by Omer Bartov
Along the way I have been helped by a large number of research assistants and translators, a number of whom also became close friends. I would like to especially thank Sofia Grachova, Frank Grelka, Anna Michalska, Joanna Michlic, and Naama Shik for many years of close collaboration, as well as Jane Zolot-Gassko, Eva Lutkiewicz, Oleg Majewski, Lars Nebelung, Eliezer Niborski, Kateryna Ruban, Vicki Shifriss, Taras Tsymbal, Rebecca Wolpe, and Evelyn Zegenhagen. Natalia Aleksiun remembered “my” Buczacz in archives and listened to me going on about the book. Dagmar Herzog was a source of continuous inspiration. Irit Halavy knew the soul of the book before I conceived it. Yoel Rappel shared his knowledge of the region and of many other matters. Shimon Redlich read drafts of several chapters and provided invaluable comments, as did Jonathan Beard. Uzi Vogelman joined me on the most recent journey to his father’s hometown of Brzeżany (Ukrainian: Berezhany) and the potato cellar where he survived in the one-street village of Kuropatnyky. Roman Voronka linked me to his birth town and never gave up on me. Thomas Weiss took me on a virtual tour of Buczacz and, together with his sons, made the tombstones readable again. Maurice Wolfthal gave me a box full of treasures over breakfast at Phoenix, Arizona.
Many other friends and colleagues have provided advice and support over the years. I would like to thank especially Vadim Altskan, Tarik Cyril Amar, Israel Bartal, Ela Bauer, Delphine Bechtel, Doris Bergen, Ray Brandon, Suzanne Brown-Fleming, Jeffrey Burds, Marco Carynnyk, Alon Confino, Martin Dean, Havi Dreyfus, Sofia Dyak, David Engel, Dan Eshet, Ziva Galilee, Simone Gigliotti, Amos Goldberg, Nurit Govrin, Jan Grabowski, Jan Tomasz Gross, Atina Grossmann, Wolf Gruner, Geoffrey Hartman (z”l), John Paul Himka, Ariel Hirschfeld, Peter Holquist, Yaroslav Hrytsak, Zvi Karniel (z”l), Samuel Kassow, Mykola Kozak, Wendy Lower, Yaacov Lozowick, Paul Robert Magocsi, Dirk Moses, Norman Naimark, Boaz Neumann (z”l), Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Antony Polonsky, Alexander Prusin, Elchanan Reiner, Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, Per Anders Rudling, Raz Segal, Avner Shalev, Joshua Shanes, Paul Shapiro, Marci Shore, David Silberklang, Timothy Snyder, Stanisław Stępień, Adam Teller, Richard Tyndorf, Larry Warwaruk, Amir Weiner, Eric D. Weitz, Larry Wolff, and Boguslaw Zdzieblo. There were many more, from Caracas, Venezuela, to Melbourne, Australia.
I owe more than I can express here to my teacher Saul Friedländer, ever since those exhilarating days of study and debates at Tel Aviv University in the late 1970s, when the world of knowledge and understanding opened up and Facebook and Twitter were not even a little dark cloud on the horizon. In recent years I benefited tremendously from the knowledge, sensibilities, and friendship of Alan Mintz, who devastatingly passed away in the midst of his Herculean labors on Agnon’s Buczacz and literary biography.
In bringing this book to see completion I was fortunate to be guided and helped by my agent, Don Fehr, my editor, Sean Manning, and my publisher, Jonathan Karp, who stepped in decisively just as I was reaching the depths of despair.
It is customary to thank one’s family for having provided the indispensable circumstances for producing a book. In this case my family has spent so long with my book-in-being that it has become almost a way of life; they may not even recognize me as I exit my study. But I hope it is not too late to make it up to them. There are always more books to be written, but in truth, this book would have never seen the light of day without them.
—Omer Bartov
About the Author
© PETER GOLDBERG
Omer Bartov is the John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History at Brown University. Born and raised in Israel, he is the author of several well-respected books on war, genocide, and the Holocaust, including Hitler’s Army, Murder in Our Midst, Mirrors of Destruction, and Germany’s War and the Holocaust. His most recent book, Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine, investigates interethnic relations in the borderlands of Eastern Europe and the contemporary politics of memory in that region. He has written for the New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, the Nation, and The New York Times Book Review, and is currently directing the project “Israel-Palestine: Lands and Peoples,” at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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ALSO BY OMER BARTOV
Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine
Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich
Germany’s War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories
The Eastern Front, 1941–45: German Troops and the Barbaristation of Warfare
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Notes
MEMORIES OF CHILDHOOD
1 The Ships List: http://www.theshipslist.com/ships/lines/balticam.shtml; Haapalah/Aliyah Bet: http://www.wertheimer.info/family/GRAMPS/Haapalah/plc/1/2/bc69f6d1a2c5c4e7a21.html; The Palestine Poster Project Archive: http://www.palestineposterproject.org/poster/polonia; SS Polonia: http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Polonia (all accessed August 29, 2016).
Chapter 1: THE GATHERING STORM
1 S. Barącz, Pamiątki Buczackie (Lwów, 1882), 3–4.
2 S. Y. Agnon, The City Whole (Tel Aviv, 1973, in Hebrew), dedication page, 9–13. See the selective translation A City in Its Fullness, ed. A. Mintz and J. Saks, multiple translators (New Milford, CT, 2016). All translations of Agnon are my own. For local Ukrainian versions see Y. Stotskyi, The Basilian Monastery (Lviv, 1997, in Ukrainian), 36–38, 48–49; I. Kladochnyi, Brief Sketch of Buczacz (private publication, no city given, Canada, 1990, in Ukrainian), 1–3. See also Barącz, Pamiątki Buczackie, 4–7, 48–52; S. J. Kowalski, Powiat Buczacki i jego zabytki (Biały Dunajec, Poland, 2005), 25–26, 32–36, 42–43, 49–50, 54–55. For the larger historical context, see P. R. Magocsi, Historical Atlas of East Central Europe (Seattle, 1995), 10, 12, 15, 18–20, 31–33, 46, 48–53, 59–61; D. Stone, The Polish-Lithuanian State, 1386–1795 (Seattle, 2001), 3–20, 36–66, 136–39, 147–48; P. R. Magocsi, A History of Ukraine (Seattle, 1996), 175–228; O. Subtelny, Ukraine, 3rd ed. (Toronto, 2000), 124, 127; J. Lukowski and H. Zawadzki, A Concise History of Poland (New York, 2001), 75–83.
3 M. Y. Brawer, “Buczacz: A Geographical Outline,” and N. M. Gelber, “A History of the Jews in Buczacz,” in Sefer Buczacz (The Book of Buczacz), ed. Y. Cohen (Tel Aviv, 1956, in Hebrew), 43 and 45–46, respectively, and citations therein; J. Tokarski, Ilustrowany przewodnik po zabytkach kultury na Ukrainie (Warsaw, 2000), 2:37; M. Nosonovsky, Hebrew Epitaphs and Inscriptions from Ukraine and Former Soviet Union (Washington, DC, 2006), 25, 107; A. Brawer, “Buczacz,” Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem, 1978), 4:1037; B. D. Weinryb, The Jews of Poland (Philadelphia, 1972), 25, 27, 115–16, 151–52, 318; G. D. Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley, 2004), 6, 14–15; M. J. Rosman, The Lord’s Jews (Cambridge, MA, 1991), 37–40; I. Bartal and S. Ury, “Between Jews and their Neighbours,” in Polin, vol. 24: Jews and their Neighbours in Eastern Europe since 1750, ed. I. Bartal, A. Polonsky, and Scott Ury (Oxford, 2012), 14–15, 17–20; J. Goldberg, “The Role of the Jewish Community in the Socio-Political Structure of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,” in Polin, vol. 22: Social and Cultural Boundaries in Pre-Modern Poland, ed. A. Teller, M. Teter, and A. Polonsky (Oxford, 2010), 142—55; N. N. Hanover, The Book of the Deep Mire (Tel Aviv, 1944–45, in Hebrew), 31–32, 37–38, 40–43, 52, 56–57, 63 (my translation); N. N. Hanove
r, Abyss of Despair, trans. A. J. Mesch (New Brunswick, NJ, 1983 [1950]), 42–44, 50–51, 54–58, 68–69, 76–77, 86; S. Stampfer, “What Happened to the Jews of Ukraine in 1648?,” Jewish History 17 (2003): 207–27; J. Raba, Between Remembrance and Denial (New York, 1995), 38, n. 128, 75, 98–99, 108, 367–434; F. Sysyn, “Ukrainian-Polish Relations in the 17th Century,” in Poland and Ukraine, ed. P. J. Potichnyi (Edmonton, 1980), 55–82; J. Pelenski, “The Cossack Insurrections in Jewish-Ukrainian Relations,” and F. Sysyn, “The Jewish Factor in the Khmelnytsky Uprising,” in Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective, ed. P. J. Potichnyi and H. Aster (Edmonton, 1988), 35, 43–54. On subsequent communal violence see H. Abramson, A Prayer for the Government (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 109–40; chapters by S. Lambroza, P. Kenez, and H. Rogger in Pogroms, ed. J. D. Klier and S. Lambroza (Cambridge, UK, 2004); K. Lada, “The Ukrainian Topos of Oppression and the Volhynian Slaughter of Poles, 1841–1943/44” (PhD diss., Flinders University, 2012).
4 Das Reisejournal des Ulrich von Werdum (1670–1677), ed. S. Cramer (Frankfurt/M., 1990), 210–11; Biblioteka Czartoryskich w Krakowie, Poland, man. 609, p. 89; A. Zamoyski, The Polish Way (New York, 2001), 185; Stone, Polish-Lithuanian State, 235–36.
5 Kowalski, Powiat Buczacki, 26–27, 37–38; Barącz, Pamiątki Buczackie, 6–7, 11–12, 53; F.-P. Dalairac, Les Anecdotes de Pologne ou Memoires secrets du Règne de Jean Sobieski (Paris, 1699), 230–31; Gelber, “The Jews in Buczacz,” in Sefer Buczacz, 46–47; Akta grodzkie i ziemskie (Lwów, 1931), 24:380, Nr. 198, sections 2–3; Kladochnyi, Brief Sketch of Buczacz, 3; Agnon, The City Whole, 16; Magocsi, Historical Atlas, 60; Stone, Polish-Lithuanian State, 170–72, 174.
6 Gelber, “The Jews in Buczacz,” in Sefer Buczacz, 48, 67–69, 72–73, citing Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Vienna (hereafter AT-OeSt), MdI: IV T. 1777, X, and Ossolineum, Wrocław, man. 3636; Dalairac, Anecdotes de Pologne, 228–32, cited in Barącz, Pamiątki Buczackie, 10–13, and further in 14–16, 27, 54; Agnon, The City Whole, 14–15; Kowalski, Powiat Buczacki, 27–28, citing W. Urbański, Buczacz i jego Powiat (Buczacz, 1936), and further on 34, 49–50; A. Żarnowski, Kresy Wschodnie II Rzeczypospolitej (Kraków, 1992), 17; Stotskyi, Basilian Monastery, 39, 143; Kladochnyi, Brief Sketch of Buczacz, 4; “Bazylianie w Buczaczu,” in Oriens 5/4 (1937): 155.
7 The wooden synagogue on the banks of the Strypa was built in 1685 after the old synagogue burned down. Mikołaj Potocki also built the Roman Catholic and the Greek Catholic St. Pokrova churches in Buczacz. Kladochnyi, Brief Sketch of Buczacz, 4–7, 10–12; Agnon, The City Whole, 12, 18, 20, 25–27, 29–40, 43–56, 89–90, 233–38; S. Y. Agnon, A Guest for the Night (Tel Aviv, 1998 [1939], in Hebrew), 11-13; D. Neuman, “The Synagogues in the Town,” and response by M. Rabinowitz, Davar Supplement, August 28 and September 9, 1938 (in Hebrew), cited in Sefer Buczacz, 89–92, and also Gelber, “The Jews in Buczacz,” in Sefer Buczacz, 56, 53, n. 28, citing AT-OeSt, MdI, IV T 1, Carton 2582, Nr. 143, October 1812; Archives of the Lwów Episcopacy, Ukraine, Directorium Divini Officii in Archidioecesi Leopoliensi (Lwów, 1819), 73 and (1835), 68–69; Schematismus Universi Venerabilis Cleri Archidioeceseos Metropolitanae Graeco Catholicae, Leopoliensis (Lwów, 1832), 89; Tygodnik Ilustrowany, 1860, Nr. 24, Archiwum Państwowe w Krakowie (The National Archives in Kraków, hereafter APK), Teki Schneidera (the Schneider collection), file 227, pp. 665–68; Barącz, Pamiątki Buczackie, 33–34, 54–59; T. Kuznek, Przewodnik po województwie tarnopolskiem (Tarnopol, 1928), 222–23; “Bazylianie w Buczaczu,” 155; Kowalski, Powiat Buczacki, 28–32, 35–37, 44–52, 45–46, 70–71; Żarnowski, Kresy Wschodnie II Rzeczypospolitej, 8, 15–17; Stotskyi, Basilian Monastery, 39–44; B. Voznytskyi, Mykola Pototskyi, Bernard Meretyn, Ioan Heorhiy Pinzel (Lviv, 2005, in Ukrainian).
8 Barącz, Pamiątki Buczackie, 34–35. In his 1833 masterpiece The Undivine Comedy (Nie-Boska komedia) the author Zygmunt Krasiński described Mikołaj Potocki as a ruler who “shot women on trees and baked Jews alive”: https://wolnelektury.pl/media/book/pdf/nie-boska-komedia.pdf (accessed August 28, 2017), 51. See also C. Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, 1983), 243–7, and L. Wolff, The Idea of Galicia (Stanford, 2010), 145, citing L. von Sacher-Masoch, Graf Donski, 2nd ed. (Schaffenhausen, 1864), 343. Others saw him as a great patron of the arts. See, e.g., Słownik Biograficzny 28 (Kraków, 1984–85), 113–14, also citing F. Karpiński, Pamiętniki (Warsaw, 1898), 18, 66, 74–76, and J. U. Niemcewicz, Pamiętniki czasów moich (Paris, 1948), 81–83; Lukowski and Zawadzki, Concise History of Poland, 88–96; Żarnowski, Kresy Wschodnie II Rzeczypospolitej, 8; N. A. Feduschak, “A Prince, Philanthropist and Playboy,” Kyiv Post, November 2, 2011, http://www.kyivpost.com/article/guide/people/a-prince-philanthropist-and-playboy-an-exciting-li-116186.html (accessed September 2, 2016).
9 A. J. Brawer, Galizien: Wie es an Österreich kam (Leipzig, 1910), 15–17, 22–29, 35–49; W. O. McCagg, A History of Habsburg Jews (Bloomington, IN, 1989), 27; N. Sinkoff, Out of the Shtetl (Providence, RI, 2004), 201–225; S. Grodziski, “The Jewish Question in Galicia,” in Polin, vol. 12: Focusing on Galicia, ed. I. Bartal and A. Polonsky (London, 1999), 61–72.
10 R. van Luit, “Homberg, Herz,” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Homberg_Herz (accessed September 3, 2016); Tsentralnyi derzhavnyi istorychnyi arkhiv, m. Lviv (Central State Historical Archives of Ukraine in Lviv, hereafter TsDIAL), fond (record group) 146, opys (series, hereafter op.) 85, sprava (file, hereafter spr.) 1903: “K.k. Galizische Statthalterei, 1772–1854”; Sinkoff, Out of the Shtetl, 228–31, 269; N. M. Gelber, “The History of the Jews of Tarnopol,” in Encyclopaedia of the Jewish Diaspora, Poland Series, Tarnopol Volume, ed. Ph. Korngruen (Tel Aviv, 1955), 46–51, 55–83; Gelber, “The Jews in Buczacz,” in Sefer Buczacz, 55, on Rabbi Pinchas Eliyahu Horowitz, an early Orthodox reformer, who spent several years in Buczacz. See also J. Perl, Sefer Megale Temirin, ed. J. Meir (Jerusalem, 2013, in Hebrew).
11 M. Bernstein, Einige Kulturhistorische Blicke über die Juden in Galizien (Vienna, 1850), v, 11–12, 13–15, 17–18, 32–33, 39, 41–43. See also C. Thornhill, “Eastern Jews and the Sociology of Nationalism,” in Ghetto Writing, ed. A. Fuchs and F. Krobb (Columbia, SC, 1999), 68–82; M. Wodziński, Haskala and Hasidism in the Kingdom of Poland, trans. S. Cozens (Portland, OR, 2009), 117, 159; S. W. Baron, “The Impact of the Revolution of 1848 on Jewish Emancipation,” Jewish Social Studies (hereafter JSS) 11/3 (1949): 195–248, esp. 231; Y. Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, 2004), 4–39; S. J. Zipperstein, Imagining Russian Jewry (Seattle, 1999), 41–62.
12 J. Shanes, Diaspora Nationalism and Jewish Identity in Habsburg Galicia (New York, 2012), 31–37. In 1886 Buczacz numbered 1,920 Roman Catholics, 1,761 Greek Catholics, and 6,281 Jews; 2,551 people, presumably mostly Jews, declared German their language of daily use. By 1900 Buczacz had 3,078 Roman Catholics, 1,918 Greek Catholics, and 6,730 Jews; only 395 declared German, while 8,948 (of whom 5,000 were likely Jews) gave Polish as their common language. Special Orts-Repertorien der im Oesterreichischen Reichsrathe vertretenen Königsreiche und Länder, K. K. Statistische Central-Commission, vol. 12, Galizien (Vienna, 1886), 66; Gemeindelexikon der im Reichsrate vertretenen Königsreiche und Länder, K. K. Statistische Zentralkommission, vol. 12: Galizien (Vienna, 1907), 100.
13 A. S. Markovits and F. Sysyn, eds., Nationbuilding and the Politics of Nationalism (Cambridge, MA, 1982); J.-P. Himka, Galician Villages and the Ukrainian National Movement in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1988), 158–75; J.-P. Himka, Religion and Nationality in Western Ukraine (Montreal, 1999); P. R. Magocsi, The Roots of Ukrainian Nationalism (Toronto, 2002); C. Hann and P. R. Magocsi, eds., Galicia (Toronto, 2005); K. Struve, Bauern und Nation in Galizien (Göttingen, 2005), 384–433.
14 Himka, Galician Villages, xxv, 66–86, 163, 167; J. Pennell, The Jew at Home (New York, 1892), 56.
15 Himka, Galician Villages, 169–70, 173–74; Struve, Bauern und Nation, 386–401; K. Stauter-Halsted, The Nation in the Villag
e (Ithaca, NY, 2001), 48–52, 116–17, 138–39.
16 J.-P. Himka, “Ukrainian-Jewish Antagonism in the Galician Countryside during the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Potichnyi and Aster, Ukrainian-Jewish Relations, 12, citing issue 1, October 1, 1879, and 113, issue 3, June 1, 1881; Struve, Bauern und Nation, 394, citing issue 3, February 1, 1880, and 413, citing issue 5, March 1, 1876.
17 Struve, Bauern und Nation, 415–16; O. Kofler, Żydowski dwory (Warsaw, 1999), 8–9, citing T. Gąssowski, Między gettem a światem (Kraków, 1997), 48; S. Pawłowski, Wielka własność w byłej Galicji Wschodniej (Lwów, 1921), 12–13, 16. According to Himka, Galician Villages, 158, in 1902 Jews owned 18.5 percent of the tabular land in private estates in Eastern Galicia. S. Gruiński, Materiały do kwestyi żydowskiej w Galicyi (Lwów, 1910), 27–29, notes that by 1902 over 25 percent of the landed properties in Galicia were in Jewish hands; Jews rarely possessed vast latifundia, but they owned almost 40 percent of medium-size land properties and paid 10 percent of all taxes received from landed property.
18 Kofler, Żydowski dwory, 240–45, 292–93. See also YIVO Institute for Jewish Research library, New York (hereafter YIVO), Nr. 77378A: O. Kofler, “Jewish Manors,” undated typescript of the book’s English translation, likely by the author himself, 136–39. Court Jews traditionally handled the finances of royalty and nobility in early modern Europe. In 1900 the estate of Petlikowce Stare (Old Petlikowce; Ukrainian: Stari Petlykivtsi) had a population of fifty-eight Roman Catholics, twelve Greek Catholics, and twenty-eight Jews; eighty-nine declared Polish their language of daily use, and nine spoke Ruthenian. Gemeindelexikon von Galizien, bearbeitet auf Grund der Ergebnisse der Volkszählung vom 31. Dezember 1900, ed. K. K. Statistische Zentralkommission (Vienna, 1907), 104.