Omer Bartov, John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History at Brown University, is the winner of the ninth annual Zócalo Book Prize for Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz, a groundbreaking historical investigation of an Eastern European border town during World War II.
The prize is given to the nonfiction book that most enhances our understanding of community and the forces that strengthen or undermine human connectedness and social cohesion.
“Anatomy of a Genocide,” wrote one of our judges, “helps us to understand how human connectedness can be ripped apart. What sets it apart from any previous account of the Holocaust is its historical sweep and its microscopic focus on one community, showing the deep roots that connected perpetrator and victim, how they changed places, how they betrayed each other, and now, how they remember the horror. It is a masterpiece of historical writing and a haunting warning of the fragility of order and goodness in our world.”
Our judges were unanimously impressed by Bartov’s scholarship and thoughtfulness, and we were deeply moved by the book’s melding of the personal and the political, from its origins in his own family history to its depiction of how global conflicts over nationalism and identity play out at the community and individual levels. This, in fact, is the core of the ninth annual Zócalo Book Prize Lecture he’ll be delivering: “How Does Community Conflict Turn into Genocide?” Bartov will deliver the lecture and accept the prize, which includes a $5,000 award, on May 2 at the National Center for the Preservation Democracy in downtown Los Angeles. Please see more details on the award ceremony here.
We asked Bartov, who was born in Israel and has a background as a military historian, to tell us more about the two-plus decades he spent working on Anatomy of a Genocide and the strange and disturbing resonance it has in the present moment.
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