Book Review: "The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World"

Christopher Dunne

Gov 4993

Dr. Cocozzelli

Book Review

The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World

            The world has seen mass movements of people from one area of the world to another.  Many times these people don’t have a choice and they must move in order to survive.  Tara Zahra is a professor at the University of Chicago and has focused on East European history.  Zahra’s most recent book, The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World, explores the mass movements of people from Eastern Europe.  The book tells a great deal about what it was like during the time of mass exodus.

            This book looks at what may have been the reason for mass migration out of Eastern Europe.  The book talks about the struggles that these people were going through in their home countries and describes the turmoil and unrest in great detail.  This book is also very comprehensive in that it doesn’t just cover one migrant group it covers multiple groups that had taken to immigrate across the Atlantic.  What I did like a lot about this book was it wasn’t just a book that talked about the different instances of immigration and talked about the people as if they were just numbers or statistics.  This book is very detailed and I do believe that Zahra did a great job of portraying the people who were a part of these mass movements from Eastern Europe.  The book was very descriptive and at least from what I feel, it captured the emotion when it would tell individual stories about a person like when the book was telling the story of Faustina Wiśniewska.  The other aspect of this book is that is did not try and sugar coat the situations it was describing.  Immigrants did not have it easy, and some were even refugees who were coming from worse.  When the book talked about Faustina’s story it told the truth, and it told of the hardships that an immigrant would have to go through especially when arriving to a place that they had held in such high regard.

            This book was a good read, and it had surprised me with how the way in which it was written.  It gave detain and depth to each situation that it depicted and really made you feel closer to the subject.  It did make me think because it was a book that told the truth, unlike others that would say that immigrants had it better off then what they were coming from and they are essentially living the American dream.  Zahra gives great insight into the situations on the ground.  The book tells about the hardships on people trying to leave their original country and in others cases the different reasons for leaving.  When it comes to my research I am looking at the Jewish population that had immigrated to America.  I feel that this book gives me some insight as to the different struggles being the immigration of a specific group like that of the Jewish Population.  The different circumstances from what I can see may not be too different because we can see similar problems with the movement of people today with the Syrian refugee crisis that has taken the world.  I believe that there are a lot of similarities between the two groups with regards to their migrant movements and situations.  This book has provided me with information and insight on the groups migrating from Eastern Europe and with this information I am able to see the similarities and the links to what we are seeing today with regards to the Syrian refugee crisis.  Overall it was an interesting book that gives one a great deal of insight into mass migration.

References:

Zahra, T. (2016).Great departure: mass migration from eastern europe and the making of the free world. New York, NY: W W Norton.