Shore, Marci The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe (review)

Abstract

SEER, 94, 2, APRIL 2016 378 Shore, Marci. The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe. William Heinemann, London, 2013. xiv + 370 pp. Cast of historical figures. £20.00: $27.00. In her first book, Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918–1968 (New Haven, CT, 2006), Marci Shore undertook extensive archival reading to illustrate how a generation of Polish Marxists evolved from a clique of interwar idealist dreamers excited about a revolutionary future into a pathetic band of sellouts and tyrants. After taking power at Stalin’s behest, they continued to purge themselves from the inside out at the same time that they repressed society. Ultimately, ‘the war and the Stalinist era had broken all of them, each in different ways’, Shore concludes (p. 328). Especially after 1956 some gave in to alcoholism, others descended into depression or grew horribly ill, not a few committed suicide and Jakub Berman, once head of Poland’s feared Stalinist secret police, begged for the restoration of his party card after he had been purged. Sudden influence in an unexpectedly Communist Polish state after World War Two had unravelled their community and mortgaged their souls. The Taste of Ashes is not a sequel, as its title might suggest, nor is it a scholarly monograph. Lacking footnotes, a bibliography and even an index, Shore’s second book is a meld of history, memoir and memory based on her encounters with a broad spectrum of Eastern Europeans from her first visit to the region in 1993 through the present. Framing herself as a naive American student at first adrift in a complex and tragic post-socialist world, Shore recounts how her notions of a ‘happy ending’ after Communism dissolved at once. On the one hand, she met scores of everyday intellectuals whose lives had been upended and whose future remained uncertain. From the students she taught in English language schools in Prague and Domažlice to her own ill-fated Czech instructor in Vermont, these are often tragic stories of winded people trying to find their way in a world that had long since gone awry. On the other hand, she came to know people who had been leading dissidents, not least members of the Charter 77 movement in post-1968 Czechoslovakia. One intriguing theme here is former dissidents’ apparent lack of faith in the people, as when Charter 77 member Jan Urban related to Shore his frustration with human passivity. Just four years after the end of Communism, Urban told her, ‘many people remember it as a very comfortable life’ in which there was ‘nothing to really cry about’ (p. 30). In Romania too, Shore recounts resentment among dissidents that they alone had believed in anything while the public had bent with the political winds. Nonetheless, much like the Communists who populated Shore’s first book, any dissident who took power after 1989 appears ready to sacrifice earlier ideals and succumb to corruption. Nationalism and antisemitism associated with Eastern Europe form another recurring theme in Shore’s post-socialist memories. In the multi-ethnic REVIEWS 379 Transylvanian city of Cluj, she encounters students troubled by RomanianHungarian segregation and personally interacts with Cluj’s notorious nationalist pro-Romanian mayor, Nicolae Gheorghe. Shore’s experiences with fellow Jewish students in Cracow and Auschwitz and reflections on Poland’s 1968 anti-Zionist Campaign coincide with her confrontation of ongoing violent crime in 1990s Warsaw, in which a Polish graduate student despaired to her that ‘the pillars of Polish reality’ were ‘envy, insanity, racism, and hooliganism’ (p. 141). In keeping with this motif, Shore’s narratives about Poland regularly dip back into the time of the Holocaust. One learns that it was out of this context that she first gained her interest in exploring the Jewish background of so many Polish Communists: a theme that mattered much in her first book, and whose backstory fills the heart and conclusion of her second. Shore’s book freely shifts between past and present, making it something of a temporal palimpsest. After introducing Tim Snyder, who was researching wartime Polish-Ukrainian ethnic cleansing before they were married, Shore introduces Snyder’s friend...