Marci Shore. Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918–1968. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. 2006. Pp. xxii, 457. $40.00

Extract

Marci Shore has written an unusual book, a collective intellectual and political biography of leading members of the radical Polish avant garde who came of age in Dadaism and futurism at the end of World War I, gravitated toward revolutionary Marxism in the 1920s, and were devoured by Stalinism and their own disillusionment in the cruel middle decades of the last century. The author's main plot revolves around the poets Aleksander Wat, Wa̦dysław Broniewski, their spouses Ola Watowa and Janina Broniewska, and their closest aesthetic and ideological collaborators on the Left. Shore's “cast of characters,” however, extends beyond the revolutionary poets and their immediate milieu to the “traditional wing of the avant-garde” (p. 23), particularly to the Skamander poets Julian Tuwim and Antoni Słonimski who were patronized by the “bourgeois” Wiadomości Literackie (Literary News) and who serve primarily as foils for Wat and his friends until World War II and the Holocaust led to a redefinition (temporary in Słonimski's case) of their political loyalties. Also featured, as tutors in Marxism and shepherds of the cultural “fellow travelers” into the communist promised land, are the fascinating political figures Wanda Wasilewska and Jakub Berman. Most of Shore's subjects are “non-Jewish Jews” (in Isaac Deutscher's formulation), most of them are male, and most of their stories have tragic endings, several before a Soviet firing squad in the Great Terror of the late 1930s.