Martin Pollack, Nach Galizien. Von Chassiden, Huzulen, Polen unri Ruthenen by A. de Vincenz

Summary

This book's cover announces it as something between literature and documentary. It is, as the author points out in the introduction, a fictitious account of travels around eastern Galicia and northern Bukovina at the turn of the century.

For the contemporary reader, both these countries represent a kind of Atlantis and the author, too, sees them in these terms, reconstructing the period when they were part of Austria. The book is written for the Austrian reader, who will find references to Austrian and German history (and thus mainly to the German past) at every step. The sources for the reconstruction of this world are the works of East Galician writers, written in German, Polish and Ukrainian (only one Yiddish source is cited and that is accompanied by an English text) .. Most of the authors mentioned are of Jewish origin - Franzos, Landau, Joseph Roth, Artur Sandauer, Bruno Schulz and Józef Wittlin, that is mainly so-called ‘assimilated’ Jews, who saw themselves not as Jews but as Germans or Poles.

The book is something of a pastiche on 19th century guidebooks for which the German language has a special term: Reiseführer. The account of the journey is also appropriate to this genre:

Dry, sandy terrains begin beyond Tarn6w, overgrown with firs … Churches of a specific style appear ever more frequently along the route, standing in the fields like great stranded arks: low shingled roofs, usually with three irregular cupolas suspended above them and a wooden building beside them housing bells. The first Ukrainian villages. Near Jarosław the railway descends into a wide valley through which the San flows lazily, forming a natural border between western and eastern Galicia (etc.)

The route takes us on the Karl-Ludwigbahn through Przemyśl to Stryj, Stanislawów, Kołomyja, Czernowitz and back to Galicia: through Czort ków and Brody which the author evokes through the texts of Joseph Roth (five whole pages). And finally Lwów (pp. 190-206), the one corner of Europe in this ‘semi-Asiatic’ terrain. More strictly speaking ‘Europe begins in Lwów's second-class station waiting-room’ (the third class no doubt still belongs in Asia). Lwów is described in the words of Hermann Blumenthal (two pages: street sellers around the old synagogue) and those of Józef Wittlin (three pages: an ecstatic description of Lwów restaurants, cafes, bars and patisseries, ending with a eulogy to the names and surnames of the inhabitants).