leading. He embraces some tired German nationalist tropes, including the idea that Czechoslovakia was artifi- cially created from antagonistic national populations, and thatMarienbad/Maria´nske ´ La ´zn e and Karlsbad/Karlovy Vary were “Sudeten-German” spa towns. He is dismis- sive of the towns’ Czech names (309). Yet the towns’ names and multinational characters existed before the Czechoslovak state. All in all this is an entertaining and informative book. It makes a compelling case for the importance of Central European grand spas in the story of modern Europe and shows that, despite sweeping changes, their story con- tinues. As Large makes clear in the introduction, this book is not intended purely for an academic audience. His fluid prose and lively stories make it interesting and accessible to a variety of readers. For scholars interested in following up his claims, it will be frustrating, since, in the nature of popular histories, the book offers a list of sources and suggested reading at the back but includes no citations through the text. But for those wanting en- gaging historical reading, it will be rewarding. CAITLIN E. MURDOCK California State University, Long Beach RAZ SEGAL. Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence, 1914–1945. (Stanford Studies on Central and Eastern Europe.) Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2016. Pp. xiii, 211. $65.00. Raz Segal’s book Genocide in the Carpathians furthers our understanding of mass violence in this part of Europe during World War II in important ways. Utilizing an im- pressive range of primary sources in five languages, Segal promises in the introduction, rather ambitiously, “to illu- minate the social and political dynamics of multiethnic and multireligious Subcarpathian Rus’ from the nine- teenth century until immediately after World War II” (3) as a background for our understanding of what he refers to as “multilayered” violence against Carpatho- Ruthenians, Roma, and Jews during World War II (7). He fulfills the promise, and the result is a compelling his- torical narrative with important analytical implications. The book not only puts the Holocaust in this remote area of East-Central Europe in the context of other mass violence in the region during World War II, but also situ- ates it in the wider history of what the author refers to metaphorically as the “social fabric” of the region, and the process of its “tearing” (8, 56), “disintegrat[ion]” (13), “shatter[ing]” (51, 112), and “breaking” (86). The rich multiethnic and multireligious tapestry of Subcarpa- thian Rus’s society gradually unraveled, according to Se- gal, as a combination of local, national, and international factors—Czechoslovak state building and its implications for local politics, Hungarian revisionism, and the Nazi threat, among others—pushed the region into turmoil and made it less resilient to extreme political visions and, ultimately, genocide. The author argues that this was a dynamic process, and that contingency, as much as longer-term developments, contributed to this history. The first chapter of Genocide in the Carpathians chroni- cles the transition of Subcarpathian Rus’ from the time before World War I, when, as the author demonstrates, Jews and Carpatho-Ruthenians shared “a culture across ethnic and religious boundaries,” as the chapter is subti- tled, and exhibited cultural and economic patterns similar to those of the mayhem and destruction wreaked on the region by the Great War. The prewar era exhibited “no significant anti-Jewish sentiments” (7) among the Carpatho-Ruthenians; this changed in the interwar period and with the creation of Czechoslovakia, when the region became a playground for rule from Prague that was al- most colonial in nature. Introducing a relatively novel ap- proach in this context, informed by work on emotions as a historical category, Segal traces the rise among Carpatho- Ruthenians of political resentment against the Jews. Because of perceptions of diverging ethnopolitical inter- ests vis-a`-vis the new state—one of the more visible of the perceived divergences, though not the only one, being Jews’ preference for Czech schools over Carpatho- Ruthenian ones—Jews came to be seen as being on the side of Czechoslovak state, precisely at the time of intensi- fying Carpatho-Ruthenian and Magyar national claims. The author then analyzes the “little world war” (the title of chapter 3) that accompanied the disintegration of Czechoslovakia starting in late 1938. The emergence and struggle of the short-lived autonomous region Carpatho- Ukraine marked a brief but intense period of further eth- nic polarization, fueled by German and Hungarian inter- vention as well as the attendant rapid shift of Carpatho- Ruthenian identification toward Ukrainian nationalism. The collapse of Carpatho-Ukraine was accompanied by anti-Jewish violence, usually (but not always) “imported” from Ukraine (56), and was followed by Hungarian occu- pation, which lasted through the end of the war. The last part of the book illuminates this last period—from the ini- tial Hungarian pursuit and murder of Ukrainianist Carpatho-Ruthenians, witnessed by the local Jews, many of whom considered Hungary as a liberator from the vio- lent period of Carpatho-Ukraine, to the policies of “purg- ing” the Magyar nation of Jews and Roma, to the German invasion in March 1944 and the attendant ghettoization and deportation of the Jews to Auschwitz. Segal’s temporal framing of this history—from before World War I to the end of the Holocaust—and his dedi- cation to what he refers to as an “integrated history” (13) allow him to interrogate several historical and analytical paradigms relating to his topic. First, the author sees the mass violence against the Jews of Subcarpathian Rus’ not primarily as a consequence of the German invasion, but as part of long-term “plans and policies of the Hungarian state to obliterate diversity and create a Magyar majority” (7). German and Hungarian interests coincided after the invasion of 1944, resulting in deportations and mass mur- der of the Jews. But the genocidal Hungarian push for ethnic homogeneity in “Greater Hungary” started much earlier, and in this sense the book is part of the growing literature that understands the Holocaust in Hungary not as the “last chapter” of the Holocaust that started in 1944, but as a longer process rooted in post–World War I AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 2018 Europe: Early Modern and Modern 657 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/123/2/657/4958341 by guest on 11 December 2018