Vanished Kingdoms
“Here’s another book on your part of the world – are you interested in the review?” a friend asks me as he hands over the latest Sun-Times (Sunday, 08 Jan).
“Here’s another book on your part of the world – are you interested in the review?” a friend asks me as he hands over the latest Sun-Times (Sunday, 08 Jan).
“I would be if I wasn’t so behind on the Pinker reviews,” was my lamentable answer.
Normally, I put all such reviews into a file to go through for the next year’s book list – books that pertain to the 500 years-old Mennonite Anabaptist history and ethnic identity. “My part of the world” varies between the former Assiniboia region straddling the border prairies between the US and Canada to the Prairie Midwest (that’s you – Omaha, Hutchinson and Sioux Falls) to the blurred historic region of West Prussia, Danzig and Poland south to Ukraine and the Russian Kuban. Russländer Anabaptism is more an ethnic archipelago than a single geographic heritage.
Norman Davies’ Vanished Kingdoms is the book in question. Davies’ latest (released in the EU last October) is a history of kingdoms and European nation states that no longer exist – many of them in the historically volatile Central and Eastern Europe. Seemingly Davies spends quite a bit of time exploring the various historical incarnations of Poland (including Sigismund’s Kingdom in which the first refugee Mennonites from the Netherlands weathered) to West Prussia and the small fledging nation of Rusyn that existed only for a single day, being once liberated by Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia then immediately absorbed by Ukraine.
“Thanks but with Bloodlands and Forgotten Land on the reading list for 2012 – I think we’ve had enough ‘forgotten’ history for a while,” I determined after reading the review.
Yet while dismissing the book’s long-term interest to the Russian Mennonites, I do perceive three potential interests for Mennonite readers in Davies’ book.
