Review of Marci Shore's “The Taste of Ashes”
By Brett Warnke
Publication, January 2013
Crown Publishers, New
York , 384 pp
It was a specialist of the
Enlightenment, academic Victor Klemperer, who wrote the greatest diaries to
emerge from wartime Germany . Later, after surviving fascist roundups and
the firestorm of Dresden Klemperer settled in East Germany and titled his postwar
diaries “The Lesser Evil.” By 1956 his
hopes dried: “I have lost all belief that I might have an effect. All belief in right or left. I live and die as a lonely literary
journalist.” The arc of Klemperer’s postwar
story paralleled those of other European intellectuals: individual tragedy followed by animated
delusions and crushed hopes. Marci
Shore
The book is rich in personalities: lyrical poets, journalists, futurists,
bundists, Zionists, and Communists.
Writers like Vladimir Mayakovsky, the beautiful and manic Russian poet
who, after growing disillusioned who wrote that “the loveboat has crashed
against the everyday.” And like
Aleksnder Wat, the futurist, Soviet inmate, and writer who saw his poems as
“the casting of a beam of light on things dark by their nature.” Both these writers were suicides and they weren’t alone. While too numerous to mention, other self-slaughters include the poet and revolutionary Andrei Sobol, novelist Tadeusz Borowski, the
poet Sergei Yesinin, and Trotsky’s daughter, Znaida Bronstein. Others, even more various, were dispatched in
intermittent terrors and purges. In reading
one of Shore’s books, one never knows if a character will make it to the next page
alive. Yet while including dozens of thinkers—many
of whom do live natural life cycles and were beautifully profiled in her
previous book—Shore renders these complex (and sometimes narcissistic) personalities so vividly and
writes so movingly about their literary production that the reader seems not
only to acknowledge but understand the decisions these writers made, however ideological or destructive.
The
Taste of Ashes stitches the recent post-communist history to the tapestry
of the avant garde. Like Weimar , the years between the war were
unsteady, filled with reaction, but also shot through with promise before the war
and the “frozen years” under Communism. It is not only the stories of men like Adolf
Berman (a Zionist and writer) and his sibling Jakub Berman (an ally of Stalin
who oversaw Poland’s security apparatus), two brothers whose paths diverged on
the matter of the unquestionable party line from Moscow. Instead, this book handles themes such as the
guilt of writing and the difficulty of writing history as an outsider. What is it like to be a historian, a speaker
of Yiddish, Czech, and Polish, who criticizes choices made during a different zeitgeist?
In one episode, after a lecture, Shore recounts meeting a woman
unhappy with her comments: “You, a young
person from another continent,” the woman said.
“You’re unable to understand Poland .”
But anxiety about her “otherness,” is
belied by a tireless pursuit: The writing
of history, the disclosure of the past as it was lived by those who shaped its
path. In one instance, she
walks through “bleak and beautiful” Warsaw
so overcome by the history of the ghetto and the Polish uprising that she
vomits. She was, in her wandering around
that somber city, looking for a way to “enter the war.” She also discovers that the tight-knit
authors who produce the literature of the “New Man” were not simply created by
blind belief. “These postwar
relationships were epilogues to prewar relationships,” she writes. “And if I wanted to understand the
convergence of the war and Stalinism, I would have to go back in time, to the
decades between the two world wars.”
A recurrent setting in her earlier
book is Café Ziemianska, a coffee and wine fuel stop for Polish writers, avant gardists, and the political
left. Whereas the country’s interwar prisons
served as universities for communists, so did the café. The intellectual ferment in places like
Ziemianska was real and definite at the close of the First World War, a
conflict that changed everything. The
café was a place to debate the evolving possibilities; a place to face the new
realities of radicalism and reaction, of utopianism and catastrophism.
“Everything was now possible, a
dizzying endlessness of possibilities,” she writes. “It was a time when the boundaries between
Marxism in theory and communism in practice were not clear, when both meant
revolution, and revolution meant consummation, an escape from nothingness. Crusty apparatchiks—balding or otherwise—had
not yet appeared, nor had anyone glimpsed ominous specters of show trials; for
many Polish literati of the 1920s, communism was cosmopolitan, avant garde, sexy.”
Shore is dazzled by the liveliness
of the political discourse in this period during which—more than ever—ideas
were precise and alive. And she reveals
the tragedy of communists who, having been the most vibrant and optimistic
fighters against fascism and for survival in the death camps, became the most
ruthless rulers while in power.
What Shore captures the cruel
paradox of Stalinist communism—which imposed itself in Eastern
Europe by military occupation and collaboration—an intellectual’s
choice of Marxism was in effect an eradication of subjectivity. To choose was to occlude the possibility of
future choices. So many succumbed to
this sinister bargain and were crushed by its terms, but in the opening of
Czechoslovakia’s communism, it was not only the opportunists and the careerists
who joined the Party but, as Czech-French novelist Milan Kundera pointed out, “the
more dynamic, the more intelligent, the better half.” The writers in Eastern
Europe who “saw hell twice,” as one deftly put it, will be held
accountable for intellectual decisions included what to write and not
write. As the great Tony Judt pointed
out in Past Imperfect, about
communism’s fellow travelers who hitched themselves to the “locomotive of
history,” the intellectual is condemned
to choose and very often does make the wrong choice. True, it is not difficult today to indict
Stalinist writers like Wanda Wasilewska whose version of socialist realism is
as reviled as passionately by thinkers today as it was lauded by the authorities
of yesterday’s “people’s democracies.”
But we are not outside history and Shore includes today’s academic
controversies: What about contemporary
intellectuals in Eastern Europe who, as Fear
and Neighbors author Jan Gross
points out, fail to write the inconvenient past of Polish anti-Semitic postwar
pogroms?
Summoning up the specters of the past
can haunt the solitary researcher with painful personal truths. At one point, Shore is reading author Bruno
Jasienski’s NKVD file, one filled during The Great Terror of 1937. Inside she finds a smashed fly, a fitting
symbol for the those “engineers of human souls” who perished in Stalin’s many purges. Inevitably, she considers the prospect of her
own interrogation. How would she fare
under the secret police’s brutal tactics and beneath their bright lights? “I… had no confidence that I would have
behaved well. On the contrary—I suspected
I would have been a coward,” she writes.
But Shore is too sharp a historian to romanticize writers like Jasienski. While he serialized (the recently reissued) I Burn Paris in 1928, Jasienski was a
man complicit in the enthusiasms of his time.
“He was perhaps not quite so innocent as his twenty first-century fans
made him appear,” she writes. “During
the Stalinist years he more than once played the role of accuser.”
Shore’s book flitters between the
hopes and pessimism of people caught in the little cage of Eastern
Europe . Each seems to hold
their own experiences, their own truths, but the conclusion is clear: For most of the idealists to come out of the
war, most met a terrible end. Contingency
or determinism? Order or chaos? Simplifications, to be sure but part of enduring debates as real and
relevant as the battles over religion.
Or as the Bundist leader of the 1943 Ghetto Uprising Mark Edelman
cynically asks “And where was God? He
was there, but on their side.” There is no grace in Shore’s conclusion. No morals or new ideology waiting to be
picked up in the street. But she does declare
what she found in the ashes:
[P]athological narcissism was not only something one
reveled in but above all something one truly suffered from; that absolute
subjectivity brought absolute anguish; that radical nihilism and radical
contingency were psychically unbearable.
I learned that the nobelest of motives could lead to the bases of
outcomes, that actions inevitably had consequences in excess of their
intent. I learned that I could not write
a book with a satisfying conclusion, for the lives of the intriguing
protagonists were breathtaking catastrophes.
I learned that the past could not be made okay.
For the dissidents who challenged
the bankruptcy that communism became, many of whom were removed from the war by
a generation, 1989 was a fittingly ironic end. An illegitimate authoritarianism
was toppled by its own internal contradictions, by writers and artists and by
an exploited working class. But for
those who remained, 1989 was the sum of all fears. For those who had gone to the firing squads
with the name “Stalin” on their lips, 1989 was a return to history. After the Frankenstein of capitalism revealed
itself in the 1930s and Communism ran out of road in the 1980s, for those
caught between the two fires of totalitarianism, what was left to believe in? For men like Czech playwright and president,
Vaclav Havel, life’s most precious and guiding principle was “living in
truth.” And for other thinkers like Adam
Michnik and Janos Kis it was the importance of self-limitation and non-violence
as a means to radically transform politics.
In these decades after communism, Shore’s book is a necessary creation—a
personal memoir, filled with interviews and a history that glows with humanity
and shows a new generation the stories of totalitarianism. By sifting through these ashes with her, from
the fragments and glowing embers, we feel and taste what occurred and what
remains. The difficulty for a historian,
as Havel points out, is that the dead end
logic of communism was that the story had already ended. After Stalin’s death, few believed in the
ossified system, but the historicist logic remained a part of state
ideology:
Public life ceases to be an arena where different
more or less autonomous agents square off, and becomes no more than the
manifestation and fulfillment of the truth and the will of this single
agent. In a world governed by this
principle, there is no room for mystery; ownership of complete truth means that
everything is known ahead of time. Where
everything is known ahead of time, the story has nothing to grow out of. Obviously, the totalitarian system is in
essence (and in principle) directed against the story.
The corollary is that the story is
then an attack upon totalitarianism. The
inclusion of one character’s story, Jarmila, a transgender dissident who
renames herself “Todd James” is masterful.
Jarmila, who immigrates to Vermont
and converts to Orthodox Judaism, stands in for personal challenges during transition,
the struggle with questions of identity, the frustrations of memory, and the weight
of the past. But Jamila’s struggles,
while individual, are not atypical. And,
as if to parallel this struggle, the opening of Eastern
Europe has thawed dormant difficulties of identity and religion—persistent
sticking points.
Like Klemperer, closing his life in
cynical resignation, so many of Shore’s characters give in to private and
public despair. The taste of ashes is
the flavor of despair. After all, the
story of Eastern Europe is a tragedy, not a
morality tale. Shore concludes with a
powerful interview. Slawomir Sierakowski,
a philosopher whose work challenges western culture’s dilemma of relativism and
fragmentation. While a neo-Marxist, he’s
not one who would have argued that the gulag was just a “tax paid” for the
glories of socialism. He’s a serious
thinker. One whom Shore quotes in a
fittingly dark and timely observation:
“In today’s world we know more and more but we don’t use our knowledge
to get together and change the world,” he says.
“We use it so that each of us, individually, can adapt to this imperfect
world. That we can get together and
change this imperfect world almost no one believes.”
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