Like most of us, Shore often remembers a particular event by what she said to somebody. But seldom is this a good way to write. When she describes a lecture she gave to an audience in Warsaw and then mentions it twice again some pages later, she comes across as solipsistic. And sometimes her personal obsessions get the better of her. Granted, for Polish Jews today, a major issue is coming to terms with the way so many Jews were once prominent Communists. As one person Shore meets puts it: “If we’re proud of Freud, how, then, should we treat Jakub Berman?” (Berman was the Stalin-era czar of Poland’s secret police.) But given that there are fewer than 12,000 Jews (the largest estimate I could find) left in Poland, should their angst over this question, however understandable, take up more than one-third of a book supposedly about Eastern Europe as a whole?



Shadowlands. By ADAM HOCHSCHILD

April 26, 2013



Marci Shore. THE TASTE OF ASHES. The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe, 370 pp. Crown Publishers. $27.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/books/review/marci-shores-taste-of-ashes.html





“When thinking about the fall of any dictatorship, one should have no illusions that the whole system comes to an end like a bad dream,” Ryszard Kapuscinski wrote 30 years ago. A Polish journalist, Kapuscinski was ostensibly reporting on the fall of the shah of Iran, but his devoted Polish readers knew that everything he said applied to their part of the world as well. “A dictatorship . . . leaves behind itself an empty, sour field on which the tree of thought won’t grow quickly. It is not always the best people who emerge from hiding.”



Far more than peoples who’ve weathered revolutions and counterrevolutions, Americans too often assume that once a tyranny has collapsed and elections follow — whether in the Soviet Union, Iraq or Egypt — whatever comes next will be far better. Things are more complicated, of course, and this is the timely theme of Marci Shore’s “Taste of Ashes,” a book by turns insightful and exasperating. First, the insights:



Shore teaches history at Yale, has been studying Eastern Europe for 20 years and obviously knows it deeply. She has written a highly personal memoir of her encounters with the territory: as an undergraduate, as a teacher, as a Jew trying to make sense of post-Holocaust Poland, and as a researcher tracking down documents and survivors of Stalinism everywhere from Warsaw to Jerusalem to New York.



When she went to the just-divorcing Czech Republic and Slovakia as a youthful newcomer, eager to meet those who had bravely spoken out for freedom before 1989, she was struck that the intellectuals she talked to had never thought much about the practicalities of life after Communism. Even Vaclav Havel, his country’s president, continued to give “speeches about authenticity and Being and the irreducibility of subjective human experience.” Another unexpected discovery was that the former dissidents had considerable contempt for “the people.” One of them “described the majority as having reached a modus vivendi with the regime — in her mind like a dog chained to his house who doesn’t want to upset his master.”



Before the Soviets arrived, of course, Eastern Europe was under the Nazis, and before then much of it was under ­regimes with a fascist tinge. The aftermath of all that lingers on: in Romania, Shore hears sympathy for the prewar Iron Guard; in Poland, she finds anti-Semitic literature on sale, Jews concealing their ethnicity — and, remarkably, even a hot line for those who want to talk about this in ­confidence.



In the mid-1990s Shore worked as a high school English teacher in a small Czech town. Apart from the fact that students addressed her with the equivalent of “Mrs. Professor” rather than the pre-1989 “Mrs. Comrade,” little had changed. This was borne home one freezing winter day when the school’s heat failed and she arrived in class to find her 14-year-old students in coats and scarves but no boots to warm their feet. A harsh headmaster had a standing rule that students had to take off shoes or boots before entering the classroom. When Shore told them they could put their boots back on, she first had to convince them that she would take responsibility before the headmaster — who indeed turned out to be furious that his rule had been countermanded. Every dictatorship creates thousands of smaller dictators, who live on for decades.



Closely observed episodes like this are little treasures, and make you wish more academics were willing to dip into their personal experience. But while first-­person writing at its best can be a marvelous literary tool, undisciplined, as it too often is in Shore’s hands, it can run off the rails.



Shore’s decisions about which stories to include seem determined less by what they tell us about the afterlife of totalitarianism in Eastern Europe (actually, countries other than Poland and the former Czechoslovakia are mentioned only briefly) than by their importance in her life. We hear about an anti-Semitic Frenchman she meets, about an old boyfriend who moved to Israel and about many other people worthy of a lively dinner table anecdote, but who seem tangential to the book’s main subject. And some things that sound highly relevant are left oddly in midair: she mentions that in Prague in 2007, an 86-year-old woman was sentenced to six years in prison for having been a prosecutor in a Stalin-era show trial some 60 years earlier. Fascinating — but were there other such cases, either in the Czech Republic or in other countries? We never learn.



Then there’s the matter of names. Shore tells us that she has given some people pseudonyms, which is certainly legitimate, but she does not make clear which people these are. Are they the ones who are mentioned by first name only? Probably, but as her cavalcade of Czech and Polish names grows to dizzying proportions, she forgets that a reader who didn’t know all these individuals might have trouble keeping them straight. Someone trying to recall just who was the Milos or Vlasta who last appeared a hundred pages earlier will be frustrated. For there is no index.



First-person writing does not have to be this way. Just to mention two such books about Eastern Europe: in “The File,” Timothy Garton Ash anatomizes a police state by tracking down everyone he could find who, archives showed, had informed on him to the East German Stasi; in “Between East and West,” Anne Applebaum meditates on the meaning of ethnic identity by making a journey through towns and cities that have changed countries with the shifting of 20th-century borders. Both are superb narratives, their architecture carefully determined not by the whim of the writer but by what will best etch the subject for the reader.



Like most of us, Shore often remembers a particular event by what she said to somebody. But seldom is this a good way to write. When she describes a lecture she gave to an audience in Warsaw and then mentions it twice again some pages later, she comes across as solipsistic. And sometimes her personal obsessions get the better of her. Granted, for Polish Jews today, a major issue is coming to terms with the way so many Jews were once prominent Communists. As one person Shore meets puts it: “If we’re proud of Freud, how, then, should we treat Jakub Berman?” (Berman was the Stalin-era czar of Poland’s secret police.) But given that there are fewer than 12,000 Jews (the largest estimate I could find) left in Poland, should their angst over this question, however understandable, take up more than one-third of a book supposedly about Eastern Europe as a whole?



The Berman family does sound interesting: a Stalinist police chief, a Zionist brother who ended up in Israel, a daughter who had survived. But just when we’re thinking that Shore should really write a book about them, we learn that she partly did: they evidently figure in another book of hers that came out several years ago. “The Taste of Ashes” ends with a half-­dozen pages about the response in Poland to a translation of her earlier book — which might be of interest to someone who has read it, but to someone who has not it merely underlines the self-involved quality of this volume.



Adam Hochschild’s books include “The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin.”