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Fellowship will help Bartov explore rich history of Buczacz, Ukraine
Buczacz is the
hometown of the only Hebrew author who has won the Nobel Prize for Literature,
Shmuel Yosef Agnon; of the great Polish Jewish historian, Emanuel Ringelblum;
of Sigmund Freud’s parents; and of Bartov’s own mother.
by Kate Bramson
 Professor Omer
Bartov plans to spend the next two years researching a town that has held his
fascination for some time – Buczacz, Ukraine.
Buczacz is the
hometown of the only Hebrew author who has won the Nobel Prize for Literature,
Shmuel Yosef Agnon; of the great Polish Jewish historian, Emanuel Ringelblum;
of Sigmund Freud’s parents; and of Bartov’s own mother.
Bartov is the
John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of Euoropean History and professor of
history. He expects to be on sabbatical for the next two years – aided by
a recently awarded Guggenheim Fellowship, a fellowship from Harvard’s
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and support from Brown.
His research
will take him to archives in Germany, Austria, Ukraine, Poland, Israel and the
United States.
Buczacz was
founded in the 14th century as a private Polish town owned by a
noble family. Bartov is particularly interested in the relationships between
its Ukrainian, Polish and Jewish residents, whose ethnicity, religion and
trades differed.
He’ll
research the town’s rich history, which later came under the
Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of World War I, then became part of
Poland, and then was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939. Once the Nazis took
over the town in 1941, nearly the entire Jewish population – about 10,000
people and half the town’s citizens – was murdered.
“What
I’m interested in is how, for centuries, these communities lived next to
each other, created a culture, a social fabric, interacted with each
other,” Bartov said. “Often, there was aggression. Often, there was
animosity. But what they had was this. They didn’t have any other
model.”
He’ll also
look at the causes for the explosion of violence in the 20th
century.
Bartov said he
typically writes short books and usually prefers to read short books.
“But this I feel – there’s a sort of saga quality to
it,” he said. “In some ways, I want to write a biography of the
town, a town with a split personality. To get it right, you need to give it
time to come into being.”
If all goes
according to plan, he expects to finish the book in 2007-08.
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