"Bukovina: The Life and Death of an East European Borderland" (Princeton University Press, December 2025)

The making and remaking of Bukovina, a disputed Eastern European borderland, from the eighteenth century to the present day

Bukovina, when it has existed on official maps, has always fit uneasily among its neighbors. The region is now divided between Romania and Ukraine but has long been a testing ground for successive regimes, including the Habsburg Empire, independent and later Nazi-allied Romania, and the Soviet Union, as each sought to reshape the region in its own image. In this beautifully written and wide-ranging book, Cristina Florea traces the history of Bukovina, showing how this borderland, the onetime buffer between Christendom and Islam, found itself at the forefront of modern state-building and governance projects that eventually extended throughout the rest of Europe. Encounters that play out in borderlands have proved crucial to the development of modern state ambitions and governance practices.

Drawing on a wide range of archives and published sources in Russian, Ukrainian, German, Romanian, French, and Yiddish, Florea integrates stories of ethnic and linguistic groups—rural Ukrainians, Romanians, and Germans, and urban German-speaking Jews and Poles—who lived side by side in Bukovina, all of them navigating constant reconfiguration and reinvention. Challenging traditional chronologies in European history, she shows that different transformations in the region occurred at different tempos, creating a historical palimpsest and a sense among locals that they had lived many lives.

A two-hundred-year history of a region shaped by the conflicting pulls of imperial legacies and national ambitions, Bukovina reveals the paradoxes of modern history found in a microcosm of Eastern Europe.

About the speaker

Atina Grossmann is Distinguished Professor of History at the Cooper Union in New York City where she teaches courses on modern Europe, Fascism and National Socialism, the Holocaust, refugees and migration in global context as well as gender and sexuality studies. Relevant publications include: The Surviving Remnant: Documents on Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany 1945-1950 (with A.Kramen, A Patt, T. Lewinsky, 2024); chapter on “Aftermath” (with K. Bohus) in Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (2015); Our Courage/Unser Mut: Jews in Europe after 1945 (with K. Bohus 2020), Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (with M.Edele and S. Fitzpatrick 2017), Wege in der Fremde: Deutsch-jüdische Begegnungsgeschichte zwischen New York, Berlin, und Teheran (2012), and Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton 2007/09, German edition Wallstein 2012). as well as “Trauma, Privilege, and Adventure: Jewish Refugees in Iran and India” (in Jews and Colonialism, ed. Stefan Vogt, 2023). In 2022-23 she was the Ina Levine Invitational Senior Scholar in Residence at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, USHMM. Her current research focuses on” Jewish Refugees from National Socialism in Iran and India: Between ‘Orient’ and European Catastrophe” as well as the entanglements of family memoir and historical scholarship.