The Great Departure

February 29, 2016
Zahra (Kidnapped Souls), a MacArthur fellow and professor of modern European history at the University of Chicago, examines the political and demographic developments and policies that influenced and were influenced by mass population movements from Eastern Europe to the Americas between the 1880s and the early 21st century. She shows how migration sapped the demographic strength of some pre-WWI empires—for example, 3.5 million people emigrated from Austria-Hungary between 1876 and 1910—though remittances from such families to relatives back home also “expanded peasant landholdings, renovated churches, and provided relief in cases of natural disaster.” Zahra relates that during the interwar period, some newly established countries encouraged the emigration of ethnic minorities, while some Polish leaders planned what was euphemistically called an “evacuation” of their country’s sizable Jewish population to Madagascar. After WWII, she shows the ways migration policies articulated Cold War propaganda, as when one Polish publication told Polish workers who had sought work elsewhere that “whoever does not return ... sentences himself to a life of hopeless exile.” Zahra, an assiduous, multilingual researcher who mined sources in Czech, English, French, German, and Polish, is a graceful writer who has produced a very fine study.

March 1, 2016

Over the past 125 years, Eastern European governments have changed from monarchy to totalitarian, but common belief maintains that a large population is a necessity for economic and military power. Zahra (history, Univ. of Chicago; The Lost Children) chronicles the lengthy wave of migration that altered the makeup of both Eastern Europe and the United States. As people left poverty and oppression in the East for the hope of prosperity and freedom in the West, governments fearful of losing workers, soldiers, or persons considered prime bloodlines, became alarmed by the mass exodus. Rather than addressing the conditions causing the emigration, ruling powers in Eastern Europe made it increasingly difficult to leave. An exception to this was the Jewish population, which Eastern nations wanted to be rid of and other countries did not welcome. Ben Shephard's The Long Road Home covers migration after World War II at almost twice the length, but Zahra's skillful use of first-person accounts and extensive documentation make this is an absorbing and comprehensive history. VERDICT Readers with an interest in Eastern European history and the history of U.S. ethnic groups will find this book fascinating.--Laurie Unger Skinner, Coll. of Lake Cty., Waukegan, IL

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