Patrycja Trzeszczyńska. Łemkowszczyzna Zapamiętana: Opowieści o Przeszłości i Przestrzeni [The Lemko Land Remembered: Stories About the Past and Space]

Abstract

he Lemko community is one of the most important and widely described ethnic minorities in Polish sociological and anthropological literature. In the over four-hundred-page book under review, Patrycja Trzeszczyńska makes the argument that there is still much to say about the history and culture of this group of Carpathian highlanders-the Lemkos. At one time, these inhabitants of the Lower Beskyd Mountains-categorized variously by scholars as a Polish ethnic minority, a Ukrainian ethnographic group, or part of the Rusyns-became the subject of violent postwar politics, which resulted in their deportation and dispersion across western Poland and parts of Ukraine. Through a substantial and well-crafted study of the village of Komańcza and the memories of its previous inhabitants, Trzeszczyńska also strives to tell a bigger story, namely that of remembrance and recognitionthe struggle of many minority groups in that part of Europe after the fall of Communism. Yet the broader context of traumatic experience and identity formation, of remembering and forgetting, shared by so many groups-such as the Vlachs in Romania, the Crimean Tatars, and the Bosniaks in the former Yugoslavia, just to mention a few-is somewhat absent in her analysis. The main focus of Łemkowszczyzna Zapamiętana (The Lemko Land Remembered) is the construction of the collective and cultural memory of the Lemko community from the village of Komańcza. Through a careful and reflective examination of 66 diaries and 57 interviews with current and former residents of the village, now living in Poland and Ukraine (mostly in the Tarnpolin district), Trzeszczyńska shows how the Lemkos remember their past and represent their own identity (118). According to her, the past is not "a scarce resource"-to use Arjun Appadurai's formulation-but a lived part of the present. Throughout five dense chapters, she argues that the members of the Lemko community in Poland and Ukraine developed different, diverse, and very often contradictory mnemonic strategies, which, at the same time, all centre on the traumatic experience of deportation. In this regard, the narrative community (the term that Trzeszczyńska prefers to use instead of collective memory) of the Lemkos shares a memory of the Lemkos' ancestral land-Lemkovyna. This almost mythical region seems to be at the centre of the Lemkos' representation and image of themselves as a group. Thus, Trzeszczyńska suggests that, in the case of the Lemkos, space T 212