Lev Tolstoi begins Anna Karenina as follows: “All happy families resemble one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” In a footnote to this sentence, Gary Saul Morson notes that Tolstoi makes a related point in War and Peace and elsewhere when he says: “Happy people have no history,” (Lev Tolstoi, Anna Karenina, Yale UP, 2014, 743). What might Tolstoi be saying here? It seems to me that he might be suggesting a connection between suffering, history, and particularity: every particular group suffers in its own way and, thus, each group tells its own history. If that were not so, then there would be no history because suffering drives history and suffering only afflicts individuals. An individual or group freed from suffering would have nothing to say because they would have nothing to lament; history is a lament for Tolstoi.

Tolstoi's opening came to my mind while reading Jelena Subotić’s stimulating new book on the contemporary appropriation of Jewish suffering by east European nationalists in the former Yugoslavia and the Baltics. Subotić begins her book with a family story about her grandfather who worked for the German occupation regime in Serbia until 1944 when he was arrested, first by the Gestapo and then by the new communist authorities on charges of collaboration. Reflecting on this history and, specifically, on how it was told in her family, Subotić writes: “My family narrative, then, was one of our own suffering. It was overwhelming and pervasive—it was also all true—but it did not allow much room for the memory of suffering of others,” (xv). To remember one's own suffering is to exclude the memory of the suffering of others—that is the central argument that Subotić advances, not only through the example of her own family, but also, and most substantially, through a comparative discussion of memory in contemporary Serbia, Croatia, and Lithuania.

In all three nation-states, Subotić discerns two basic trends with regards to Holocaust memory. On the one hand, nationalist elites in Serbia, Croatia, and Lithuania have been supporting since 1989 the establishment of various Holocaust memory initiatives (memorial days, museums, monuments, textbook revisions) largely in accordance with western standards set by the European Union, to which each belongs or aspires. Yet they have done so in a manner that advances their own political interests. Above all, they have sought to conflate the crimes of Nazism with those of Stalinism. Their purpose in making this conflation has been either to reject Marxism in a neoliberal era of unbridled self-interest or to reject cosmopolitanism in an era of nationalistic xenophobia. As an example of the latter, Viktor Orbán, Hungary's Prime Minister, used the occasion of the opening of a renovated synagogue in Subotica, Serbia to defend his exclusionary policy against Muslim migrants in the name of protecting Jews and Christians.

On the other hand, right-wing politicians in Serbia, Croatia, Lithuania, and elsewhere have been rebelling against the putative imposition of Holocaust memory from Brussels by aggressively asserting their own suffering at the hands of the Nazis or the communists (or both). The most striking example of this trend comes from Poland, one of the other countries that Subotić discusses frequently. In February 2018, Poland's President signed into law a bill that included two articles that criminalized any suggestion that the Polish nation was complicit in Nazi crimes (these two articles were later removed in June 2018 amid pressure from the United States and Israel). The articles, as Subotić astutely argues, were part of a campaign “by Polish nationalists to rid Poland of what they call pedagogika wstydu (the education of shame)” and to supplant it with a pedagogy that exalts Polish suffering during World War II, with what Polish nationalists refer to as Polocaust (206).

The Polish case is, however, one among many in a contemporary Europe largely run by nationalists. The danger of nationalism is that it engenders conflict. While stressing this danger, Subotić also suggests a way out of it when she calls for “memory solidarity” among all sufferers of history (227). This plea returns me to Tolstoi, who sought to overcome conflict as well. Tolstoi recognized, however, that a community constituted on suffering is inherently fragile since, after all, only individuals suffer and die. Suffering isolates as much as it joins people together. To say that is not to take away from Subotić’s plea for cosmopolitanism; rather, it is to think about it and ask: can suffering be the basis of solidarity?