The Taste of Ashes

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 The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe, by Marci Shore

 I've had this for quite some time, and was spurred to start it when I started watching a series of lectures online and realized that the professor was the same person who wrote this book.  And also she's married to Timothy Snyder, whose books I love.  So I dove in, and it still took me forever to read, but that's because of my slump, not because it wasn't fascinating.  It was!

It's a sort of combination memoir and description of life in many different places in Eastern Europe after the Cold War ended.  To my intense envy, Shore -- who must be only a year or so older than I am -- spent 1990 on studying and teaching in Czechoslovakia and other places.  That's what I wanted to be doing in the early 1990s!  Only I didn't know how to get there, and probably I wouldn't have done too well at it anyway.  But reading about her doing it was pretty amazing.

Shore's observations about life after communism, especially for Jews, make for good reading.  She was researching various dissidents and what happened to them, meeting with anyone still alive or maybe their relatives, and exploring Poland, Ukraine, and other places.  She was watching and participating in endless discussions of what it meant to live under communism, to dissent, to fall into the clutches of the secret police and to break, or not, under interrogation.  How do people keep living after long-secret files are made public and someone's betrayal is made known?  What happens when an exile finally comes home after longing for it for decades, only to find that 'home' is gone, lost in the past?  How to sort through the endless questions of the intersection of Jewishness and communism?

Excellent reading.  I really loved it, but I'm probably the ideal audience!

 

 

 

 

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