Marci Shore - Caviar and Ashes. A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968 [2006][A]

Book Description
Publication Date: April 10, 2006
"In the elegant capital city of Warsaw, the editor Mieczyslaw Grydzewski would come with his two dachshunds to a café called Ziemianska." Thus begins the history of a generation of Polish literati born at the fin de siècle. They sat in Café Ziemianska and believed that the world moved on what they said there. Caviar and Ashes tells the story of the young avant-gardists of the early 1920s who became the radical Marxists of the late 1920s. They made the choice for Marxism before Stalinism, before socialist realism, before Marxism meant the imposition of Soviet communism in Poland. It ended tragically.
Marci Shore begins with this generation’s coming of age after the First World War and narrates a half-century-long journey through futurist manifestos and proletarian poetry, Stalinist terror and Nazi genocide, a journey from the literary cafés to the cells of prisons and the corridors of power. Using newly available archival materials from Poland and Russia, as well as from Ukraine and Israel, Shore explores what it meant to live Marxism as a European, an East European, and a Jewish intellectual in the twentieth century.

Reviews
"'The book Caviar and Ashes performs quite an extraordinary feat. It tells the history of an entire generation in an engaging way, keeping the reader's interest throughout... Caviar and Ashes provides the vicarious pleasure of following the intertwined lives of writers and poets whose work one remembers from textbooks.' Irena Grudzinksa-Gross, The Polish Review

'Shore strikes a beautiful balance between empathy and dispassion. Her thorough research into the lives and papers of the Polish avant garde writers who became Marxists rescues many of them from the margins of receding memory, while explaining the world in which they lived.'" Nathaniel D. Wood, The Russian Review

'One of Marci Shore's fine accomplishments in Caviar and Ashes is the care she bestows not only on the minute ideological and political differences among the various groups that came into being in the wake of the Russian Revolution, but on their tangled personal interrelations as well.' Abraham Brumberg, Times Literary Supplement

About the Author
Marci Shore is assistant professor of history at Yale University.