Synopsis:
In a period where deep structural changes are sweeping Eastern Europe, commentators risk instant obsolescence. Kaufman isn't prescient; his analysis includes the commonplaces: the food lines, the fossilized Communist Party, heroic Solidarity. Yet, because it is personalized, because it views events through human eyes and memories, it partakes a little bit of the timeless. Better than your average anti-communist tract. No references or index. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.
From Publishers Weekly:
The Poles, in Kaufman's probing portrait, are a "people steeped in legends of suffering, loss, and sacrifice" who "for a very long time have seen themselves as the suffering Christ of nations." As a New York Times correspondent based in Warsaw for three and a half years, the author found the Polish political and social scene "a mixture of putrefying Communism and idiosyncratic Polish romanticism." His trenchant observations capture the drab patterns of everyday life in a backward, pauperized economy, the ferment of a thriving cultural underground, the conspiratorial antics of Solidarity leaders and strong-arm tactics in what remains a police state, albeit an "idiosyncratic, sloppy" one. Kaufman takes a hard look at anti-Semitic tendencies within the Solidarity movement and in Poland generally, "a country without Jews." His report of his father's visit to Warsaw in 1985, after a half-century's absence, makes for dramatic contrasts. The Poles' mixed reactions to Gorbachev, as recorded here, indicate that many view Soviet reforms as countermeasures designed to preserve the U.S.S.R.'s ebbing power.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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