The Bogdanow Lectures in Holocaust Studies

2024

'The Return of the Repressed: Ukraine's Unresolved Pasts' (Online lecture series)
Prof. Omer Bartov (Brown University)

Lecture 1. History, Myth, and Fiction: Narratives of the Ukrainian Past

Tue 30 Jan 2024

Drawing on his recent book, Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking Galicia's Past (2022), Prof Bartov will discuss the conflicting Jewish, Polish, and Ukrainian narratives of life together and apart in Galicia, now known as West Ukraine, and once a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. For 400 years these three ethnic and religious groups lived side by side in this remote borderland region, telling themselves different tales about how they came there, how they were transformed, and where they were heading. In the last decades of the 19th century, this province also became a stronghold of Ukrainian, Polish, and Jewish nationalism. Plurality and difference had made for uniquely original and creative cultures, now largely forgotten; nationalism and animosity destroyed that world and erased its memory. What remains are individual memories, including those of Prof Bartov's own family, which he will also evoke in the closing parts of his talk, referring to an interview he conducted with his mother in 1995 and to his recent novel, The Butterfly and the Axe, that tries to "save" the stories of lost family members from the oblivion of documented history.

Lecture 2. Coexistence and Violence: The Reality and Memory of Genocide in Ukraine

Wed 31 Jan 2024

This lecture draws on Prof Bartov's book Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018). The book examines how long-term coexistence in one Galcian town - the birthplace of his mother, as well as of the Nobel Prize laureate S. Y. Agnon - was gradually undermined under the pressures of nationalism, the destructive effects of World War I, the divisive policies of interwar Polish rule, and the two years of brutal Soviet rule that followed it. The German occupation of the town in 1941-1944 was focused first and foremost on the mass murder of the Jewish population. In order to accomplish this task, it mobilized pre-existing ethno-national sentiments and resentments, thereby transforming a town of interethnic coexistence to one of communal, intimate genocide. The memory of the populations that had lived for centuries in the town, its murdered Jews and ethnically-cleaned Poles, was erased after the war, as was the story of their destruction. The current war in Ukraine has undermined recent efforts to revive the memory and commemorate the lives and mass murder of those groups.

Masterclass

Wed 31 Jan

This masterclass is for MA and PhD students to meet with Omer Bartov. It is an opportunity to discuss his research and methodologies in a small class. No registration is needed.