The Taste of Ashes

340 Pages·2013·1.58 MB·English

by  Marci Shore

Copyright © 2013 by Marci Shore All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a
division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shore, Marci.
The taste of ashes : the afterlife of totalitarianism in Eastern Europe / Marci Shore.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Europe, Eastern—Social conditions—1989– 2. Post-communism—Europe, Eastern. 3. Social
change—Europe, Eastern. 4. Social psychology—Europe, Eastern. 5. Shore, Marci—Travel—
Europe, Eastern. I. Title.
HN380.7.A8S56 2012
303.40947—dc23
2012007853
eISBN: 978-0-30788883-9
Jacket design by Eric White
Jacket photograph: Ralph Crane/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
v3.1
Timuszkowi
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note
Preface
The Taste of Ashes
A Wrinkle in Time
Truth
“Hair Is Like Garbage”
“Everything I Know about People I Learned in the Camps”
“It Was Only a Small Revolution”
Pornography in Prague
“The Human Being Is Rather Perverse”
Reason and Conscience
A Galician Summer
“Think About Whether or Not I Was Right”
The Other Side of Stalinism
The Locomotive of History
Cemeteries
Broken Families
The Eternally Wandering Jew
The Dead and the Living
“But Not in the Ovens”
Children of the Revolution
The Taste of Caviar
Files
“Everything Was So Unattractive”
Unrequited Love
A Star of the Stage
Lustration
God-Seeking
Tragedy and Romance
Acknowledgments
Cast of Historical Figures
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a work of nonfiction. I have, however, changed the names (and in
a single case an identifying profession) of many of the book’s
protagonists who are not public figures, in an effort to protect their
privacy. A further note: because this book includes many citations from
a variety of spoken and written sources, in the interest of clarity I have
put quotations from oral sources in quotation marks and quotations from
written sources in italics.
PREFACE
Eastern Europe is special. It is Europe, only more so. It is a place
where people live and die, only more so. In these lands between the
West and Russia, the past is palpable, and heavy. The past is also
merciless: by history’s caprice, here the Second World War and
communism were inseparable historical traumas, one bleeding into the
other, as Nazi power gave way to Soviet domination.
I came to Eastern Europe for the first time in 1993, knowing almost
nothing. The previous summer, at the carnivalesque parking lot of a
Grateful Dead concert in Northern California, I had sat on the grass amid
the Deadheads, who were braiding hair, selling bagels, and smoking
marijuana, and read Václav Havel’s essays, the essays that had originally
been published secretly, in samizdat editions. I was mesmerized by the
romance of the Velvet Revolution, seemingly so untainted, and by the
imprisoned playwright who became a philosopher-president, who went
to live in a magnificent castle, and who made Frank Zappa one of his
advisers. Havel seemed so generous, so loving toward the world, so good.
I came to Eastern Europe because I wanted to hear a story that ended
happily. I wanted to learn how the philosophers came to power and the
people were liberated. I wanted to understand the anticommunist
dissidents of the 1970s and 1980s, who had been unafraid to “speak
truth to power.” Yet I found myself drawn into an ever more distant
past: to understand the dissidents I needed to understand the Marxist
revisionists calling for a more democratic socialism who preceded them;
to understand the Marxist revisionists of the 1960s I needed to
understand the Stalinists of the 1950s; to understand Stalinism I needed
to understand the Second World War and the Holocaust; to understand
the war I needed to understand the depression and fascism of the 1930s
and the unhinging, the dizzying possibilities, of the 1920s. And so while
this book moves forward in time from the early 1990s through the
second postcommunist decade, it also moves backward in time, from the
1980s to the years immediately following the First World War. The pivot
is the revolutions of 1989, which ended communism and brought me to
Europe.
All historical drama is acted through the lives of individuals. The
postcommunist moment that followed the revolutions of 1989 was a
moment of disorienting freedom: spaces suddenly opened for people to
play new roles. They could find themselves inadvertently, as if by
accident, in positions of power. The postcommunist moment was also
one of generational estrangement: in 1989 age suddenly mattered very
much. From its nineteenth-century beginning, communism had always
been a generational history, a Freudian family romance, each generation
killing the fathers in its turn. The fall of communism did not end the
silences of one’s parents or resolve the feelings of guilt by contiguity
with the crimes of earlier generations; it rather heightened demands for
accounting with the past. This desire for accounting raised disquieting
questions: Could the boundary between public and private, nearly
effaced by totalitarianism, be restored? Could the intimate and the
political be disentangled? The eclipsing of private space was among
totalitarianism’s deepest violations. In this way the totalitarian state was
unlike its merely authoritarian or monarchical predecessors: it
distinguished itself—it made itself—by caring what lovers said in bed.
Was it possible to restore human dignity through truth, if arriving at
truth involved gazing anew through old peepholes?
Shortly after his defection to the West in 1951, the Polish poet
Czesław Miłosz wrote, “The man of the East cannot take Americans
seriously because they have never undergone the experiences that teach
men how relative their judgments and thinking habits are.” For half a
century, on the eastern half of the European continent, people made
decisions, often in extreme moments, most never believing that
communism would end in their lifetimes, many never imagining that
they would have to account for their choices in a world where all the
rules had changed. This book tells a story about the darker side of the
fall of communism, about the lingering presence of the past. After 1989
the ability to reinvent oneself was circumscribed: no one, after all, could
change his previous life. Freedom meant being liberated, but also
exposed. Openness was a key to both a treasure chest of knowledge
about the past and a Pandora’s box of unanswerable questions. This is a
story, too, about the inescapable interplay between historical fate and
individual choice. There were historical situations in which no decisions
were innocent ones, in which all significant action was a betrayal of
someone or something, in which all possible choices caused suffering.
Nonetheless one had to choose. In twentieth-century Eastern Europe
tragedy was endemic.
The lives of East Europeans after communism reveal the necessity of
choice, the omnipresence of guilt, and the impossibility of closure. In the
pages that follow these dilemmas are illuminated in large measure
through an extreme case: Stalinists and the lives of their children and
grandchildren. They are illuminated, too, through the lives of other
former dissidents and former Stalinists, poets and politicians, Jews and
Gentiles, Zionists and communists, old people and young people,
brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, lovers and friends, those who
stayed and those who left, those who killed themselves, those who
reinvented themselves, and those who live on.
I arrived in Eastern Europe as the communist archives were opening.
Archival work—reading pages from the lives of others—is a profoundly
invasive act: it is staring at many things that were never meant to be
seen. Often I have thought of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel The
Handmaid’s Tale, recounting a woman’s life as a reproductive slave in a
terror-filled world, where the Eyes were always watching. In the novel’s
final chapter, set long after the gruesome events, historians sit calmly in
a conference room, earnestly trying to understand a totalitarian hell that
has by then long passed. They are aware that their sources are partial
and leave many questions unanswered. They are aware that “the past is
a great darkness, and filled with echoes.” They are aware, too, that
people may have conflicting motives: the self-interested and the
sentimental are often entangled. “We must be cautious about passing
moral judgment,” says the historian presenting a paper about the
recently discovered manuscript by “The Handmaid.” “Surely we have
learned by now that such judgments are of necessity culture-specific.”
The historians who appear at the end of Margaret Atwood’s novel are
doing nothing wrong, yet the reader feels something chilling in their
scholarly detachment.
Being a historian in postcommunist Eastern Europe has very often felt