What price freedom?

One of the best-known contacts for many Western reporters covering Poland and the Solidarity protests of the 1980s was Konstanty ‘Kostek’ Gebert. A fine journalist who usually wrote under the name Dawid Warszawski, he seemed to know everyone in Warsaw, liked to talk late into the night about ideas and gossip, wore his vast learning lightly and had an invaluable gift for putting complex issues into broad perspective.

Gebert’s parents were Jewish migrants to the US in the 1920s. They were loyal members of the American Communist Party for years and returned to Poland in 1947 to build socialism from the ruins of the second world war. When Gebert, born in the Fifties, was old enough to think he knew he loathed communism. He spent much of his life trying to destroy the system his parents had devoted their lives to creating. His father, to his death, remained an unrepentant Bolshevik, though he knew his life had been wasted. ‘They lived too long,’ Gebert says. But he loved them very much and he believes that anything worthwhile he has done was because of the values his parents had instilled in him.

Gebert, the quintessential East European intellectual, is one of an extraordinary cast of characters in Marci Shore’s brilliant and perceptive book about a part of the world, as she explains, ‘where the past is palpable, and heavy’. It is not a conventional history, with a straight narrative, though it tells an important story about the legacy of the three utopian ideas of the 20th century — Fascism, Communism and Zionism — that transformed Europe. It is part memoir, part reportage, a treatise on the philosophy of history, and part romance written with lyrical beauty in places.