Goodbye, Eastern Europe by Jacob Mikanowski

Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land
By Jacob Mikanowski
Pantheon Books 2023

Jacob Mikanowski readily admits that his new book, Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land, is “a history of a place that doesn’t exist.” And yet, his book’s narrative, which stretches from Vienna to Kiev and Vilnius to Skopje, is very much grounded in hundreds of real-world stories, all shaped by the “tragicomic stories, abounding in sudden catastrophes, unexpected reversals, and miraculous escapes” that Mikanowski knowingly describes as “the lingua franca” of Eastern Europe.

Goodbye, Eastern Europe is full of those sudden catastrophes and unexpected reversals, fizzing and popping over a thousand years of history and a dozen countries, half of which no longer exist. Lenin, Stalin, and Putin loom over the book’s final third, but the majority of the rest of it invokes a host of figures both historical and semi-mythical. Weird supernatural creatures lurk in the shadows of Mikanowskui’s earliest stories, and “sometimes saints battled against them, but more often, they thought it best to fight fire with fire”:

Behind the sun and beneath the earth, monster fought monster for possession of the soil and the sky. Across Eastern Europe, “good werewolves” and “good dragons” (usually in human form) watched over their communities and protected them from the forces of evil that threatened them from the outside. This made sense when seen through the prism of traditional belief; it was harder to explain to members of the Christian elite.

In a move that helps to emphasize the ever-present nature of the past in so many pockets of Eastern Europe, Mikanowski sometimes weaves his own experiences into his history. In a mention of St. Elizabeth’s Church in Dumbraveni, Transylvania, for instance, he mentions that time has worn the sandstone steps leading up to the front door. “Climbing them,” he writes, “feels like walking on the pages of a burnt book.” 

Mikanowski adroitly shifts his register, from the appropriately somber, writing about Bulgaria’s Communists in the 1920s (but obviously applicable in the dire present moment, of course): “People no longer quarreled about sword tassels and military salutes. They fought pitched battles in the streets over what felt to them like the fate of the world,” to the wryly playful global observations, “Today most of the Jews are gone, and the Islamic presence is much diminished. Working alchemists are even harder to find.” 

Goodbye, Eastern Europe cannot avoid being a fragmentary book, a necessarily incomplete book – a book ten times its length would feel the same way. But it’s smoothly eloquent, and its persistent surprise is its jumpy, thought-provoking unpredictability. It’s an account every bit as intriguing and strange as its subject.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.