write, for example, about Galician autonomy and its consequences. This is why the description of the last fifty years of the “long” nineteenth century looks very pale in comparison to the first half of this century. Maybe, the period 1772–1880 and not the “long” nineteenth century should be in the title of the book. Kuzmany rarely puts Brody's political life in the broader context of Galician politics. It is understandable that the book concentrates on the Jewish issues, but the Polish topics should not be neglected. During the last decades before 1914, Polish legal and illegal political life was quite active in Brody, but the author ignores this topic. Kuzmany, a post-doc in the interdisciplinary program “Austrian Galicia and Its Multicultural Heritage” at the University of Vienna, is a very well-educated scholar. He spent years at various institutions of higher learning in Vienna, Paris, and Moscow. Maybe a longer visit to Cracow and Warsaw would change his perspectives and interpretations.