100 books like A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails

Jerzy Ficowski (1924-2006) is a poet who has been less well known in the United States, even though Poland had one of the greatest poetic traditions of the 20th century.

He resisted both Nazi oppression and communist censorship, celebrated Roma culture, and often wrote of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. His own poetry is full of striking and unexpected images and characters, and this collaborative translation by two talented poets brings his voice right into the room. I especially love his ode to the stove burner: who would have thought?

Published in 2017, Words for War offers work by sixteen Ukrainian poets reacting to the earlier stage of the war there, translated by a number of poets and specialists.

Why is it important to get this kind of testimony to readers? The answer came in 2022—and the very various poems by writers young and old, women and men, in-country and émigrés, funny and tragic, give the reader both the vitamins of knowledge about the country and its people and the pleasures of beautiful, thought-provoking poetry about something you know is truly important.

Doris Kareva (born 1958) is an outstanding poet from the small but powerful Estonian literary community.

Like any outstanding poet, she often does things that work in the original language, but these translations by Irish poet Miriam McIlfatrick-Ksenofontov really capture the music, the beats of short lines that accumulate into vivid and rhythmic pictures.

(Plus, how cool is it to have a translator named Ksenofontov? I envy both author and translator, and it turns out that Kareva also translates her translator’s poetry into Estonian.)

Aco Šopov (1923-1982) is one of the fundamental poets of Macedonia, and indeed the first poet ever to have a whole book of his verse published in Macedonian, a language that had been suppressed for generations.

This book will appear in fall of 2023, but I have already seen some of the translations by Rawley Grau and Christina Kramer online—and they’re dynamite, full of hard-won versions of the thoughtful, deep-dwelling originals. Šopov is not the only brilliant poet of his generation, but he alone can prove that a small nation can produce big poets.

And how are we to know, unless we read them in translation?

People in the West tend to celebrate 1945 as a year of liberation; but, of course, in Eastern Europe, the defeat of Germany merely heralded the beginning of four more decades of repression. In this book, Anne Applebaum describes the Communist takeover of three European countries – East Germany, Poland, and Hungary. It’s a masterpiece both of research and of analysis. Communism, just like capitalism, had many faces: this book shows brilliantly just how varied repression can be. In 2013 it won the lucrative Cundill Prize, and deservedly so.

I can think of few novels as funny as this one.

Rates of Exchange depicts a hapless British academic, Angus Petworth, on his first journey behind Iron Curtain and into the imaginary land of Slaka, a country that combines elements of a number of East European communist states but is perhaps most like a combination of Romania and Bulgaria, with a touch of former Yugoslavia.

The riotous Cold War comedy begins as Petworth boards the flight (“Welcome here please on Comflug 155, destiny Slaka”) and it continues to the last line, as Petworth is feted, followed, seduced, and left thoroughly confused.

It is as funny about the British as it is about the East Europeans, and his language games are infectious. I end up speaking “Slakan” English every time I reread the novel.

Again, this may be a bit dense reading but Wolff tackles the very notion of “Eastern Europe.”

The Enlightenment was a philosophical movement that began in the mid-17th century and lasted until about 1800, and it focused on remaking politics. Enlightenment thinkers believed in change and progress, that Europeans were not doomed to suffer under the tyranny of feudal kings.

Wolff explores how these Enlightenment thinkers celebrated an Age of Progress in Western Europe – but were less impressed with the Eastern half. For thinkers like Voltaire, “Eastern Europe” came to mean backward, under-developed, superstitious, and violent Europe.

These thinkers began using this term, “Eastern Europe” in the 1770s to mean “the Other Europe,” like an embarrassing, unwanted sibling. Wolff describes how these attitudes shaped Western policies towards Eastern Europe. 

Having not one but three books as my second choice may look like cheating, but the novels which comprise Manning’s unforgettable Balkan Trilogy – The Great Fortune and The Spoilt City, set in Bucharest, Romania; and Friends and Heroes, set in Athens – are now usually published under one cover.

The first two volumes paint the story of Guy and Harriet Pringle, newly married English expats in the Romanian capital on the eve of the Second World War, who then escape to Athens as the Germans advance across the Balkans.

I use the verb “paint” deliberately. Manning was a painter in her youth, and few writers can paint the word-picture of a foreigner in a strange city as well as she does.

I fell in love with Bucharest after reading it, and I travelled there for the first time in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution in 1989, while there… show more.

If my first two listings are somewhat inaccessible to the average reader, fear not, Megargee’s concise study of Operation Barbarossa is a masterful summary of the campaign as well as the parallel German war of annihilation in the East. Richly illustrated with maps and photos, Megargee transforms a huge and complex war into a short (150 page), straightforward read. There is also a helpful bibliographic essay at the end and numerous sub-headings to guide the reading. It is the perfect introduction to the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

In his exploration of East Prussia in its final stages, author Max Egremont noted, “This is a part of Europe where boundaries are vague, where names deceive.” (2011; Pg. 220)

It is true across all of Europe but more so in Eastern Europe that ethnic and cultural boundaries often overlap – though nationalists try to claim exclusive domain.

This is a book about one city, today known as Wrocław (in southwestern Poland) which has a rich Polish history – but whose background includes strong German (“Breslau”), Czech (“Vratislav”), Jewish (ברעסלוי /Bresloi), Romany, and even more layers. Often these cultures coexisted, and mixed.

This book is a wonderful introduction to the ethnic complexity of Eastern Europe, and how today’s political borders can give the false impression of simple, clear ethnic boundaries.