BOOK NOTES

'Biography of No Place' focuses on Ukraine

"A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderlands to Soviet Heartland" by Kate Brown. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. 322 pp., $45 (hardcover).

Last year in February, historian Kate Brown released a biography of a borderland between Russia and Poland, a backwater region where, in 1925, people identified as Poles, Germans, Jews, Ukrainians, and Russians lived side by side. In the words of the author, "This is a biogrpahy of a place and the people who inhabit it, or rather, a biography of no place and the people who no longer live there."

"These people lived in close proximity to each other, but far from the centers of power - the area was a rich mingling of languages and culture that was neither Russian nor Polish and, in that sense, no place," wrote Sarah Trabucchi of Harvard University Press.

"Over the next three decades, in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution, this mosaic of cultures was modernized and homogenized out of existence by the ruling might of the Soviet Union, then Nazi Germany, and finally Polish and Ukrainian nationalism," Ms. Trabucci noted. By the 1950s, this "no place" emerged as a Ukrainian heartland, and the fertile mix of peoples that defined the region was destroyed.

In "A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland," Ms. Brown focused on the life of the village and shtetl, and the personalities and small histories of everyday life. She documents how regimes, bureaucratically and then violently, separated, named and regimented this intricate community into distinct ethnic groups.

Drawing on recently opened archives, ethnography and oral interviews that were unavailable a decade ago, "A Biography of No Place" reveals Stalinist and Nazi history from the perspective of the remote borderlands, thus bringing the periphery to the center of history. We are given, in short, an intimate portrait of the ethnic purification that has marked all of Europe, as well as a glimpse at the margins of 20th-century "progress."

"A Biography of No Place" is certain to intrigue anyone interested in Eastern European history, cultural history, or sociology.

The book is available from Harvard University Press, 79 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138; phone, (617) 495-4714.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, February 20, 2005, No. 8, Vol. LXXIII

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