The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe. By Marci Shore. Crown; 370 pages; $27. William Heinemann; £20. Buy from Amazon.com,Amazon.co.uk

EASTERN Europe, writes Marci Shore, is “Europe, only more so”. It was the site of the continent’s worst events and of the most uplifting moments of modern times: the peaceful revolutions that toppled communism. As a young scholar in the 1990s, Ms Shore, who now teaches at Yale, was mesmerised by the way each chapter of the past had its roots in an earlier era. The dissidents of the 1980s were in large part formed by the failed reform-communism experiments of the 1950s. Those in turn were a reaction to Stalinism. Communism itself was a reaction against fascism and the Depression of the 1930s.

Her kaleidoscopic book of reminiscences and encounters gives an authentic feel to the difficulties that outsiders often have in making sense of this intricate history. The main part deals with her researches into the interplay between Zionism, socialism and anti-Semitism in Poland (which formed the basis of her excellent earlier work, “Caviar and Ashes”). Ms Shore alludes to her Jewish roots, and she does an excellent job of bringing to life the still rancorous relations between Jews of rival persuasions. Should a proud Polish Jew speak Yiddish or shun it? And what should modern Jews think about Poland: nostalgia for a golden age, distaste for anti-Semitism or revulsion for the mass murder carried out by the Germans under wartime occupation?

One of her many vignettes is about a Jewish student from Warsaw who joined a group of Israelis who were visiting Poland as part of a “March of the Living”: a proud, grim event when young Jews bearing Israeli flags commemorate those killed at Auschwitz and elsewhere. The student went with his friends to Israel at the end of the trip to take part in the final ceremonies. Representatives of the 43 countries that had participated were called to the stage to speak—but not the Jews from Poland. “It was the greatest humiliation of my life,” he tells her.

Ms Shore casts her net in other directions too. Her memories of teaching in the early post-communist years in the then Czechoslovakia are evocative. Democracy was still a notional concept in her provincial school. The head teacher was authoritarian and cranky; the students, though bright, had minds deadened by rote learning, totalitarian pedagogy and bureaucracy. “Communist content had been purged…but a certain totalitarian form—or rather an acute sense of the world’s restrictedness—lingered.”

The taste of ashes of the title is by no means universal. Ms Shore ends her book with a description of an encounter with a representative of the Polish “New Left”, who had been thrilled by her previous book. He was grateful that an outsider had appreciated and uncovered a long-lost Polish socialist tradition that could serve as a guide for him and his comrades. In vain she protested that her research was a voyage through unimaginable sadness. “But I didn’t read it as a tragedy,” he replied. “I read it as a romance.”