Orel Beilinson
@BeilinsonOrel
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I read, write, and teach about modern Europe. Ph.D. from Yale (2024); Postdoctoral Fellow at the Polonsky Academy. Personal views.
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This is a thread with recommendations for less-popular textbooks of Eastern European languages. Many of them are not in English, but I figured that since these languages have rather meager resources, such a thread might help point learners in useful directions. Feel free to RT:
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It is among the stupidest byproducts of globalization that every time Netanyahu tweets, most Hebrew-language comments call for his resignation and the most supportive comments are in Hindi.
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Many of my Turkish friends are ridiculously well read. One reason, I suppose, is the amazing wealth of literature available in translation. Richer than any other country I visited in the region.
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Reading the Bratislava shooter’s manifest, I couldn’t but marvel at how American it all sounds. Gun rights, “lefty libs,” FBI… this was a Slovak youth whose language of hatred was English and entire worldview entrenched in American Nazism and fascism, not even in translation.
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Somewhat hilarious to see Russian speakers in Belgrade speaking Russian to a Serbian waitress and react confusedly, almost angrily, when she does not suddenly retrieve her hidden Russian out of the depth of her deep Slavic soul
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Every nation-state is a modern construct made “real” by years of agitation by nationalist movements. Not yours, of course: you really are an actual nation, absolutely primordial and autochthonous. Your enemies, on the other hand? Definitely fake.
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European Intellectual History since Nietzsche, my advisor's extremely popular course at Yale, is now available on YouTube. I particularly recommend Lectures 11-12, 17-18, 23-24. The Heidegger Controversy lecture (
#24
) is particularly memorable.
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Turkish is a very regular language. Its word order, however, is unintuitive for many. Here is the first sentence of Oğuz Atay's great novel Tutunamayanlar 'Those who cannot hold on,' dissected for you. You have to wait until the end to get the point. It's also a literary device.
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Someone should found the “Journal for Articles that Tell Interesting Historical Stories but have no Major Historiographical Point to Make.”
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Who are "they," Mr. Orban?
Today is a national day of mourning. They crushed our revolution in 1956, but our love for freedom and sovereignty lives on to this day.
#freedomfighters
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Soviet grandpa is disturbed by the fact that Yale's Department of History, where I am writing my Ph.D., hasn't "yet" extended me an offer for a tenured position. "Don't they like you? Doesn't Prof. Snyder like you? Why do they wait so long with offering you a job?" Thanks grandpa
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Turkish is such a wonderful language.
Hatırlayabildiklerim: 'What [plural] I could recall.'
Hatırla- 'remember'
-abil 'can, able to'
-dik 'that which'
-ler plural suffix
-im 'mine'
Hatırlayabildiklerim 'the things I was able to remember,' a memoir title.
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The best food in Athens is Karamanli. Originally Turkish-speaking Greek Orthodox people in central Anatolia, hundreds of thousands of them had to leave their homeland in 1923 and move to 🇬🇷 . This restaurant is just spectacular, with the best versions of Anatolian & Greek food.
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I managed to leave our anti-Roma tour guide speechless: we encountered a Roma mother and her children outside of a church; he embarked on a speech on the impossibility of integrating them, so I engaged in a short conversation with them in Romani. Best use for Romani I’ve ever got
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So surreal: I’ve learned Ukrainian because Covid stopped me from traveling to 🇺🇦 in 2020 for research. My advisor thought studying Ukrainian was a better use of Yale’s money compared to Dutch at U Indiana. Never thought I’d use it beyond archives. Now I use it with refugee kids.
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When people say "settlers go home" to mean all Israelis and places like the Caucasus, here is why it's perhaps not the best idea and an indicator as to why they left.
Mobs break into the Makhachkala airport, in Russia’s north Caucasus, looking to lynch Jews after rumors spread about the arrival of Jewish refugees from Israel.
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One reason everyone should learn Turkish is so that we can use adjectives like
yeşil 'green' -> yemyeşil 'completely green, totally green'
yalnız 'alone' -> yapayalnız 'completely alone'
temiz 'clean' -> tertemiz 'completely clean, spotless'
These adjectives are so fun to form.
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All these tweets about "2020 please end already" remind me of an old communist joke:
Two friends meet in the middle of Bucharest:
- How are you doing these days?
- Average. Worse than last year, better than next year.
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I am often asked what is the one most important rule we learn from the history of Eastern Europe and they expect me to say something about totalitarianism/communism/modernization but the one rule of Eastern European history is that every song in the world has a Czechoslovak cover
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Grandpa suggested that I "work more loudly" in the archive, so they'll notice me and offer me a professorship. Here is the job market tip you didn't know you needed, given to you by the former Vice Chief Medical Doctor of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, and not an academic.
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Is there far-right 🇺🇦 nationalism? Yes
Is 🇺🇦 nationalism inherently far-right? No
Who else has far-right nationalists? Everyone.
If your standard for helping against a murderous aggressor is nothing less than a spotless historical record of morality, no one on earth is safe.
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The desecration and burning of al-Hamma's synagogue were the final note of a long demise. It's hard to find photos that do justice to this community, which believed it was as ancient as the city itself. A community of craftsmen whose neighborhoods were demolished by the 1960s.
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PhD ✅ In a remarkable finale to
#ASEEES23
, I defended my dissertation! Thanks to
@NancyWingfield5
,
@TimothyDSnyder
, and
@marci_shore
for their mentoring, feedback, friendship, and belief in both me and the project (and for coming to Philly so that we do not celebrate over Zoom!)
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Whenever I am asked for my opinion on Galeev's mega-threads, I first state a very simple fact: I do not know any serious historian of the Russian Empire/USSR who corrected him or asked for a clarification and wasn't immediately blocked.
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The first time it happened to me, now I recall, was with my very own grandpa. We were in Bratislava; he tried to communicate with the taxi driver in Russian. He was not very young, so he knew basic Russian but was NOT willing to use it. Grandpa only understood the numbers in 🇸🇰.
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An interesting graphic from the Museum of Lower Austria: how many eggs, liters of milk, or kilograms of flour does a farmer need to produce in order to afford today’s newspaper, 1950 vs 2014
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Many Israelis, virtually everyone I know personally, see settler violence in the West Bank & incitement against Israeli Arabs on par with supporting Hamas: problems Netanyahu aggravated to entrench his premiership. We know that recovering from Oct 7 means undermining their power.
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Turkey is really a fascinating country:
“During the march on the Israeli General Consulate, one group used the slogan ‘No to Zionism, Fascism, Sharia [Islamic law].’ Another group used Takbir [Allah Akbar].”
İsrail Başkonsolosluğu'na yapılan yürüyüş sırasında;
Bir grup "Siyonizme, Faşiste, Şeriata geçit yok” sloganı atarken.
diğer grup “Tekbir” getirdi.
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I ate in a Georgian restaurant today, which reminded me of my favorite Georgian word (and my utter failures to turn my passive reading knowledge into active speech): šemoeč̣meba - "I ate it all by accident". The prefix can make any verb "by accident" or "I didn't mean to".
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I know there are many fellow Ph.D. students whose dissertation plans are now void. If anyone needs to talk over some options to find other, published or digitized sources, I'm happy to talk. My dissertation's geographic scope made archival work unfeasible anyway. Some broad tips:
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Just found out that the Turkish word kalabalık 'crowded'/'crowd' made it into Swedish, through Ottoman, as 'riot'/'disorder'. From there it reached Finnish: kalabaliikki 'disorder'/'skirmish'. Through Ottoman it also reached Romanian: calabalâc began as one's messy belongings...
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Library of the Municipality of Vienna. Not the worst place to spend a rainy Friday in.
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Heartbroken about Bratislava's gay bar/cafe Tepláreň. Many friends frequent it. Right by the castle and the Jewish museum, I often walk by. I love Bratislava. I've never felt threatened there as a gay Jew. An antisemitic+anti-LGBTQ manifesto turned into gunfire is unsettling.
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From an Israeli review of a guided trip to Croatia and Slovenia: "It's so good to visit two countries that simply have no history. So peaceful to be in a place with nothing but nature". Someone should have told me that before I chose my current profession: History of the Balkans.
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A Serbian woman whose son I had briefly dated in 2019, who teased me on the one weekend I visited her for not understanding her accent, just sent me a message on Facebook:
"Everything is terrible. In the Middle East, Europe... Why don't you come to us in the village for a while?"
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Dear sudden historians of Twitter: the history of nationalism is fascinating, but dignity and right to live is not predicated upon how old their nation-building project is or how plausible their national myths are. True for Israelis, Palestinians, Ukrainians, Kurds, everyone.
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It is unfortunate that, through Erasmus, most languages I know adopted the idiom "in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king" instead of the much better version in Uzbek:
Qush yo'q joyda qurbaqa ham bulbul
'In a place without songbirds, [even] a frog is a nightingale.'
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Is Varoufakis really that uninformed? Is he, even worse, malicious? Putin has been bombing hospitals in Ukraine and Syria for years. He has been causing the equivalent of 500 deaths in places deemed sanctuaries weekly. Are we being proud of not paying attention, let alone caring?
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A moment of light: after 4.5 years, the dissertation is printed, bound, and ready to be defended in Philadelphia next weekend! Well ahead of the next degree award date but, in many ways, long overdue.
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One thing I like about historians not writing a formal “methodology” section in their papers is that I don’t need to write sentences like “the main criterion for selecting the memoirs analyzed was were their availability as PDF files” explicitly.
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I always wondered how a duel actually looked like. Thanks to this photo kept at the Magyar Földrajzi Múzeum from 1909, I know now.
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Katerina Clark, the foremost scholar of early Soviet fiction, passed away. I cannot stress how implausible this sentence sounds: seeing her riding her bicycle to campus every day and the speed with which she mastered Zoom during COVID was the symbol of immortality.
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As a historian of Southeastern Europe, I must remind of what we learned from Ceaușescu: abortion bans kill mothers, subject children to misery. Orphans galore, in multiple scenarios, all gruesome. A lasting tear in the social fabric, it amounts to terror against women & children.
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I came to Istanbul to rest after submitting my dissertation’s final draft and get over a breakup. Thanks to the many locals — from amateur fishermen to urban planners, & a 4-year-old boy who taught me how to fed seagulls — for sharing their Istanbul with me. I’ll be back soon! 💖
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The Soviets really did have the best graphic designers:
("The volume of industrial production in percentage form by 1929", from Stalin's report to the 17th Party Plenum in 1934)
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@lijukic
In undergrad, I was forbidden from taking Turkish because it did not count as a European language. So I took Romanian. Then, I insulted Romanians (unknowingly, I guess) by telling them that I learned Romanian as part of learning all major Balkan languages. Oh well!
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I see people denigrating young Georgians for "having no idea what they're protesting." This claim wildly contrasts my experience. Since I came here last month, young adults have spent hours with me to make sure I understand – especially because I'm a "foreign expert." They know.
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The best thing about this extremely promising book is its title: it writes European history from the Habsburg Empire, which is just what we need. Some of the most daring and innovative scholarship saddling both centuries is written from the Habsburg vantage point.
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Still one of the best opening paragraphs of all time. D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover (1926).
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Prompted by a journalist friend, I quickly went over my WhatsApp messages to count: 4 people I know personally lost their lives violently today. We can add one bad news from Ukraine to calculate a weekly total of six. These are horrible times.
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I just heard that Lenka Hlávková is one of the victims in the Prague shooting. A fantastic historical musicologist, a wonderful person, a mother of two young children — may she rest in peace.
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מה שבטוח, למרבה הצער, הוא שמעתה יש רשימת קולגות הולכת ותופחת שאיתם לא אוכל לשבת יותר באותו השולחן. ריקוד על הדם קשה להמתיק גם דרך תאוריה, היסטוריה או לטינית משפטית. ואלו שמצדיקים את ריקודם על הדם באמצעות אלגוריות והשוואות למלחמת אלג׳יריה — גם לסטודנטים שלהם כנראה מגיע יותר.
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An Armenian priest, trying to explain my interest in their language to a suspicious visitor:
"You see, Orel wants to be a historian of everywhere. And what do you have everywhere? Armenians!"
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Now that the ink has dried, I am pleased to have accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at the Polonsky Academy by the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem starting this October. Having up to four years of peace to write, think, and possibly teach is a blessing.
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I am glad to see the competition for the worst historical take is still open for submissions. Today it is the WSJ’s turn:
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A new addition to my running list of interactions with border patrol officers:
“Why are you coming to Romania?”
“I am a historian coming for archival work.”
“On Romanian history?”
“Yes”
“Why?… (sigh) You know what, never mind, I don’t get it, but your choice…, good night.”
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For the many 🇮🇱 students entangled in 🇺🇸🇬🇧 academia, witnessing professors outing themselves as antisemitic is terrifying because of how personal academia is. It is based on trust. You really depend on these people. One unhinged professor can end a career before it even started.
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This will one day make a beautiful cover for a book about the intersection of masculinity, political culture, and vernacular fascism in 21st-century America.
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By the way, now that so many are interested or faking expertise in Kosovo, it is a good time to remember that one of the greatest Yugoslav actors, and the first Eastern European actor to play in Cold-War Hollywood, was Bekim Fehmiu, an Albanian from Kosovo born in Sarajevo.
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I ran into multiple students (at Yale) this morning who wanted to speak about Israel, Gaza, and Hamas and I am happy to say they are much, much saner than those claiming to represent them on Twitter.
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Turkish borrowed the Chagatai word sayın 'distinguished' so it will have a "Turkic" way of opening letters (sayın in modern Turkish is 'dear X'). It is actually a Mongolian word: sain 'good'. This is great because Mongolian erkhem 'dear' is actually the Turkic chief title irkin.
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The opposite of “Lenin invented the Ukrainians” doesn’t have to be adopting nationalist historiography that reifies nations and rewrites history. The opposite of “Lenin invented the Ukrainians” doesn’t have to be “all history in modern-day 🇺🇦 is Ukrainian; 🇷🇺 began with Moscow.”
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I just received the program for a conference I'm participating in next month. I forgot the Austrian adoration of titles, so I forgot to introduce myself as BA MA MPhil -- so now I look degreeless, especially compared to the speaker after me who's listed as BA BA MA MA MA(!)
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I consider replacing the geographic label “Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe” in my tentative dissertation title with just “Europe” as a revenge for all the book/articles I read in which “modern Europe” is maximum UK/France/Germany with some excursions to Italy/Austria.
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The funniest woman alive is the Iranian woman in my hotel who, to demonstrate how “bad Georgian tea is,” prepared a cup for each member of her family, and then a cup of Azeri tea, and forced each one to admit and elaborate on the supremacy of Iranian tea.
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My mom fears that I will fall victim to antisemitic violence these days. Don’t worry, mom: anyone who comes near me risks an impromptu lecture on the sociology of realist fiction or inequalities in school-leaving exams c. 1900. The perfect shield. I’m virtually immune.
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My heart goes out to all Syrians who, after being ignored as Assad gassed their families, now see the photos of their suffering repurposed to look recent. One must be awfully cynical to recycle photos from atrocities ignored by the news cycle in real time only to feed it now.
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Slovene immigrants to the US who used this phrase book are basically guaranteed to have a… peculiar… accent:
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David Ben Gurion, Israel's first Prime Minister, and Yitzhak Ben Tsvi, its second President, as students in Istanbul. Ben-Zvi was born in modern-day Ukraine and Ben Gurion in modern-day Poland. Both studied in Thessaloniki and then law in Istanbul.
The broader trend among prime ministers and presidents of Turkey’s neighbors, who have graduated from schools in Istanbul is that:
Bulgarians have studied at Robert College and Galatasaray;
Israelis, Syrians, and Albanians at Istanbul University;
And Iraqis at the War Academy
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This is a great map for all the wrong reasons: It shows how maps can conflate chronology & much more interestingly, it does the opposite of what national communities usually do by allocating people to the current state that rules over their birthplace, regardless of "nationality"
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I planned to read on this six-hour train ride, but I found myself instead explaining to a group of young travelers from Britain that the sentence "China, like Iran, is the only country not founded on colonialism and imperialism, which is why the West hates it" is not, hmm, true.
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It’s not even dinner time yet and I have already offended 3 Romanians by saying that I am here to work on Romanian history as part of my interest in the Balkans, a classificatory move they deemed completely inappropriate.
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This photo of 1962 Budapest can and should be a great book cover about the human and physical rebuilding of Eastern Europe after World War II and 1956.
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Since Yale doesn't have enough grad students to sustain a workshop in Central and Eastern European history, I am sharing here a call for participation in an online, year-long workshop for grad students working on the modern history of the area, from ~1790 to 1945:
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As a historian of Eastern Europe, I can certify that no one liked the breadlines and that people prefer having stable access to food.
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My first trip to Bratislava after the shooting. So glad to see the city full with flags:
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Now that the funding is all in place, I am very pleased to say that I am going to Europe! I will spend the next semester in Zurich (02/21), Budapest (03-04/21), Bucharest (05/21), Belgrade (06-07/21), and Athens (08/21). Very much looking forward to it!
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Hi Twitter! I've published an extensive list of language textbooks for reading purposes that I recommend as the basis for future scholars and students. Please use it and spread the word widely!
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@D_abdulkader
As an Israeli with strong ties in Turkey, I can confirm that I've only seen this photo in your posts and in a handful of posts mocking this photo.
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A university that invited me to give a talk about my possible postdoctoral research directions asked for a "provocative" image for the poster. Is this Yiddish-language map of colonial Africa provocative enough?
(S. Gottlieb, _Tsvishen Sinay in Zanzibar [Warsaw, 1938])
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Three years into my Ph.D., I still do not know what European history is. Perhaps next year!
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Reading a memoir of a Jew who emigrated in 1910 from the Russian Empire to Texas. He mentions getting from Minsk to Vilnius by balagole. What the hell is a balagole? Then I read it out loud and it hit me. Hebrew ba'al 'agala (lit. "a cart owner") via Yiddish = coachman.
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Happy to accept a visiting fellowship at the Centre of Southeast European Studies at the University of Graz. My 2022-2023 academic year is now completely Austrian — very lucky.
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This Polish-German phrasebook from 1944 is quite something:
33. I remind you that as members of the SS and the police, you murdered defenseless Poles, and as Volksdeutsche you betrayed the Polish state.
35. Austrians, step forward. You will soon return to your liberated homeland.
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There's a trend, apparently, of using a Penguin Classics cover generator to imagine your dissertation as a future classic. As I am writing and rewriting my prospectus, this is kind of nice to simulate:
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American myopic narcissism: the absolute inability to relate to anyone or stand for anyone unless I can somehow fit their problems through my sensibilities. That’s probably why they don’t care about Syria (unless they can blame the USA) or the Tigrinya.
“Israeli” is not an ethnicity. There is so much effort put into denying that this is about the mass expulsion of brown people
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May I always remain this enchanted by the view from an ordinary ferry in Istanbul. It’s always breathtaking: I can’t read anything crossing the Bosporus — I always stare at the view.
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Now that we care about Dagestani Jews, Sovietologists/Eurasianists should read Mishi Bakhshiev (1910–72), who drew compelling socialist realist portraits of Dagestanis from all walks of life in Judeo-Tat & Russian. He survived the purge of Judeo-Tat literature, c. 1936–1953.
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My evening reading: A 1911 story about Sherlock Holmes in Istanbul, called Abdülhamit and Sherlock Holmes. It was written by Yervant Odian, an Armenian satirist working in Istanbul. The plot is not great, but the meta-story has a sense of tragedy in it, however:
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My Soviet grandpa, still upset about the fact that Harvard didn't admit me into their Ph.D. program, wished me a happy birthday and that "they'll offer you to be their president and you say no because you become the big president of historical studies in the world". Exact quote
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Interestingly, the Azeri word for 'parent' is valideyn. You would have expected it to be 'valid' because wālidayn in Arabic (whence it's derived) is already in the dual, so 'two parents.' 'Parents' in Azeri would be valideynlər, which is redundant if you know Arabic morphology.
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Unbelievable. Who could have imagined even a month ago that we’ll ever see a Stolperstein burned in Europe?
La pietra d’inciampo in memoria del mio bisnonno Aurelio Spagnoletto, deportato ad Auschwitz, è stata bruciata a Via Dandolo a Roma da chi non accetta che i suoi nipoti si rifiutino di fare la stessa fine. L’Europa non è un posto per ebrei.
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