A bottom-up approach to the history of the region
An interview with Jacob Mikanowski, author of Goodbye Eastern Europe. An intimate history of a divided land. Interviewers: Adam Reichardt and Nina Pániková
September 16, 2024 -
Adam Reichardt
Jacob Mikanowski
Nina Pániková
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Issue 5 2024MagazineStories and ideas
Photo courtesy of Jacob Mikanowski
ADAM REICHARDT AND NINA PÁNIKOVÁ: We’d like to start by talking about how you came up with the idea to write the book. What were your motivations? What drew you to the region?
JACOB MIKANOWSKI: It was a kind of voyage to write the book. It took many years and developed pretty slowly. Part of it is my background. I’m Polish by family. I grew up speaking Polish. My parents are immigrants from Warsaw. I grew up in a Polish-Jewish family and lived in America, but then moved back for a few years to live with my grandparents in Warsaw. Then I went to grad school for history. I was actually supposed to study Soviet history. I studied Russian in college, actually partly because I spoke Polish, so I thought it would be easy. But I got less interested, I was always pulled back towards Eastern Europe, the Eastern Europe which is not a part of Soviet history. And I was doing that at a time when I think interest in Eastern Europe, in America at least, was at an all-time low, before 2014 and Russia’s start of aggression against Ukraine. Then there was an absolute kind of nadir of popular and academic interest. So I was in graduate school and watching the ground vanishing under my feet in terms of jobs and interest. Yet, I was very passionate about this region. I thought what I was studying was incredibly interesting. And I thought what I had inherited with my family’s story, two world wars, the Holocaust, spies, guns, it was incredibly interesting. And there was very little audience for it. So ultimately I was leaving grad school to be a journalist. As a kind of last look back at what I’d been working on, I wrote an essay in 2017 called “Goodbye, Eastern Europe”, which was partly saying goodbye to the idea of Eastern Europe that was in the 1980s and 90s, when there was that high point of western interest. I actually had trouble publishing that essay, but it eventually came out and had a little bit of viral success, especially in Eastern Europe. I felt like it spoke to somebody. Then there was a slow process over five or six years of turning that essay into a fuller story.
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Central Europe, Eastern Europe, history, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Western Balkans
