The Taste of Ashes

by Marci Shore

  One critic declared that the existence of Caviar and Ashes was the price of the Poles’ own laziness: now an American woman had taken the opportunity to tell the Poles’ story in her own way.

  Another reviewer wanted to know: Why was it only from an American woman that Polish readers were finally learning what their country had really been like?

  A reader wrote to the magazine that had published Daniel Passent’s column, thanking the editors for introducing her to Caviar and Ashes, for finally someone without complexes had told this story.

  “But it’s a shame,” the reader added, “that it had to be an American woman who did this.”

  A sympathetic radio interviewer asked me if I had been able to write this book, when no one in Poland had been, because they had complexes while I was free of complexes.

  It was a strange notion. I assured him that I had many complexes as well, surely as many as he had. But just as we each had our own complexes, we each wrote our own books. After all, books were personal things.

  Another journalist wanted to know: Had I not been afraid to write about people like Wanda Wasilewska and Janina Broniewska—people who were hated, whose names were anathema in Poland? Where had I found the courage?

  This was a misunderstanding: it was not courage at all. As had been the case in Domažlice all those years before, when the stove was broken and I let the students put their winter boots back on, what appeared to be courage was only an absence of acculturation.

  DURING THAT VISIT to Poland in spring 2009 Pan Sławek invited me to give a talk about Caviar and Ashes at the Broniewski Museum. Among the people from the audience who approached me afterward was a woman of around sixty. Her name was Alina, and she had a story to tell me about Janina Broniewska: she was that friend of Janina Broniewska’s granddaughter, Pani Ewa, whom Janina Broniewska had taken in, together with her infant, in 1968. She and Ewa, both nineteen years old with newborn babies, had been afraid to tell Ewa’s grandmother what had happened to Alina’s young husband: that he had been among the students imprisoned. That was why Alina and her baby had been evicted from their apartment. Three months passed, and finally the two young women had to explain Alina’s husband’s absence.

  “And do you know what Babcia said?” Pani Alina whispered in my ear. Like her friend, Pani Ewa, Pani Alina called Janina Broniewska Babcia—“Grandma.”

  “Fuck, they’re locking up children now!”

  “Grandma” made a phone call. Three days later, Alina’s young husband returned from prison.

  AT THAT TIME Jan’s friend, the literary editor Basia Toruńczyk, published an open letter to the young Poles of the “New Left.” The letter was both warm and critical, supportive and condescending. Basia Toruńczyk, like Jan Gross and Irena Grudzińska, like Alik Smolar and Adam Michnik and Pani Alina’s young husband, had been among the Warsaw students arrested for their participation in the March 1968 protests. She wrote about herself and her friends: their hunger for complete freedom and their distaste for school, for uniforms, for any kind of conformity, for petit bourgeois life—above all in its communist version. The students demonstrating in March 1968 had had no illusions of victory, only a belief in the value of a noble defeat. Some of them had been raised by influential parents, prewar communists, often of Jewish origin. They were young people who had been under the influence of Marxism since childhood, who, as they grew up, had watched reality confront ideology. They became fearful of the collectivist spirit and the desire for grand narratives. Their challenge, then, was to abandon grand narratives without abandoning ethical values, to extricate themselves from ideology without falling into nihilism.

  Basia Toruńczyk dedicated this essay to a young man named Sławomir Sierakowski.

  I met Sławomir Sierakowski in March of 2009. He was twenty-nine years old and already the spokesperson of Poland’s “New Left.” And in fact this was a new Left—not a postcommunist Left—whose core was composed of people now in their mid- to late twenties, too young to have been fully formed by communism. They were, on average, several years younger than the generation “graced by a late birth” and calling for lustration. Sławomir Sierakowski talked manically with his hands. He slept very little. Instead he chain-smoked and poured spoonfuls of sugar into endless cups of espresso.

  Sławomir Sierakowski had invited me to give a talk about Caviar and Ashes at the salon he hosted. He was a neo-Marxist of a sort, a social democrat with revolutionary proclivities, and a student of postmodern philosophy who wanted not only to deconstruct but also to build something again. He had founded a society dedicated to reviving the legacy of a brilliant nineteenth-century Polish Marxist philosopher who had died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-three.

  About Caviar and Ashes Sławomir Sierakowski was fanatically enthusiastic. He understood the book as revolutionary—and prescriptive. He reminded me of the Plastic People of the Universe’s band manager, Ivan Jirous: an animateur, a cultural figure without his own definable vocation per se but with an extraordinary ability to mobilize other people, to persuade them to do things. He was considering, Sławomir told me, whether he should found a new political party.

  The room was crowded, there were not enough seats, people were standing. The audience greeted me as if I had come to deliver a secret message from another world. Sławomir was the host, and the audience asked me questions:

  “So what can we do?”

  “How can we today, as intellectuals, engage on behalf on the revolution and get it right?”

  “How can we save the world?”

  Excellent questions—to which I had no answers.

  The lives of these angst-laden poets and their friends had not disclosed to me the secret of how to save the world. What I had learned from figures like Aleksander Wat, for whom life was unbearably heavy, was rather that pathological 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 noblest of motives could lead to the basest 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.

  IT WAS A Sunday afternoon, 18 December 2011, when Sławomir Sierakowski rang our doorbell in New Haven. He had spent the previous few months at Yale, where he had captivated my students with his manic energy and his insistence—following the ideal of the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia—that ideas were to be lived. Now he was about to return to Warsaw and wanted to say goodbye. I answered the door.

  “Václav Havel is dead,” he told me, still in the doorway.

  “I know,” I said. It had not been a fairy-tale ending. Havel had died that morning, at home in his cottage in the Bohemian countryside, after a long illness. He was seventy-five years old. Ivan Jirous had preceded him to the grave just a few weeks earlier.

  Could we say something to the Polish New Left, Sławomir asked us, about what Havel had meant to us?

  “There is no such thing as neutrality; there is only, as Havel grasped, inauthenticity,” Tim replied.

  “What I learned from Havel about the moral ambiguity of being both a victim and an oppressor was my entryway into postcommunist Europe,” I told Sławomir. “It was the beginning of my fascination with those historical moments in which there are no innocent choices.”

  When he reached the other side of the Atlantic, Sławomir organized a series of public discussions about Havel. Havel remained timely today, Sławomir told his audience, as a voice that implicitly warned us against ignoring the commonalities between the old oppressive era of communism and the new free era of democracy—who warned us about the instrumental reason that leads to cynicism. Sławomir believed this should be our wake-up call. Postcommunist Poland, he lamented, was a part of a postcommunist world in
which there was no common set of values that proved stronger than each person’s private interest. And on a daily basis, everyone—like Havel’s greengrocer who hung the “Workers of the world unite!” sign—accepted this. “We are all greengrocers from Havel’s essay,” he told his audience.

  “In today’s world we know more and more,” Sławomir said, “but we don’t use our knowledge to get together and change the world. 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.”

  Sławomir wanted very much for his generation to be the one Havel had been waiting for: the one that, having escaped, by the “grace of late birth,” being wholly formed by communism, would reject selfishness and opportunism and would bring rediscovered moral values into public life. It would involve a touch of romanticism, a revolutionary rejection of cynicism, and a desire to reenchant a disenchanted world.

  I remembered, then, the day two and a half years earlier when I had first been introduced to the Polish “New Left.” In the front row that evening had sat a bright young man who was thin and wore glasses with thick plastic frames. He had thanked me for the book. Finally someone had rehabilitated the Polish intellectuals engaged in Marxism, finally someone had presented him and his peers with a vision of history that could serve as a signpost for the young Polish Left.

  “I’m very, very flattered,” I had said to him—to all of them, “that you liked my book. And it’s true that I tried to write with empathy. I wanted to understand these people—Aleksander Wat and Władysław Broniewski and Wanda Wasilewska, Jakub Berman and Janina Broniewska, Bruno Jasieński and Adam Ważyk and all of them—I wanted to understand why they came to make the choices they did.

  “But,” I added, “these people I wrote about—things turned out really, really badly for all of them. This book—their story—is a tragedy.”

  “But I didn’t read it as a tragedy!” said the bright young man in the front row. “I read it as a romance.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This is a deeply subjective book. During my first long stay in Warsaw over a dozen years ago, Piotr Wróbel encouraged me to write in the first person, owning the perspective of a young American woman who wanders into a completely different world and attempts to untangle the dark mysteries of Polish-Jewish relations. The notes I made then in some way form the core of what follows. Now I find myself unsure of how to write acknowledgments for a book among whose motifs is the guilt of writing. Writing is bearing witness, as Roger Cohen and others have said; yet I am also aware that bearing witness contains within itself an exposure of other people’s lives.

  I began this book in 1997, as a graduate student at Stanford University. The content was inspired by my European friends, colleagues, and acquaintances and by my European interlocutors from the dead, encountered in books and archives. The writing was inspired by the passionately American Gilbert Sorrentino, who insisted that aesthetic academization must be resisted, that writing must be kept fresh. Two of his seminars in the early 1990s, on William Carlos Williams and on the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, introduced me to the power of form and radically altered how I thought about language. I owe to him, and to our dialogue over several years, a sense of the palpability of words.

  I returned to this book when I was teaching first at Indiana University, and later at Yale University, institutions to which I’m indebted for providing the structural stability that allows me to indulge in an intellectual life. At Yale my students in a fall 2008 seminar devoted to European intellectuals’ responses to totalitarianism read excerpts from an early version of this manuscript. I thank them for their goodwill, their enthusiasm, and their thoughts. I completed a draft of this book at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen in Vienna, a very special place, and the only institution where I have ever felt “at home.” I owe my having found my way there to the late Tony Judt, whose loss can never be made okay.

  This is a book that is unusually beholden to (the perhaps dying art of) conversation. I am grateful to everyone who talked to me, including those who might prefer not to be named. A February 2010 seminar at the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen was unusually valuable. Comments there by Slavenka Drakulić, János Mátyás Kovács, Ivan Krastev, and Hiroaki Kuromiya were especially thought-provoking. Slavenka Drakulić was also a fellow participant in the panel discussion on totalitarianism’s afterlife, organized by the Central European Forum in Bratislava, which inspired the subtitle of this book.

  While most of the translations in the book are my own, I have drawn upon published English translations in several instances: Miron Białoszewski, A Memoir of the Warsaw Uprising, trans. Madeline Levine (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991); Karel Čapek, War with the Newts, trans. M. and R. Weatherall (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1985); E. M. Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born, trans. Richard Howard (NY: Arcade Publishing, 2011); Michel Jakob, “Wakefulness and Obsession: An Interview with E. M. Cioran,” Salamagundi 103 (Summer 1994): 122–45; Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Andrew H. MacAndrew (NY: Bantam Books, 1970); Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” trans. Paul Wilson, The Power of the Powerless, ed. John Keane (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1985): 24–96; Radu Ioanid, The Sword of the Archangel, trans. Peter Heinegg (Boulder: East European Monographs, 1990); Hanna Krall, To Outwit God, trans. Joanna Stasinska Weschler and Lawrence Weschler (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1992); Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Henry Heim (NY: Penguin Books, 1981); Milan Kundera, The Joke (NY: HarperPerennial, 1992); Arnošt Lustig, The Unloved (NY: Arbor House, 1985); Pope John Paul II, “Pope John Paul II Speaks in Victory Square,” From Stalinism to Pluralism, ed. Gale Stokes (NY: Oxford University Press, 1991): 200–203; Antony Polonsky and Joanna Michlic, eds., The Neighbors Respond (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Martin Šimečka, The Year of the Frog, trans. Peter Petro (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993); Vladimir Tismăneanu, “How was Ceauşescu Possible?,” trans. Julie Dawson (NY: Romanian Cultural Institute, 2011); Leon Volovici, Nationalist Ideology and Antisemitism: The Case of Romanian Intellectuals in the 1930s (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1991); Aleksander Wat, My Century, trans. Richard Lourie (NY: W. W. Norton, 1988); Yitzhak Zuckerman, A Surplus of Memory, trans. Barbara Harshav (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). The drawing by Szymon Zachariasz on this page (sygnatura 476/24) is reproduced with permission from Archiwum Akt Nowych in Warsaw.

  Over a dozen trips to Eastern Europe were made possible by a variety of sources, beginning with a Stanford University Undergraduate Research Opportunities Grant in 1993. I want to acknowledge as well the American Council of Learned Societies, the University of Toronto Centre for Russian and East European Studies, IIE Fulbright, the Stanford University Center for Russian and East European Studies, the International Research and Exchanges Board, Fulbright-Hayes, the Mellon Foundation, the Taube Center for Jewish Studies at Stanford, the American Council for International Education, the Russian and East European Institute and the Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University, and the Yale University Macmillan Center.

  For years Kasia Chamera-Marquez, Agata Jagiełło, Kaśka Jesień, and Agnieszka and Andrzej Waśkiewicz have welcomed me to Warsaw, where much of this book is set. Norman Naimark and Sepp Gumbrecht were the best dissertation advisers in the world. Brad Abrams, Iwona Butz, Jan Gross, Jacek Leociak, Amir Weiner, Ksenia Zadorozhnaia, and Steven Zipperstein were ever-provocative dialogue partners, as were my graduate students Jolanta Mickute and Anna Muller. My friend Izabela Kalinowska appeared at my door one evening with a copy of the film Trzech kumpli. My irreplaceable colleagues from Indiana University, Dov Ber Kerler and Jeffrey Veidlinger, took me along on one of their expeditions into a past lived in Yiddish. Marcin Szuster, the unusually talented and unusually patient translator of this book into Polish, offered wise advice at moments of vacillati
on. Paul Robinson inspired an appreciation for the continuing resonance of Freud—and of his “dark psychic closet.” Eliza Shaw Valk and her architectural talents played an essential role in helping me to think visually. Pavel Barša, Andrea Baršová, Ian Bremmer, Jonathan Brent, Chris Calhoun, Lan Samantha Chang, Slavenka Drakulić, Paul Freedman, Konstanty Gebert, Amelia Glaser, Gail Glickman, Jan Tomasz Gross, Irena Grudzińska-Gross, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, the late Tony Judt, Eva Kalivodová, Andrew Koss, Nitzan Lebovic, Joanne Meyerowitz, Krzysztof Michalski, Norman Naimark, Ashley Noel, Meredeth Rouse, Jamie Sarfeh, Dan Shore, Aleksander Smolar, Mary Snyder, Timothy Snyder, Piotr Sommer, the late Gilbert Sorrentino, Stephanie Steiker, Dariusz Stola, Nancy Wingfield, Larry Wolff, Alexander Zeyliger, and Steven Zipperstein all read excerpts and in some cases full drafts of this manuscript. Sometimes they laughed, sometimes they cried, sometimes they cringed—I am indebted to all of their readings, and under no circumstances should they be burdened with any responsibility for what I have written.

  Some final grateful thoughts: working with two people as sensitive, intelligent, and committed as my literary agent, Gillian MacKenzie, and my editor, Vanessa Mobley, has been a stroke of enormous good fortune in my life. I am thankful to Ian Bremmer for introducing me to Gillian, and to Gillian, in turn, for introducing me to Vanessa. This book has benefited more from their enthusiasm, insights, and literary sensibilities than I can express here.

  Maria Andrade, Katherine Bednarczyk, Christine Plateroti, and Amelie Stummer took very good care of my baby, Kalev Tristan Snyder, while I made the final revisions to this manuscript. Kalev, unlike his American parents, is, by virtue of his multilingual, citizenshipless Viennese birth, an authentic Central European and rootless cosmopolitan. While his father has been an incomparably perceptive reader of multiple drafts, Kalev has yet to read any of my writing. I hope that someday (naturally once he’s learned to read in one language or another) he’ll find that these pages bring him closer to the place where he was born.