Is Ukraine Ready for Maturity?
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:
Andryi Portnov claims that the Ukrainian intellectual context does not favor the national discussion of Bartov’s Erased that would resemble the Polish discussion of Neighbors (by Jan Gross) or the German discussion of Hitler’s Willing Executioners (by Daniel Goldhagen). In Ukraine, there is no tradition of writing and talking about the Holocaust, and the discursive field of World War II history is dominated by the old Soviet and new heroic national narratives, or – most interestingly – by their synthesis. Most studies of Jewish extermination on the territory of present-day Ukraine are written in English or in German and remain inaccessible to the Ukrainian-language audience. Erased, in Portnov’s view, shows the limitations of direct “translation” into the Ukrainian social reality of the standard Western tropes of Holocaust writing. Portnov contrasts the categorical nature of Bartov’s conclusions to the limited geographical and historical scale of his analysis (not to mention his poor use of Ukrainian-language sources). Still, Portnov believes that a willingness to accept Bartov’s conclusions can push Ukraine beyond the colonial-postcolonial deadlock.