When historian Bernard Wasserstein was around nine years old, in 1957, his mother told him about Krakowiec, the “small town in Ukraine” his father’s family had come from and gone back to. At the time, he writes, it was located “smack on the border between Poland and the Soviet Union” – though, with the collapse of the USSR in 1991, it “emerged, as if from a cloud, just inside the newly independent republic of Ukraine”.
Wasserstein became fascinated by the place and, alongside his major study of 20th-century Europe, Barbarism and Civilization, ambitious books on Israel/Palestine and many other aspects of Jewish history, has long tried to “assemble a biographical dictionary of every single person in recorded history who had ever lived” there. He has now distilled this somewhat madcap project into a compelling history, which pays tribute to his ancestors while raising issues that remain tragically relevant today.
