This important book by Omer Bartov is neither history monograph nor history survey. It has, indeed, the features of travel writing, moral commentary, family history, and contemporary reportage. It does not fall neatly into any of these categories, but the various approaches combine to make a coherent and effective whole. Like the vanished multiethnic borderland with which the author deals, the book is a product of intermingled intentions, issues, and influences.

One of the more ethnically jumbled regions of the Habsburg Empire, historic eastern Galicia (now the western part of Ukraine) was peopled by Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, and many others. The world wars, the Holocaust, and some massive additional waves of ethnic cleansing have produced an ethnically cleansed region that is now for the most part Ukrainian, and from the ideological standpoint, intensely Ukrainian. The central question Bartov investigates is this: how does the modern collective memory in this region take into account the often brutal and sometimes shameful history played out there?

History hovers, layered, in the background. Of first importance is the murder of the Galician Jews by Germans, Ukrainians, Poles, and Soviet Russians. But Bartov shows that the brutalities of Ukrainians toward the Polish population; the repression, violence, and cruelties of the Communist regime; and the brutal war of the Ukrainian nationalist groups against the Soviets not only mark the past but condition the present.

Bartov's book is in effect a way of exploring the present by exploring the past and examining the past by investigating the present. For three decades now, historians have discussed the importance of memory and commemoration in European histories, and Bartov applies this discourse to a less studied region and history. But further, he also takes this discussion into the streets, and here the “streets” are the thoroughfares of small towns and cities in western Ukraine and the country roads that pass by former sites of murder and atrocity.

Bartov's visits to these places over the past few years are central to the book, the core of which is a catalog of visits. We find out what people in a given town know, what their monuments say, how they have commemorated their past, and which part of it they have remembered.

Repeatedly, we encounter the following pattern. There is no shortage of historical “awareness.” But this awareness is almost exclusively tied to a narrative of brutalities suffered by Ukrainian victims at the hands of both Nazis and Communists (a narrative in most cases accurate enough). On the other hand, the murder of Jews (and the ethnic cleansing of Poles, for that matter) is rarely memorialized, practically forgotten, to some extent suppressed. Instead of beginning some kind of coming to terms with this part of the past (as happened, for instance, in the early 2000s in Poland in connection with Jan T. Gross's book, Neighbors), western Ukrainians have deepened and developed their narrative of martyred Ukrainian heroism, while ignoring the fate of destroyed communities in the region, and above all without any reference to Ukrainian participation in destroying them. Bartov finds that an indispensable component of modern Ukrainian nationalism, especially in western Ukraine, is the story of the Ukrainian resistance bands of the UPA/OUN. Yet to a frightening extent, these Ukrainian groups—along with unconnected Ukrainian townspeople and peasants—assisted in the murder of Jews and were indeed the principle perpetrators of the ethnic cleansing of Poles at the end of the war.

Actually, Bartov shows that the murder of Jews by Ukrainians was often closely connected to Communist atrocities. A prime example is the case of Zolochiv, a Galician town where the NKVD tortured and murdered some 600 inhabitants just before the Russians retreated from the Barbarossa attack in 1941. When the Germans arrived and discovered the mass grave of these victims of the NKVD, local Ukrainians and Poles joined German soldiers and SS-men in a vicious three-day pogrom that killed between 1,000 and 4,000 Jews. Of a modern exhibition on the NKVD massacre Bartov writes, “These are stories of pain, suffering, and loss. But as is the case in many other sites of atrocity in the world and over many centuries, the urge to remember and commemorate is tightly bound with the need to suppress and forget” (p. 173).

Worse than this “forgetting,” Bartov shows that in contemporary western Ukraine, anti-Semitism can easily appear in local nationalist discourse in forms as crude and coarse as anything Julius Streicher wrote in the 1930s. For example, after describing the ways in which Jews (usually identified with Bolsheviks) have ransacked Ukraine, a right-wing newspaper editor in Ternopil' continues, “For this is the Zionist profession: to act as parasites, to exploit, and to rob” (p. 149). The more radical recent purveyors of xenophobia remember the Jews almost exclusively by making them perpetrators, the Ukrainians the victims.

Bartov discusses the Poles of Galicia only peripherally, but it is worth noting that the ethnic cleansing of these people—including both killing and expulsion—is one of the many egregious acts of ethnic violence in this particular cauldron of the World War II period. Insofar as the author deals with this question in passing, these ethnic Poles also seem absent from the collective historical narrative of modern western Ukraine.

This is an unusual work, one that resonates in more than one direction. It is also a study that Bartov is extremely well qualified to write, based on his credentials as historian, his family background (an important leitmotif in the book), and his engagement in questions of collective memory and narrative. It is this last concern with which he concludes the study. As for the past, the dead, he says, deserve—figuratively—a decent burial. As for the future, it is only by “exposing these roots and uncovering the hidden past” that eastern Galicia will succeed in reconnecting with its past as a creative and complex cultural borderland (p. 210).