The East Galician town of Buczacz belongs among those places in Eastern Europe that was in the twentieth century part of the Habsburg monarchy, Republic of Poland, Soviet Union, Nazi-occupied General Government, Soviet Union again, and, in the past thirty years, Ukraine—where it remains as of yet. Omer Bartov, a distinguished Holocaust historian at Brown University, has written a book focusing on Buczacz during the Holocaust. Bartov's mother came from the town and emigrated as child to Palestine, motivating the author to write a detailed study of the destruction of the Jewish community of Buczacz.

Buczacz was part of Kresy, the multiethnic part of Poland with a mix of Polish and Ukrainian population. (Bartov laudably uses all place names.) The area remained relatively impoverished, but it was especially the Ukrainian peasants who were poor and often illiterate. In the interwar period, most leading civil servants were Polish. There was a small Jewish middle class, often in connection with the Buczacz Jewish Gymnasium. Like other places, however, the educated Jewish youth often left, be it for Palestine (when Zionists) or the United States. Some left to study at the German University in Prague, like many other Polish Jewish students, who could not easily attend Polish universities because of numerus clausus, and where some became communists. Anatomy of a Genocide offers a long prehistory of the World War II, arguing how the memory of humiliations and wrongs came to a culmination during the Nazi occupation.

Bartov is known as a historian of perpetrator perspective and theoretical approaches, and the book, written in a narrative framework, is a departure, comparable to Christopher Browning's Remembering Survival, a narrative of Starachowice Jewish forced labor camp. Bartov's book is based on two decades of meticulous research in a number of languages and dozens of archives, and it is impressive how the author combines the perspective of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders. Perhaps because Anatomy of a Genocide is marketed as a trade book, there is next to no discussion of historiography. This is disappointing, as Bartov writes on a topic where plenty of amazing research was published over the last twenty years, including the work of Yehuda Bauer, Nechama Tec, Jan Gross, Christoph Mick, Christoph Dieckmann, Wendy Lower, Natalia Aleksiun, Karl Berkhoff, Kate Brown, Jan Grabowski, or Diana Dumitru. Often I would have liked to see the author take a position in relation to existing scholarly arguments. There is no bibliography and the footnotes are frequently convoluted.

The book is largely a microperspectival narrative: Hitler and Stalin are missing, which is a welcome change after Timothy Snyder's bombastic Bloodlands (New York, 2010). The tone is laconic and the picture it gives is almost kaleidoscopic. This narrative choice has advantages—we get to know Buczacz inhabitants intimately, and Bartov's knowledge of the town is truly encyclopedic. However, the close-up focus is not always easy to follow and at times even gets somewhat wearisome. For a narrative turn it is necessary to be a good story teller, and the book does not always succeed here; it does not have the narrative scope of Yehuda Bauer's The Death of the Shtetl (New Haven, 2009). I would have appreciated a more stringent chronology of what happens and where people are killed. Several maps and sketches drawn by the survivors are included (one in Yiddish), but these are not explained and difficult to follow. It would have been useful to have new maps professionally drawn for the reader.

Having said that, parts of the book are fascinating. The sections on the everyday lives of the German perpetrators, who experienced the Holocaust as the best time of their lives, are a chilling and important read. Similarly, Bartov offers a trenchant take on the tasks, leeway, and mentality of the Jewish Council and Jewish Police. The author also discusses sexual violence against Jewish women: rapes by the Wehrmacht soldiers and the commandant of the labor camps in the region, the SS corporal Paul Thomanek, who tasked the Jewish Council with “providing him” with Jewish women. Some villagers would go look in the ghetto for attractive Jewish women to take them into hiding. The discussion of sexual violence is today's de rigueur (and Bartov's earlier work on narratives of sexual violence set standards for the field); however, it is important to analyze this violence further. What does it mean? Bartov concludes that Jewish survival was largely a result of chance and the decisions of gentiles. It is a shame that he does not say anything about the agency of Jewish women, who participated in sexual barter with the men who took them into hiding. At the same time, the writing about the nature of courage, and Jewish reflection of their helper's bravery as opposed to the Jewish council's lack of it, are insightful, especially today.

Bartov's book is a welcome contribution to the existing literature discussing intimate violence in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust. The narrative approach illustrates the intimate, personal aspects, but it also clouds the understanding of the bigger picture, which is further made difficult by the decision to forego historiographic debate. In the end, I am ambivalent about the decision of some Holocaust historians to publish trade books: some, like Nikolaus Wachsmann, combine readability and analysis, others less so, possibly a point to pass on to the publishing industry.