Marci Shore draws upon intimate understanding to illuminate the afterlife of totalitarianism. The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe spans Berlin to Moscow, moving from Vienna in Europe’s west through Prague, Bratislava, Warsaw and Bucharest to Vilnius and Kiev in the post-communist east. The result is a shimmering literary examination of the ghost of communism – no longer Marx’s "specter to come" but a haunting presence of the past.
Shore builds her history around people she came to know over the course of the two decades since communism came to an end in Eastern Europe: her colleagues and friends, once-communists and once-dissidents, the accusers and the accused, the interrogators and the interrogated, Zionists, Bundists, Stalinists and their children and grandchildren.
For them, the post-communist moment has not closed but rather has summoned up the past: revolution in 1968, Stalinism, the Second World War, the Holocaust. The end of communism had a dark side. As Shore pulls the reader into her journey of discovery, reading the archival records of people who are themselves confronting the traumas of former lives, she reveals the intertwining of the personal and the political, of love and cruelty, of intimacy and betrayal. The result is a lyrical, touching and sometimes heartbreaking portrayal of how history moves and what history means.
The author begins in Prague, where she traces some of the signatories of the influential Charter 77, a collectively authored text defending human rights as put forth in the Helsinki Accords - which prompted numerous intellectuals in then-Czechoslovakia to be blacklisted for the next decade. She finds, rather surprisingly, that many signatories of the charter that had helped bring down the regime in 1989 were former Communist Party members who had hoped a new revolution would bring "socialism with a human face." From Prague, where she took Czech-language courses while teaching English, Shore visits Bucharest, where former dissidents of the Ceausescu regime make her aware of unsettling problems with the current democracy and ethnic discrimination. In Warsaw, the author scours archives of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and remnants of postwar Jewry as it splintered into communist and Zionist sympathies before being snuffed out by Stalinism.
Shore also explored records in Vilnius and Moscow and interviewed survivors and their descendants, offering numerous stories of heartbreak, betrayal and "the impossibility of closure."
According to Oknoliteratura.pl, the book brings surprising conclusions for Polish readers, and provokes a new reflection based on the comparison of our neighbouring countries’ political, social and psychological situations. There are many controversial images, yet the observations can strike as tellingly true. In a talk with Shore, a doctorate applicant named Mikołaj names the four pillars of Polish reality: Jealousy, madness, racism and hooliganism…
Shore, who is Jewish and an American, describes everything from a personal perspective. This contributes to the distinct character of the book in which she also touches upon the great influence that beat poetry and American counter culture had on the Czech way of thinking and on Polish antisemitism. In her book, Shore writes:
"Consciousness preceeds being", said Havel to the American congressmen. Nobody knew what that meant, but it sounded really beautiful.
According to the Polish review on Oknoliteratura.pl, after reading The Taste of Ashes, we will understand quite well what the Czech president and great intellectual had in mind.
Marci Shore is a professor of history at Yale University. In 2004, the manuscript of her earlier book Caviar and Ashes was honoured with the Frankel Prize. The award is presented to authors with particular merits in contemporary history. In 2009 Shore became a laureate of Polityka magazine’s history award and was nominated for the Kazimierz Moczarski Historic Award for the best book of the year.
The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe
by Marci Shore
Published by Crown, January 15th, 2013
Editor: SRS
Source: Kirkus review, Amazon, oknoliteratura.pl