Between East And West: Across The Borderlands Of Europe

Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe

From Library Journal The borderlands west of Russia, in east central Europe, have endured frequent changes of hegemony. Citizens of one village may think of themselves as Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Polish, or Moldovan regardless of where the current borders are drawn, as Applebaum discovered during her travels and interviews. An American journalist now living in London, she spent the years 1988-1991 as a free-lancer in Poland and revisited the area from which her great-grandparents had emigrated. The narrative proceeds from Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea to Odessa on the Black Sea, stopping in large cities and small towns; it combines a bit of history from the Middle Ages with tales of contemporary life without the Soviet Union to portray an eclectic mixture of ethnic identity. The vivid descriptions of another way of life would enhance popular collections.Marcia L. Sprules, Council on Foreign Relations Lib., New YorkCopyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. Examines the past and present of the Eastern European borderlands, now emerging from Soviet rule, describing the rich variety of cultures, religions, and national aspirations of the area's inhabitants as they attempt to construct a future based on ancient ancestral legacies. From Publishers Weekly Traveling the uncertain land between Eastern and Western Europe, Applebaum recounts her three-month journey and the people she meets, typified by a man who was born in Poland, raised in the Soviet Union and now living in Belarus-yet he has never left his village. The territorial borders of many towns in Eastern Europe have been redrawn so often over the centuries that such villages are called kresy, meaning they belong to no one in particular. The American-born Applebaum, who is the foreign editor of the London Spectator and has residences in Poland and England, shows herself as a journalist of sturdy competence, smart and shrewd. She speaks Polish and Russian and is well read in Eastern European history. Applebaum travels from kresy to kresy in dilapidated private autos she hires, although on occasion she must walk; the few hotels are seedy and homes where she is sometimes invited to sleep aren't markedly more comfortable. But she's not deterred; Applebaum's receptiveness encourages borderlanders to tell her the myriad of ways that political partitioning has subjugated their personal lives, cultural traditions and languages. She in turn explains to us the nationalism motivating these newly independent people as they try to redefine their true heritages. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus Reviews A journey through middle Europe, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, of which George Orwell would have been proud, if he had extended his own travels from the Road to Wigan Pier to Minsk. This is not a land flowing with milk and honey. The region and its peoples have been fought over, uprooted, persecuted, and killed for a thousand years. Just in this century, the Borderlands have survived the collapse of three empires, the division of the spoils after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939, the Second World War, the Holocaust, Stalin's despotism, and the fall of the Soviet Union. As Applebaum, foreign editor for the London Spectator, aptly comments, ``To sift through the layers, one needs to practice a kind of visual and aural archeology.'' She does so with sensitive skill, noting how the cobblestones have disappeared beneath cracked concrete, how medieval foundations have vanished behind ``spectacular monotony,'' and how churches and shops have given way to numbered apartment blocks. She records the rival nationalisms- -Lithuanians hating Poles, Poles hating Lithuanians, everyone hating the Russians. She sees the miles of rusting Soviet naval ships in Kaliningrad, the pit behind the courthouse in Woroniaki in the Ukraine where the KGB dumped the bodies of those they had executed, and records the chang