Simply the Holocaust
1/2010
Forum AI
REMEMBERING FRIENDS, FOES, AND NEIGHBORS
In the present issue, AI continues the discussion, which started in the Ukrainian journal Ukraina Moderna, of American historian Omer Bartov’s book, Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (Princeton University Press, 2007). We publish Bartov’s introduction to the Ukrainian-language edition of his book, which is currently being prepared. This introduction features, among other things, Bartov’s responses to critical arguments published in Ukrainian academic periodicals. We hope that our discussion goes beyond an evaluation of the achievements and shortcomings of a particular book, and instead focuses on the mechanisms through which historical memory defines contemporary borders of “our” and “their” communities and pasts.
Published in Russian, see Russian pages of this website.
SUMMARY:
The present article is a Russian translation from the Ukrainian publication in the Web journal Western Analytic Group (Zakhidna analitichna grupa, http://zgroup.com.ua/article.php?articleid=3473). Hrytsak agrees with Bartov that the absence of Jews in the sociohistorical landscape of contemporary Halychyna is nothing but a scandal. However, he does not consider the book Erased a good way of making sense of this scandal. Hrytsak provides a list of Bartov’s factual mistakes but does not claim that they make Bartov’s analysis irrelevant. Bartov’s main faults, according to Hrystak, are his ideologically driven selections of evidence, disregard of nuances of the Ukrainian national identities, and application of a rigid national framework to Ukrainian-Jewish encounters past and present.