Caviar and Ashes by Professor Marci Shore sku-10088747

Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968 is a paperback by Professor Marci Shore, listed in Ages 9-12 Kids' Books as sku-10088747. It opens with Warsaw editor Mieczyslaw Grydzewski visiting Café Ziemianska with his two dachshunds. Shore follows Polish writers born at the fin de siècle who gathered there and believed their words could move the world.

Young avant-gardists of the early 1920s became radical Marxists later that decade, choosing Marxism before Stalinism, socialist realism and the imposition of Soviet communism in Poland. Their story ended tragically. Beginning after the First World War, the book traces a half-century through futurist manifestos, proletarian poetry, Stalinist terror and Nazi genocide, from literary cafés to prisons and corridors of power.

Shore draws on newly available archives from Poland, Russia, Ukraine and Israel to examine the lives of European, East European and Jewish intellectuals who lived Marxism in the twentieth century.