Book description
In the tradition of Timothy Garton Ash's The File, Yale
historian and prize-winning author Marci Shore draws upon intimate
understanding to illuminate the afterlife of totalitarianism. The
Taste of Ashes spans from 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 'spectre to come' but a haunting presence of the past.
Marci 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 and sometimes heartbreaking portrayal of how
history moves and what history means.
Marci Shore, an associate professor of intellectual history at Yale,
has spent much of her adult life in central and eastern Europe. She is
the author of
Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death
in Marxism
, which won eight prizes, including a National Jewish Book Award. She is
also the translator of Michal Glowinski's Holocaust memoir
The Black Seasons
.
