The Taste of Ashes

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: 978-0-307-88883-9

  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 sist
ers, 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 disconcertingly like finding oneself in the last chapter of Margaret Atwood’s novel. Empathy does soften detachment—yet this is an empathy itself born in voyeurism. Understanding the past is inextricably bound up with guilt: writing history demands an imaginative leap into a time and a place where one was not, an exercise insisting upon a simultaneous violation of and identification with the other. This book, in a sense, lays bare the ambivalent process of writing history. It also, I hope, reveals something about what it means to understand.

  The Taste of Ashes

  In April of 1995 I sat in a Prague café with Amanda, two days before the memorial mass she had arranged for Oskar. It was late. The spring was cold that year. We sat upstairs where it was dark and smoky, eating ice cream. Amanda insisted on paying for the ice cream because, as she said, she was “now an heiress.” I was telling her about my young student, a smart girl with the rugged prettiness of a tomboy whose brown hair fell just below her chin. In an essay composed in her grasping English she wrote about the boy who had once held her hand and called her “sweetheart.” One summer day he went off to his cottage in the countryside. When he returned he told her he had made love to an older girl. My student’s tears and cigarettes, all of it too harsh for a fourteen-year-old girl. Her final sentence: You know, I think that life can be very cruel sometimes. And I had wanted to write on her paper: Oh, but you don’t know, it gets so much worse!

  But Amanda, the artist from New England whose Czech husband had just killed himself, told me, “No, that’s it. That’s as bad as it gets.”

  And I believed then that it was true.

  Two days later I went with Amanda to the Catholic mass dedicated to Oskar, Oskar who had waited twenty-five years to return to Prague, only to find that he no longer had any home there. In the church tucked, as if concealed, behind Old Town Square, I took communion for the first time, although I was not a Catholic, although I was not even a Christian, although I did not believe in God.

  Several hours later we were sitting in the apartment of Oskar’s sister. She was matronly, prematurely aged, nothing like her brother, the stylish, cosmopolitan physicist. Oskar had been handsome, sexy well into middle age. His sister and brother-in-law lived on an upper floor of one of the many faceless high-rises built of gray concrete. In their time these socialist housing projects had created thousands of identical units for modern, single-family living. Now inside these run-down apartments there lingered the aura of communist-era bourgeois. On Oskar’s sister’s old wooden table there was food and wine, red wine in Bohemian crystal set against Amanda’s beautiful silver hair. There were layers of aesthetic paradox: Amanda, the bohemian from Massachusetts, in the bourgeois communist apartment.

  Oskar’s brother-in-law poured the wine. Amanda and Oskar’s friends, a woman named Korina and her husband, had come from Paris for the memorial service. They were scientists, young and attractive, eager to communicate. I translated, awkwardly, for Oskar’s sister and brother-in-law.

  Hours passed. In a few minutes it would be midnight. Amanda was consumed by the thought now: it was the first of May, the Czech holiday of love. “It was late in the evening, the first of May / May evening, the time of love / Voice of a dove calling to love / Where fragrance drifted from the pines.” With these lines Karel Hynek Mácha, Czech romanticism’s greatest poet, had made it impossible for the communists to make the workers’ holiday of May Day fully their own.

  It was the first of May and Amanda wanted to give Oskar a gift.

  We moved into the kitchen.

  “Ask her for a pair of scissors,” Amanda said to me, turning her head toward Oskar’s unhappy sister.

  I hesitated. I did not want to ask her, she would not want to give the American sister-in-law she barely knew a pair of scissors at a fragile moment. Amanda remained for her an alien, unfathomable creature from a decadent foreign world, with whom she shared no language, with whom she shared nothing but Oskar, who was now dead.

  Amanda insisted.

  “Why?” Oskar’s sister asked.

  I said nothing.

  “Why?” she asked me again.

  I shrugged, smiled weakly, Otto’s sister brought the pair of scissors. I held Amanda’s hand, and Korina, the scientist who had come from Paris to say goodbye to Oskar, took the pair of scissors in her hands. Amanda shut her eyes. Korina began to cut. A moment later she held between her fingers Amanda’s long, silver ponytail. Beautiful, like sparkling ashes.

  Now we left the kitchen and returned to the small living room where wineglasses still stood on the wooden table. I watched as Korina sat down on her knees on the wooden floor, reaching out to touch the porcelain. She put her finger into the urn and tasted Oskar’s ashes.

  In a moment Amanda was gone. She had fled the apartment, flown down the staircase. When I found her below on the dark Prague streets, her dress was already wet, the disembodied silver ponytail she held in her hand whisked about in the storm. Korina and her husband and I followed her, running drunkenly through Prague in the rain, Amanda clutching her ponytail, the rain-drenched silver turning to gray.

  A Wrinkle in Time

  One April morning in 1989 I saw the headline: Abbie Hoffman had killed himself. He had fought for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. He had thrown dollar bills from the roof of the New York Stock Exchange and held a séance outside the Pentagon to levitate its evil spirits. When, following the antiwar protests in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention, Abbie Hoffman and seven of his friends were put on trial for conspiracy to riot, he appeared in the courtroom in judicial robes. His lawyer called upon Allen Ginsberg to read his poetry as testimony for the defense. The antiwar activists did not have a sympathetic judge: he issued more than two hundred citations, to the defendants and their lawyers alike, for contempt of court. “You are a shande far di goyim,” Abbie Hoffman told the judge. You shame us in front of the goyim.

  “Democracy is not something you believe in or a place to hang your hat, it’s something you do,” Abbie Hoffman continued to insist. The proper response to social injustice, he believed, was moral outrage. I was fifteen when I first discovered Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book in a dusty college library. By then—1987—his onetime fellow revolutionary Tom Hayden had entered mainstream politics, and Jerry Rubin had abandoned his “Pig for President” campaign in favor of Wall Street finance. Abbie Hoffman, though, held tight to his earthy idealism. On the banks of the Delaware River he persisted, fighting to save the water from a nuclear power station’s pumping project. Until, one day twenty years after the Chicago trial, when he was living in a converte
d turkey coop and making a one-dollar-per-year salary from a local environmental group, Abbie Hoffman gave up.

  I felt crushed by the suicide of the man who had continued to fight for a better world even when the times were no longer his times. That summer, having just finished my junior year of high school, I traveled some two hours to a public memorial service for Abbie Hoffman in Washington Crossing Park, not far from the gentrifying countercultural enclave of New Hope, Pennsylvania, where I’d once bought a pair of peace-sign earrings. The park commission had not been receptive; its chairwoman believed this was an event honoring the wrong kind of person. The environmentalist organizers were undaunted, perhaps even pleased: they threatened a First Amendment lawsuit. The park commission relented. The gathering was named “Steal This Picnic.” The program included some of the organizers’ favorite Abbie Hoffman quotes: “The Constitution does not begin, ‘We the Philadelphia Electric Company.’ ” “The people must prevail if democracy is to survive.” At the picnic Allen Ginsberg read his poetry, Richie Havens played the guitar, and Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers sold his cookbook, Barbeque’n with Bobby, to raise bail money, he explained.

  The mourners wore tie-dyed T-shirts and red, white, and blue buttons proclaiming, “Abbie lives!” Then came the scent of patchouli mixed with exhaust fumes as Vietnam veterans in black leather on Harley-Davidson motorcycles stormed the park, revving their motors and shouting, “Pinko commie fag!” and “We hate Abbie! Abbie is a commie!”

  The motorcycle-riding veterans too, were soon to become an anachronism: these were the final days of the cold war. In the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev had already come to power. In Poland, the very same April when the American revolutionary Abbie Hoffman died, opponents of the communist regime sat down with communists at a roundtable and planned elections. That November the Berlin Wall fell. Within ten days, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia began. The following month in Bucharest, at a mass rally for Romania’s communist dictators, Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu, the cheers suddenly turned into boos. On Christmas Day the Ceauşescus were executed by firing squad. Four days later, on 29 December 1989, the dissident playwright Václav Havel became president of Czechoslovakia.