Bartov tells us in
Erasedthat his tour was prompted by a wish to rediscover the Jewish world his mother had known as a child and to establish how the region's Jews had died. But as his inquiry proceeds, its focus changed. Instead of adding to the vast corpus of Holocaust literature or celebrating the hayday of Galician Jewry, he has produced a study of collective denial and the means by which embarrassing facts about the past can be expunged from local memory. Bartov's account of his experiences in the field makes a disturbing story
(
Philip Longworth Times Literary Supplement )
This small volume is an important addition to contemporary Jewish travel literature. Bartov writes with clarity and palpable outrage, as he describes the pattern he found repeated almost everywhere: Virtually all traces of the Jews and their history have been erased. This book is an often brilliant and impassioned response to the annihilation from memory of the last traces of the Jews who lived for generations in the Ukraine. It is a valuable book both about the destruction of the past and an attempt to preserve memory into the future.
(
Jewish Book World )
A book that in its mixture of description and emotional commentary seeks to bring to light the shear success of efforts to expunge the Jewish past from eastern Galicia.
(
Simon J. Rabinovitch Haaretz )
An unsettling and highly revealing book. . . . The local people [of Buchach, Ukraine], while devoted to their nation's history, have developed an amnesia about their one-time Jewish neighbours. Bartov writes about this phenomenon with an understated emotion, fact piled upon fact, until his evidence becomes overwhelming. . . . There are Ukrainians today who refuse to take part in consigning the local Jews to oblivion, just as (Bartov notes) there were Ukrainians who risked everything to save Jews during the Holocaust. . . . But, in Bartov's account, the silence is close to deafening and the reasons for it are painfully obvious.
(
Robert Fulford The National Post )
Because so many of us have roots in Galicia, and because it is a very readable and yet a scholarly, well researched work, the book is recommended for every Jewish library--in synagogues, schools or centers--and certainly for large Judaica collections.
(
Michlean L. Amir AJL Newsletter )
[T]his is an excellent study of interest not only to former Pinskers and professional consumers of historical literature, but to virtually everybody interested in the Jewish past, Eastern Europe (Jewish and non-Jewish alike), urban history and many cognate fields. It is also an extremely powerful commemoration of the once vibrant Jewish community of Pinsk, offering a detailed yet comprehensive picture of its life and showing the world that once existed without resorting to sentimental clichés of shtetl life.
(
Marcin Wodzinski East European Jewish Affairs )
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.
(
T. Hunt Tooley Central European History )
In telling his 'story of discovery,' Bartov moves seamlessly between personal observations and penetrating analysis.
(
Erich Haberer Holocaust Genocide Studies )
Reader Reviews
For a long time Galicia was a 'hotbed' of nationalism and this book shows the ramifications of that. I am from a city that is, according to the author, part of Galicia but it is not one of the cities he traveled to and wrote about in the book, sadly. I would have been quite interested to read his take on what happened to this city after the war, etc. Overall, as another reviewer has said, the book is at times repetitive. What readers will notice is that for the most part in practically every city Ukrainians partook in the pogroms or murders of Jews from the beginning days of the German occupation. Few, on the other hand, tried to save Jews. One can argue that they had no time to save Jews as they were looking out for themselves, yet that does not go a long way in explaining why so many were implicit in their deaths. Today all the memorials erected to commemorate the suffering and death of the Jewish people are overlooked or forgotten about, in their place have sprung up dozens of monuments to Ukrainian nationalists, many of them guilty of mass murder and anti-Semitism. It should be mentioned that during the Soviet era the Holocaust was not mentioned, the Soviets did not want to single out any one group of people (commendable in some respects but not realistic or to a degree honest) and most of the memorials do not mention which group died but rather you will find them saying that so many 'Soviet citizens' died/were murdered, etc. It seems that it will be a long while, if ever, before Ukraine and Ukrainians can come to grips with their past in regards to WWII and the Holocaust. Overall the book is an interesting read because one can get a glimpse of the exact same thing happening in every village/town/city, one after another. It is not a natural phenomenon, I'm sure to a degree it is part of a state sponsored program to erase the Ukrainian past during WWII in regards to the Holocaust and replace it with heroic nationalistic characters like Stepan Bandera.
