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The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe

  • Marci Shore

* NOTE:  The venue has been changed to the Barnes/McDowell Rooms at the Fisher Conference Center in the Arrillaga Alumni Center.

Professor Marci Shore will be speaking on the topic of her recent book, The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Easten Europe.  The collapse of communism opened the archives, illuminating the tragedy of twentieth-century Eastern Europe: there were moments in which no decisions were innocent, in which all possible choices caused suffering.  The Taste of Ashes is an account of the darker side of the revolutions of 1989, when the ghost of communism--no longer Marx’s “specter to come"--became a haunting presence of the past.

Marci Shore is associate professor of history at Yale University.  She is the translator of Michał Głowiński's The Black Seasons and the author of Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968.  Currently she is at work on a book project titled “Phenomenological Encounters: Scenes from Central Europe,” an examination of the history of phenomenology and existentialism in East-Central Europe.


Co-sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, Taube Center for Jewish Studies and the Department of History.