New Books in Eastern European Studies

Dr. Yanni Kotsonis, Professor of History and Russian & Slavic Studies at New York University, is the author of The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism (Princeton University Press, 2025). This deeply researched and beautifully written history traces how something brand new – a Greek nation-state – emerged out of an Ottoman Balkan mosaic of languages, religions, and cultures. The book argues that the Greek Revolution was an event of global historical significance, ushering in an age of ethnocentric nationalism. In addition, Kotsonis' work is a major contribution to the studies of statecraft and mass violence, showcasing how new practices of mass mobilization and warfare transformed Ottomans into “Greeks” and their “Others.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shocked the world. And yet, to Ukrainians, this attack was painfully familiar, the latest episode in a centuries-long Russian campaign to divide and oppress Ukraine. In Intent to Destroy: Russia's Two-Hundred-Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine (Basic Books, 2024), political scientist Eugene Finkel uncovers these deep roots of the Russo-Ukrainian War. Ukraine is a key borderland between Russia and the West, and, following the rise of Russian nationalism in the nineteenth century, dominating Ukraine became the cornerstone of Russian policy. Russia has long used genocidal tactics—killings, deportations, starvation, and cultural destruction—to successfully crush Ukrainian efforts to chart an independent path. As Finkel shows, today’s violence is simply a more extreme version of the Kremlin’s long-standing policy. But unlike in the past, the people of Ukraine—motivated by the rise of democracy in their nation—have overcome their deep internal divisions. For the first time, they have united in favor of independence from Russia. Whatever the outcome of the present war, Ukraine’s staunch resistance has permanently altered its relationship to Russia and the West. Intent to Destroy: Russia's Two-Hundred-Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine (Basic Books, 2024) offers the vital context we need to truly understand Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

As he prepared to wage his war of annihilation on the Eastern Front, Adolf Hitler repeatedly drew parallels between the Nazi quest for Lebensraum, or living space, in Eastern Europe and the United States's westward expansion under the banner of Manifest Destiny. The peoples of Eastern Europe were, he said, his "redskins," and for his colonial fantasy of a "German East" he claimed a historical precedent in the United States's displacement and killing of the native population. Edward B. Westermann examines the validity, and value, of this claim in Hitler's Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars: Comparing Genocide and Conquest (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016). The book takes an empirical approach that highlights areas of similarity and continuity, but also explores key distinctions and differences between these two national projects. The westward march of American empire and the Nazi conquest of the East offer clear parallels, not least that both cases fused a sense of national purpose with racial stereotypes that aided in the exclusion, expropriation, and killing of peoples. Westermann evaluates the philosophies of Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum that justified both conquests, the national and administrative policies that framed Nazi and U.S. governmental involvement in these efforts, the military strategies that supported each nation's political goals, and the role of massacre and atrocity in both processes. Important differences emerge: a goal of annihilation versus one of assimilation and acculturation; a planned military campaign versus a confused strategy of pacification and punishment; large-scale atrocity as routine versus massacre as exception. Comparative history at its best, Westermann's assessment of these two national projects provides crucial insights into not only their rhetoric and pronouncements but also the application of policy and ideology "on the ground." His sophisticated and nuanced revelations of the similarities and dissimilarities between these two cases will inform further study of genocide, as well as our understanding of the Nazi conquest of the East and the American conquest of the West. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Year 2008 marked the introduction of a new economic governance regime in the European Union (EU) in response to the global financial crisis. Politicising Commodification: European Governance and Labour Politics from the Financial Crisis to the Covid Emergency (Cambridge UP, 2024), authored by leading scholars in the field and also available open access, uses a approach to capture the EU formulation of prescriptions and their uneven deployment across member states (Germany, Italy, Ireland, Romania), policy areas (employment relations, public services), and sectors (transport, water, and healthcare). The regime led to a much more vertical mode of EU integration, and its commodification agenda unleashed a plethora of union and social-movement protests, including transnationally. Listen to this engaging interview with the leading author, Prof. Roland Erne, to find out what inspired this book, how the team worked together, and which conclusions they arrived at. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Viktoriya Fedorchak's The Russia-Ukraine War: Towards Resilient Fighting Power (Routledge, 2024) provides a systematic analysis of the Russian-Ukraine war, using the concept of resilient fighting power to assess the operational performance of both sides during the first year of the full-scale invasion. The Russian war in Ukraine began in 2014 and continued for eight years, before the full-scale invasion of 24 February 2022. It is not a new war, but the intensity of the warfighting revived many discussions about the conduct of inter-state warfare, which has not been seen in Europe for decades. This book does not aim to offer an exhaustive operational analysis of the war, but rather provides a preliminary systematic analysis across various domains of warfare using the concept of fighting power to assess the operational performance of both sides. First, the book discusses the conceptual component and the post-Cold War adaptations of the Soviet strategic tradition by both the Ukrainian and the Russian Armed Forces. Following that, it gives an evaluation of the various aspects of warfighting in the land, air, maritime and cyber domains. Then, the book examines the role of international allied assistance, sanctions and weapons delivery in strengthening the resilience of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. The book concludes with some comments on the role of inter-state warfare in the current strategic environment and future warfare. This book will be of much interest to students of military and strategic studies, defence studies, foreign policy, Russian studies and international relations. Viktoriya Fedorchak is a lecturer in War Studies at the Swedish Defence University. She is the author of British Air Power (2018) and Understanding Contemporary Air Power (2020). Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar whose research areas are related to Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, military history, War studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, as well as Russian and East European history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Radical right parties are no longer political challengers on the fringes of party systems; they have become part of the political mainstream across the Western world. How the Radical Right Has Changed Capitalism and Welfare in Europe and the USA (Oxford UP, 2024) shows how they have used their political power to reform economic and social policies in Continental Europe, Northern Europe, Eastern Europe, and the USA. In doing so, it argues that the radical right's core ideology of nativism and authoritarianism informs their socio-economic policy preferences. However, diverse welfare state contexts mediate their socio-economic policy impacts along regime-specific lines, leading to variations of trade protectionism, economic nationalism, traditional familialism, labour market dualism, and welfare chauvinism. The radical right has used the diverse policy instruments available within their political-economic arrangements to protect threatened labour market insiders and male breadwinners from decline, while creating a racialized and gendered precariat at the same time. This socio-economic agenda of selective status protection restores horizontal inequalities in terms of gender and ethnicity, without addressing vertical inequalities between the rich and the poor. Combining insights from comparative politics, party politics, comparative political economy, and welfare state research, the book provides novel insights into how the radical right manufactures consent for authoritarian rule by taming the socially corrosive effects of globalised capitalism for key electoral groups, while aiming to exclude the rest from democratic participation. Philip Rathgeb is an associate professor in Social Policy in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz. Philip holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute (EUI) and held visiting positions at Harvard University, Lund University, University of Southern Denmark, and the EUI. His research interests are in comparative political economy and comparative politics, with a particular focus on welfare states, industrial relations, and party politics. His first book Strong Governments, Precarious Workers was published with Cornell University Press in 2018. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

The Holocaust in Thessaloniki: Reactions to the Anti-Jewish Persecution, 1942-1943 (Routledge, 2021) narrates the last days of the once prominent Jewish community of Thessaloniki, the overwhelming majority of which was transported to the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz in 1943. Focusing on the Holocaust of the Jews of Thessaloniki, this book maps the reactions of the authorities, the Church and the civil society as events unfolded. In so doing, it seeks to answer the questions, did the Christian society of their hometown stand up to their defense and did they try to undermine or object to the Nazi orders? Utilizing new sources and interpretation schemes, this book will be a great contribution to the local efforts underway, seeking to reconcile Thessaloniki with its Jewish past and honour the victims of the Holocaust. The first study to examine why 95 percent of the Jews of Thessaloniki perished--one of the highest percentages in Europe--this book will appeal to students and scholars of the Holocaust, European History and Jewish Studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

With From Incarceration to Repatriation: German Prisoners of War in the Soviet Union (Cornell UP, 2024), Susan Grunewald significantly enhances understandings of the fate of Germans captured by the Soviet Union during World War II. Her archival research demonstrates that the Soviets saw the German prisoners of war as a source of labor at a time when the Soviet Union urgently needed to rebuild and lacked manpower after its enormous war losses. Numerous Soviet enterprises, operating under dozens of ministries, used POWs contracted out by prison camp officials. Grunewald argues that the mistreatment of German POWs and their high death rates were the consequence not of retribution but of negligence, lack of coordination, and severe shortages, especially during the famine that followed the war. Those too weak to work were often repatriated. POWs were also subjected to intense antifascist reeducation so that once home, they would help win support among Germans for the Soviet Union; many former prisoners filled leadership roles in East Germany after the establishment of two German states in 1949. The last POWs returned to Germany in early 1956. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Today I talked to Anthony McElligott about The Last Transport: The Holocaust in the Eastern Aegean (Bloomsbury, 2024). The deportation of 1,755 Jews from the islands of Rhodes and Cos in July 1944, shortly after the last deportation from Hungary, was the last transport to leave Greece for Auschwitz and brought to a close the last significant phase of the genocide of Europe's Jews (notwithstanding the death marches). Within six weeks of their deportation, the Germans were retreating from Greece and the Balkans as Hitler's empire shrank. This last deportation is frequently acknowledged in Holocaust literature but its significance for our understanding of the Nazi genocide of the Jews remains largely overlooked. The timing of the transport, when it was clear to the German military elite that Nazi Germany had lost the war, raises important questions in relation to long-term ideological Nazi goals and the immediate contingency thrown up by war. Anthony McElligott, in this account of the last Greek transport of Jews to Auschwitz, tells a compelling story of this previously underexplored event and sheds light on an important aspect of the Holocaust through an in-depth study of one Eastern Mediterranean community. Roberto Mazza is currently a visiting scholar at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs at Northwestern University. He is the host of the Jerusalem Unplugged Podcast and to discuss and propose a book for interview can be reached at robbymazza@gmail.com. Twitter and IG: @robbyref Website: www.robertomazza.org Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

"Herta Müller should share her Nobel with the Securitate." This comment by a former officer in the Romanian secret police, or Securitate, was in reaction to hearing that Müller, a German writer originally from Romania, had won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature. Communist Romania's infamous secret police was indeed a protagonist in Müller's work, though an undesired and dreaded one: most of her writings are deeply and explicitly anchored in Ceaușescu's Romania and her own traumatic experiences with the Securitate. Müller's file traces her surveillance from 1983 until after she emigrated to West Germany in 1987. She has written extensively in reaction to reading her file, but primarily addresses its gaps, begging the question what information the file does in fact contain. The Secret Police Dossier of Herta Müller: A "File Story" of Cold War Surveillance (Camden House, 2023) is an in-depth investigation of Müller's file, and engages with other related files, including that of her then-husband, the writer Richard Wagner. Valentina Glajar treats the files as primary sources in order to re-create the story of Müller's surveillance by the Securitate. In such an intrusive culture of surveillance, surviving the system often meant a certain degree of entanglement: for victims, collaborators, and implicated subjects alike. Veiled in secrecy for decades, these compelling and complex documents shed light on a boundary between victims and perpetrators as porous as the Iron Curtain itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Forty years ago, Schengen - a wine-making village at the tripoint border of Luxembourg, France, and Germany - made European history when diplomats from these countries, Belgium, and the Netherlands struck a deal to scale back their mutual border checks. "The event at Schengen went unnoticed by much of the European press," writes Isaac Stanley-Becker in Europe Without Borders: A History (Princeton University Press, 2025). Yet, as one of its signatories said much later, the Schengen agreement "changed everything" - accelerating the development of the European single market and currency area. Today, however, Schengen is under threat as its now-29 members struggle to balance the free movement of people against the demands of cross-border policing, immigration control, and political consent. In September 2024, the German government - rattled by surging support for the nativist AFD in the run-up to a federal election - reinstated border controls with its four Schengen founders, prompting threats of retaliation. Could Schengen face, as Stanley-Becker warns, "death by a thousand cuts"? Isaac Stanley-Becker is an investigative reporter at the Washington Post - part of the team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2024 for a series exploring the role of the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle in American life. A graduate of Yale, he went on to complete a PhD in History at Oxford in 2019. Europe Without Borders is his first book. *The author's book recommendations were East West Street: On The Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity by Philippe Sands (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016) and The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy (Hamish Hamilton, 2019). Tim Gwynn Jones is an economic and political risk analyst at Medley Advisors, who also writes and podcasts on Substack at 242.news. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Before Hungary’s transition from communism to democracy, local dissidents and like-minded intellectuals, activists, and academics from the West influenced each other and inspired the fight for human rights and civil liberties in Eastern Europe. Hungarian dissidents provided Westerners with a new purpose and legitimized their public interventions in a bipolar world order.  The Making of Dissidents: Hungary’s Democratic Opposition and its Western Friends, 1973-1998 (U Pittsburgh Press, 2024) demonstrates how Hungary’s Western friends shaped public perceptions and institutionalized their advocacy long before the peaceful revolutions of 1989. But liberalism failed to take root in Hungary, and Victoria Harms explores how many former dissidents retreated and Westerners shifted their attention elsewhere during the 1990s, paving the way for nationalism and democratic backsliding. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

In our conversation about Spaces of Treblinka: Retracing a Death Camp (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), Dr. Jacob Flaws expands the spatial realities of the Treblinka death camp and what it means to be a witness of the Holocaust. Spaces of Treblinka utilizes testimonies, oral histories, and recollections from Jewish, German, and Polish witnesses to create a holistic representation of the Treblinka death camp during its operation. This narrative rejects the historical misconception that Treblinka was an isolated Nazi extermination camp with few witnesses and fewer survivors. Rather than the secret, sanitized site of industrial killing Treblinka was intended to be, Flaws argues, Treblinka’s mass murder was well known to the nearby townspeople who experienced the sights, sounds, smells, people, bodies, and train cars the camp ejected into the surrounding world. Through spatial reality, Flaws portrays the conceptions, fantasies, ideological assumptions, and memories of Treblinka from witnesses in the camp and surrounding towns. To do so he identifies six key spaces that once composed the historical site of Treblinka: the ideological space, the behavioral space, the space of life and death, the interactional space, the sensory space, and the extended space. By examining these spaces Flaws reveals that there were more witnesses to Treblinka than previously realized, as the transnational groups near and within the camp overlapped and interacted. Spaces of Treblinka provides a staggering and profound reassessment of the relationship between knowing and not knowing and asks us to confront the timely warning that we, in our modern, interconnected world, can all become witnesses. Dr. Andrew O. Pace is a historian of the US in the world who specializes in the moral fog of war. He is currently a DPAA Research Partner Fellow at the University of Southern Mississippi and a co-host of the Diplomatic History Channel on the New Books Network. He is also working on a book about the reversal in US grand strategy from victory at all costs in World War II to peace at any price in the Vietnam War. He can be reached at andrew.pace@usm.edu or via https://www.andrewopace.com/. Andrew is not an employee of DPAA, he supports DPAA through a partnership. The views presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of DPAA, DoD or its components. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

When Nazi Germany launched the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, its leadership made clear to the Wehrmacht that it was waging a "war of extermination" against Germany's enemies. This meant that normal military conduct in war was to be dispensed with and soldiers would act more in accordance with the precepts of Nazi ideology. During the brutal fighting on the Eastern Front, how did average German soldiers interpret the war they were fighting? David A. Harrisville seeks to answer this question in his book The Virtuous Wehrmacht: Crafting the Myth of the German Soldier on the Eastern Front, 1941-1944 (Cornell University Press, 2021). Through letters, diaries, and other primary documents written during the war itself, German soldiers portrayed themselves as "noble" warriors undertaking a "righteous" mission to rid the world of the evils of Soviet Communism. This would later form the basis of the "clean Wehrmacht" myth that prevailed in postwar German society.  David A. Harrisville is an independent scholar. He has held various academic positions, including, most recently, Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Furman University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

The history of antisemitism in Europe stretches back as far as Ancient Rome, but persecutions of Jews became widespread during the Crusades, beginning in the early 11th century when the wholesale massacre of entire communities became commonplace. From the 12th century, the justification for this state-sanctioned violence became the blood libel accusation: the idea that Jews ritually murdered Christian children and used their blood in the celebration of Passover. Nowhere in Europe was the blood libel more tenacious, credible, and long lived than in the Russian Empire, particularly during the late Imperial period, which saw large scale pogroms and harsh restrictions visited upon the empire's Jewish population. The Russian Revolution of 1917 attracted many Jews to its cause, thanks in large measure to Bolshevik condemnations of antisemitism and persecution of the Jewish minority. These numbers grew in the wake of the brutal Civil War that followed from 1918 - 1922 when the White Army revived the pogrom with particular vigor. What happened after the Bolshevik victory is the subject of Elissa Bemporad's new book, Legacy of Blood: Jews, Pogroms, and Ritual Murder in the Lands of the Soviets (Oxford UP, 2019), which won the National Jewish Book Award (Modern Jewish Thought and Experience). Bemporad probes the underbelly of the "Soviet myth"— that the USSR had eradicated the pogroms, banished the notion of a blood libel to the scrapheap of other opiates for the people, and vanquished antisemitism as part of the regime's broad anti-religious campaign — and discovers that both pogroms and the blood libel had a robust afterlife in the USSR. As she traces changing attitudes towards Jews in the USSR, Bemporad also examines the uneasy and often ambivalent but mutually dependent, and ever-shifting relationship between the regime and the Jewish population as the Soviet century unfolds. Legacy of Blood looks at the re-emergence of overt antisemitism in the occupied territories of the USSR during World War II and the troubled return of the Jews to mainstream society after the war. The result is a meticulously researched, thought-provoking, and eminently readable book that adds much to both Jewish and Russian historical scholarship. Elissa Bemporad is an Associate Professor of History at CUNY Graduate Center and the Jerry and William Ungar Chair in East European Jewish History, Queens College of CUNY. She is the author of Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Indiana University Press, 2013) and the forthcoming A Comprehensive History of the Jews in the Soviet Union, vol I (NYU Press). Jennifer Eremeeva is an American expatriate writer who writes about travel, culture, cuisine and culinary history, Russian history, and Royal History, with bylines in Reuters, Fodor's, USTOA, LitHub, The Moscow Times, and Russian Life. She is the award-winning author of Lenin Lives Next Door: Marriage, Martinis, and Mayhem in Moscow and Have Personality Disorder, Will Rule Russia: A Pocket Guide to Russian History. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

When the Great War began, the Russian Empire was home to more than five million Jews, the most densely settled Jewish population anywhere in the world. Thirty years later, only remnants of this civilization remained. The years of war from 1914 to 1918 launched the forces that scattered and destroyed Eastern European Jewry and transformed it in ways that were second only to the Holocaust in their magnitude. Yet little has been written about the experience of Russia's Jews during this time.  A Nation of Refugees: Russia's Jews in World War I (Oxford UP, 2024) uncovers this untold history by revealing the stories of how Jewish civilians experienced the war and its violent epicenter on the Eastern Front. It presents a history of rupture and dispersion at a human level, with accounts of individuals who struggled to survive and the activists who worked to aid them. The stories in this book are drawn from hundreds of documents held in previously inaccessible archives, the Russian and Yiddish press, and the personal accounts of refugees, relief workers, writers, artists, and political leaders. This is a history of the first state violence and military aggression directed at Jewish civilians anywhere in modern Europe. It is a history of refugees, so numerous and scattered across Russia that they represented the fate of the Jewish nation itself. And it is a history of how Russia's Jews formed the largest and most influential humanitarian campaign in their history, and of their leaders and institutions that endured long past the years of war and revolution. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Queer Kinship on the Edge? Families of Choice in Poland (Routledge, 2024) explores ways in which queer families from Central and Eastern Europe complicate the mainstream picture of queer kinship and families researched in the Anglo-American contexts. The book presents findings from under-represented localities as a starting point to query some of the expectations about queer kinship and to provide insights on the scale and nature of queer kinship in diverse geopolitical locations and the complexities of lived experiences of queer families. Drawing on a rich qualitative multi-method study to address the gap in queer kinship studies which tend to exclude Polish or wider Central and Eastern perspectives, it offers a multi-dimensional picture of ‘families of choice’ improving sensitivity towards differences in queer kinship studies. Through case studies and interviews with diverse members of queer families (i.e., queer parents, their children) and their families of origin (parents and siblings), the book looks at queer domesticity, practices of care, defining and displaying families, queer parenthood familial homophobia, and interpersonal relationships through the life course. Joanna Mizielińska is associate professor at Collegium Civitas in Poland. Qing Shen recently received his PhD in anthropology from Uppsala University.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

When consulting key works on urban studies, the absence of Central and Eastern European towns is striking. Cities such as Vienna, Budapest, Prague, and Trieste, where such notable figures as Freud, Ferenczi, Kafka, and Joyce lived and worked, are rarely studied in a translocal framework, as if Central and Eastern Europe were still a blind spot of European modernity.  Urban Culture and the Modern City: Hungarian Case Studies (Leuven UP, 2024) expands the scope of literary urban studies by focusing on Budapest and Hungarian small towns, offering in-depth analyses of the intriguing link between literature, the arts, and material culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. The case studies situate Hungarian urban culture within the global flow of ideas as they explore the period of modernism, the mid-century, and the post-1989 era in a context that moves well beyond the borders of the country. Ágnes Györke is associate professor at Károli Gáspár University’s Department of Literary and Cultural Studies in English and principal investigator of the Cosmopolitan Ethics and the Modern City research group. Tamás Juhász is associate professor at Károli Gáspár University where he teaches modern British and American literature, cultural theory and Central European film. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Today I talked to Daniel B. Hinshaw about his book Journey to Simplicity: The Life and Wisdom of Archimandrite Roman Braga (St Vladimirs Seminary Press, 2023). The events of Fr Roman Braga’s life unfolded on three continents in complex and tumultuous times. In Romania, he lived through turbulent historical events, and he suffered for Christ under communist persecution. Later he continued his life and ministry in Brazil, and ended his days in the United States. He was a confessor of the faith and spiritual father of great wisdom and compassion, who shared Christ's love with all who came his way. This text presents the life of Fr Roman Braga, while also exploring the broader historical context in which he lived. Most fundamentally, it reveals the transfigured life of a man who is close to us in time, but who passed far beyond us in his spiritual life, who was not broken but rather transformed by God’s grace, even in the midst of the horrors of torture and imprisonment. He continues to shine as a beacon of God’s love, and a witness to His power to overcome even the greatest of evils. All the royalties for this book go to support Holy Dormition Monastery in Rives Junction, Michigan, where Fr Roman was a spiritual father: Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies

Based on original sources, The State, Antisemitism, and Collaboration in the Holocaust: The Borderlands of Romania and the Soviet Union (Cambridge UP, 2016) explores regional variations in civilians' attitudes and behavior toward the Jewish population in Romania and the occupied Soviet Union. Gentiles' willingness to assist Jews was greater in lands that had been under Soviet administration during the inter-war period, while gentiles' willingness to harm Jews occurred more in lands that had been under Romanian administration during the same period. While acknowledging the disasters of Communist rule in the 1920s and 1930s, this work shows the effectiveness of Soviet nationalities policy in the official suppression of antisemitism. This book offers a corrective to the widespread consensus that homogenizes gentile responses throughout Eastern Europe, instead demonstrating that what states did in the interwar period mattered; relations between social groups were not fixed and destined to repeat themselves, but rather fluid and susceptible to change over time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/eastern-european-studies