Fall 2020 Issue of the Yale Historical Review Interview by Grace Blaxill

1. INTERVIEW
HISTORY OF THE
PRESENT
Marci Shore on empathy,Trump,and being a public scholar in a
politically turbulent time
Interview by Grace Blaxill Transcribed by Margaret Hedeman
October 26, 2020
I’d love to start with the recent forum "The Last Time
I Saw Them." You were the historical consultant for
the film as well as a participant in the discussion af-
terwards. Could you talk a little bit about that role?
Yes, of course. I think Stephen Naron, the director of the
Fortunoff Archive, invented the title “historical consul-
tant” for me. He wanted to give me some credit for the
film, credit I didn’t really deserve. I had the idea that we
should make a film using material from the Fortunoff
Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies focused on
parent-child separation. And I did watch several early
versions of it and make some suggestions about which
clips I thought were working best. But it was definitely
not the case that Stephen needed me to explain the his-
torical context to him. And he was also the one who
found and hired the filmmakers.
I’ve played a larger role in curating, together with Ste-
phen and our colleague Jeffrey Goldfarb at The New
School for Social Research in New York, a forum that
uses the film as a point of departure titled “The Uses
and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life.”
In my introduction to the forum I tell the story of how
the project came into being. In May 2018 we learned
that children were being taken from their parents at the
American border by ICE officers and thrown into cages.
And I was horrified. Of course atrocities take place all
the time all around the world, and none of us can pos-
sibly keep up and intervene in each case that deserves
our intervention. And of course the Trump administra-
tion had been doing a lot of morally repulsive things
before that as well. But the children taken on the border
was sickening in a new way. I couldn’t calm down.
ust before the November elections,YHR Editor Grace Blaxill
had the opportunity to talk with Professor Marci Shore about
her role in the New Democracy Seminar Forum "The Last
Time I Saw Them," which documented survivors' experiences of the
Holocaust. In this discussion and later over email, they discuss her
work applying historical methodology to politics in Eastern Europe,
and how that work has informed her view of the Trump presidency.
J
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YALE HISTORICAL REVIEW
Fall 2020

2. I have very little experience of Latin America. I don’t
speak Spanish; I have no expertise on the topic of Cen-
tral American refugees. And yet in some way I felt very
close to what was happening. I’m a historian of Eastern
Europe, and when I first began spending time there, in
the 1990s, many more survivors of the Second World
War and of Stalinism were still living. Encountering
those people was an important part of my coming of
age as an historian. And more or less everyone who
survived Nazism and Stalinism was forced at some
time to escape from somewhere in dire circumstances.
The people I met had survived because at some point
they crossed a border and someone extended a hand
to them. Each survival involved an enormous amount
of contingency—sheer chance and good luck, and at a
crucial moment encountering someone who was kind
even when surrounded by cruelty. The job of a historian
is to imagine herself into other people’s stories; and I
had imagined myself into many of these stories I had
encountered in Eastern Europe. And so as I read the
news about what was happening on the American bor-
der, the thought that a person could make a decision
in desperate circumstances to flee was not difficult for
me to grasp. You don’t take those kinds of risks unless
you’re pushed to the edge.
I was also especially distraught because I have young
children. And I could imagine fleeing violence or terror
with my children. I could also imagine that in such a
situation, if someone were to try to take my children
away from me, I would be capable of killing someone.
I grew up in a Jewish community, and as a child I knew
Holocaust survivors. I grew up hearing their stories, and
having some sense of what happened when guards took
children from their parents and threw them in camps.
And the thought that now Americans were doing this to
other people—and because this was my country, I was
complicit—was unbearable. I had nightmares that my
children were being taken away. And that was when I
emailed Stephen and said, "We have to do something.
There must be a way we could use the material at this
archive to make some intervention. If those of us who
understand something about the Holocaust don’t inter-
vene, then who? And if not now, when?"
I think that touches back to what you talked about
in your essay, The Price of Freedom. It seems to me
like you're answering a question you raised in your
introductory essay about a sinking ship: you describe
Americans after the election as people on the Tita-
nic saying, "Our ship can't sink." And, to quote you,
you said, “what I knew as a historian of Eastern Eu-
rope was what would happen was what could happen
and I knew that there was no such thing as a ship that
could not sink.” That terrified me because I thought
it was very true. But I also took heart in your essay,
because you're answering the question how can we
save the ship. In the conclusion, you say that this
moment can be a time when we recognize ourselves
as fully human subjects with agency who “can take
hold of the present, overcome what has been and go
beyond to we have been until now.” Do you see a near
future where Americans can accept their ability and
responsibility to make a change? Where they can not
only see that ability but act on it? Do you see a future
where we right the ship or where we see an issue and
make a choice and make an act change the narrative?
It’s only now, since the inauguration, that I feel like I’m
beginning to breathe again. And beginning to feel more
hopeful.
What happened on Wednesday, January 6th did not
Professor Marci Shore is the author of several
books, including Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw
Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, The Taste
of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern
Europe, and The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate
History of Revolution.
Photo courtesy of Rostyslav Kostenko
“If those of us
who understand
something about
the Holocaust don’t
intervene, then
who? And if not
now, when?”
ON THE NEXT PAGE
2 MARCI SHORE

4. come as a surprise to me. I’m skeptical of teleology and
I generally don't feel competent to make predictions
(in the best-case scenario, historians can tell you what
has already happened), but this had been in the air for
a long time. I’m desperately hopeful that the storming
of the Capitol building was a kind of endgame. A gro-
tesque farce. And now Republican unity very, very be-
latedly has fractured.
I'm musing over those advisers and Republican sena-
tors and cabinet members—people like William Barr,
for instance—who are expressing shock and dismay
that the president could have sought to undermine
American democracy, incited violence, and supported
a white supremacist insurrection. Could they really
be shocked—that is, is this idiocy or bad faith? Trump
never made a secret of who he was—nothing was ever
hidden; from the beginning what was terrifying was not
what was being concealed, but what was being norma-
lized.
I held my breath all through the elections. In some
sense I feel as if I hadn’t been breathing for four years.
The United States is a very divided country; in this
sense it’s very similar to Poland. As I watched the vote
counts come in, I felt overwhelmingly grateful to all my
students and former students and everyone who had
been out there this fall canvassing and registering vo-
ters and working on the campaign. What happened in
Georgia was extraordinary. The moment when Biden
pulled ahead in Georgia was when I really began to feel
hope. I said to husband, “I want to send flowers to Sta-
cey Abrams.”
My kids were much more anxious about this election
than any little kid should have to be—unfortunately
they’ve been going up with this catastrophe. During
one conversation with my ten-year-old son this fall, I
was explaining that in order for Joe Biden and Kamala
Harris to win the election we didn’t need all the people
who supported Donald Trump to change their minds.
We just needed 3, 4, 5% to switch sides. And Kalev said,
“But Mommy, it would be better if all of them changed
their minds.” And I said yes, of course that would be
better. . .
In 2017, when we were in Poland, Kalev and I took part
in a huge demonstration in Warsaw against the natio-
nalist-populist’s regime attempt to dismantle the inde-
pendent court system. It was a summer evening, and the
atmosphere was wonderful, peaceful and determined.
There were many people there with children, people
offering you snacks and bottles of water and candles.
There was such a feeling of good will and shared values
in that crowd of thousands and thousands of people,
and it felt like surely the government would fall the
next day. But the next day the right-wing government
still had their c. 38% support. In essence the demons-
trations mobilized the same half of the population that
was already in opposition.
I had exactly the same feeling four years ago, the day
after the inauguration, when my husband and I (and
our au pair, Alitta, and our friend Volodia who was a vi-
siting professor from Ukraine) took Kalev and Talia to
the Women’s March in New York. I had never seen that
many people on the streets of New York—or anywhere
else. I had been prepared to leave with the kids the
moment it felt edgy or violent—I’m not actually very
brave and I had no intention of taking any physical risks
with Kalev, who was then six, and Talia, who was then
four. But it never felt edgy. The mood was so good—
kid-friendly, mutually supportive, colorful, inclusive.
There were some fantastically creative posters—one of
my favorites was “Knitters Against Nitwits.” And like in
Warsaw, in New York that day you felt like the consen-
sus was so overwhelming that this repehensible govern-
ment could not possibly go on—and then the next day
you see that Trump still has his 40% or whatever it was,
that nothing has actually changed.
In the past four or five years, this division between the
two camps has been greater in the United States than I
had ever experienced before. There’s an abyss between
us. I’ve been very isolated from Trump supporters; I’ve
4 MARCI SHORE
“From the beginning
what was terrifying was
not what was being
concealed,but what
was being normalized.”

5. had no direct contact with them, as if they lived in a
different world. In 2016 my husband and I invited fo-
reign journalists we knew to come stay with us in New
Haven and cover the American elections. I wanted to
encourage journalists from abroad to come here: I felt
like it was a moment when the epistemological advan-
tages of marginality were considerable—you always see
different things when you come from the outside.
A fearless investigative reporter from Ukraine took us
up on the offer. Nataliya got off the flight from Kyiv with
all her equipment, ready to be her own cameraperson.
And we told her that we’d do whatever we could to help
her. She said she wanted to do interviews with Trump
supporters. And suddenly I thought: where am I going
to find her a Trump supporter in New Haven? I couldn’t
think of a single person I knew, even knew vaguely. In
the end, Nataliya only stayed with us for three days or
so because New Haven was clearly not the place to be
to cover the elections. We sent her off to stay with my
husband’s parents in rural Ohio, where the population
was—and all too likely remains—85% for Trump (my
parents-in-law are not part of this 85%). My mother-
in-law became Nataliya’s unofficial fixer, and in the end
Nataliya saw and learned much more about the wor-
ld of Trump supporters than I ever had—or have since
then, for that matter.
The Romanian absurdist playwright Eugène Ionesco
saw his friends—the best and brightest of the young
Romanian intellectuals—seduced by fascism in the
1930s. Later he wrote an allegorical play about fascism
titled Rhinoceros. (There’s an American film version as
well.) He later wrote about this experience:
University professors, students, intellectuals were tur-
ning Nazi, Iron Guards, one after the other. At the be-
ginning, certainly they were not Nazis. We were some
fifteen people who used to get together to discuss, to
try to find arguments opposing theirs. It was not easy…
From time to time, one of our friends said: ‘I don’t agree
with them, to be sure, but on certain points, neverthe-
less, I must admit, for example, the Jews…’, etc. And
this was a symptom. Three weeks later, this man would
become a Nazi. He was caught in the mechanism, he
accepted everything, he became a rhinoceros. Toward
the end, we were only three or four to have resisted.
One of the things that gives me hope is that in the past
four years I never had this experience. The divide has
remained steady in that sense. I have not seen anyone
become a rhinoceros. I have not lost any friends.
There is no shortage of smart, competent people who
are not morally insane—either in Poland or the United
States or in any other country I know. The problem is
rather what the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski
called “negative selection.” Why at certain moments do
the slimiest people—the most spineless, conscience-less
opportunists—rise to power? It’s not because there are
no other people. This is probably an arrogant thought,
but I think I could staff the whole government in Was-
hington just drawing upon my students and former stu-
dents and we would not be in such a bad situation at all.
On the subject of negative selection I would add so-
mething else. Conceptually there are at least two diffe-
rent phenomena we need to understand. The first is
exemplified by the Proud Boys, that strange synthesis of
the Klu-Klux-Klan-meets-the-Incels, and the QAnon
believers—i.e. the people who really believe in white su-
premacy or really believe that the Democrats are invol-
ved in a global pedophile conspiracy to sell children to
Satan—or both. The second is exemplified by Lindsay
Graham and Ted Cruz and Mitch McConnell and every
single one of those Republican Senators who might have
cringed when Trump got the Republican nomination
in 2016, but then got in line and voted for every single
one of Trump’s appointments. The ones now being re-
ferred as “the enablers.” Two years ago, in an attempt
to understand them, I read the different versions of the
Faust story—Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus,
Goethe’s Faust, Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. Under
what conditions does someone sell his soul to the devil?
I still haven’t managed to understand. Lindsay Graham
doesn’t make sense to me.
I wanted to go back to what you were talking about
with that 3, 4, 5% because I remember that coming
up in your discussion in the forum. You introduce
some questions about empathy in that discussion
and you said, "how do you change people’s minds,
but then there’s also the question of understanding
where the epistemological logical limits of our ability
to understand and on what basis we are able to un-
derstand each other…" and later you say the question
is if we reach our current limits of that understan-
ding, is there a way to push it further? And if we’re
never going to get to perfect understanding, how can
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6. we get further? To be more specific, how do we get to
that 3, 4, 5%? I know those are big questions, but how
do you think the limits of empathy are linked to these
divisions? These are big questions. I’m an intellectual
historian and I work on the history of philosophy. The
book I’m writing now has to do with thinkers in the
20th century pursuing the epistemological question:
Does truth exist? How can we reach truth? What can
we know, and what can we not know?
Thepracticeofwritinghistoryisimplicitlyboundup[in]
these kinds of epistemological questions. On the one
hand, as a historian, you can know more than any given
historical actor could know in real time. In The Human
Condition, Hannah Arendt writes about how the actor
is never the author of his or her own life story: it’s only
the historian looking back who can see what it was all
about. (This is the Hegelian perspective: meaning only
reveals itself in retrospect.) Looking back, given time
and good sources and the good critical skills, you can
find out much more than anyone could have known as
the events were happening. On the other hand, as a his-
torian, you never have all the pieces of the puzzle. You
try to track down as many as you can. Sometimes you
get fewer pieces, sometimes more. But there’s no such
thing as finding every single piece.
Every time I write I have to ask myself, “Do I have
enough pieces of the puzzle so as to feel reasonably
confident telling the story?” My first book, Caviar
and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in
Marxism, 1918-1968, is a milieu biography of a group
of Polish avant-garde poets who became communists.
There were scenes I very much wanted to write in that
book, but I just didn’t have good enough sources, either
I found too few sources or I didn’t trust enough the ones
I had.
The job of the historian is to understand. This past fall
was the 30th anniversary of the publication of Chris-
topher Browning’s Ordinary Men, a history of a unit of
German soldiers during the Second World War. Chris
Browning tries to understand how ordinary people
were turned into murderers. The book was controver-
sial: for many people it was not acceptable to even try to
understand those men. Understanding came too close
to excusing, the argument went. But the author insisted
that this was not the case: understanding was not jus-
tifying, and understanding was not forgiving. I think
that's the position you have to take as a historian. Our
job is to try to understand. That does not mean making
the past okay or suggesting “oh, it wasn’t so bad.” Un-
derstanding is a thing unto itself.
The second thing I would say in response to your ques-
tion is that I do believe in reaching out to readers out-
side of the university. “The uses and disadvantages of
historical comparisons for life” is very much an inter-
vention in the public sphere. There has long been a
strong sentiment at the university that scholarship has
to be preserved as a sphere unto itself, uncontaminated
by political engagement. It has to be a sacred space—se-
parate and protected. Our job is not to be political pun-
dits. That also only comes with a feeling that we should
not be writing in such a way that aims to be accessible to
everyone who reads Harlequin romance novels. We’re
supposed to be doing something special.
And there are good reasons to protect spaces for pure
scholarship. That said, I’ve always been skeptical of
the mandate to write only for my colleagues and to re-
frain from engaging in “real life.” This has something
to do with being a historian of Eastern Europe, where
there traditionally has been no such division between
intellectual life and the public sphere. In any case, in
the past four years I think that many of my colleagues
have felt that there was no longer any neutral space, no
space to stand aside. I remember talking to my friend
and colleague Jason Stanley, a professor in the philo-
sophy department, when he was contemplating wri-
ting the book that became How Fascism Works. He’s a
brilliant analytical philosopher of language. Most of his
scholarly work has been written in a way too technical
and complex for most non-philosophers to understand.
Now he was contemplating writing in a very different
way for a much larger audience. To me it was obvious
that he should do that. “Jason,” I said, “you’re an expert
in the language of ideology and propaganda. If you
don’t speak up now, then who should? Then we cede
the public sphere to the Steve Bannons?”
You talk sometimes about your research and your
scholarship as if you were a novelist. Do you ever see
yourself as a novelist and historical figures as charac-
ters? For me writing history is like writing novels, only
with certain constraints. As an undergraduate, I stu-
died creative writing and toyed with the idea of trying
to become a novelist. One thing fiction writers talk a
6 MARCI SHORE

7. lot about is the “suspension of disbelief.” When you’re
reading a novel (or watching a film, or a play, and so on)
you’re supposed to forget that it’s not real. This is what
as a historian I want from my readers as well: I want
total absorption in the story.
I choose my characters. The convenient thing about
writing about intellectuals is that they write themselves;
they therefore produce a lot of material, which in turn
provides the historian with details. I don’t believe that a
given illiterate peasant necessarily had a less interesting
life than a poet who was reading Nietzsche and Maya-
kovsky. But it’s very hard, as a historian and therefore
someone who is not allowed to make things up, to ren-
der a peasant on the page as vivid a character because
we don’t have the sources to provide the details. In or-
der to make a character feel real to the reader, you need
individualizing details.
I wanted to talk a bit about your next project, Phe-
nomenological Encounters: Scenes from East-Central
Europe. In the introductory essay you write for the fo-
rum you also discuss empathy. You compare different
philosophers' ideas of empathy, and you settle on the
idea of empathy as an embodied lingering that pro-
vides space for being together with the past and with
one another. That was Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s idea.
He elaborates on that in his contribution in the forum
(which I encourage everyone to read!). In my introduc-
tion I try to extract his key idea and make it slightly
more reader-friendly. I love his writing, but if it can be
difficult for readers who have none of the philosophical
references he uses.
No, I think you did a very good job. I didn't have any
background but I thought it was interesting and rea-
dable. I was fascinated by this idea of empathy being
together with the past and with one another, and I
thought it wasn't so different from the kind of work
that you do applying European intellectual thought
to current events, which also seems to be the impetus
of your next work. I was wondering if you agree with
that, if you see your scholarship as a being together
with a past and applying it to the present. Yes. The first
chapter of Caviar and Ashes is set in Warsaw in the early
1920s. And these self-absorbed young poets are sitting
in a café, smoking, drinking lots of black coffee and
writing poetry on napkins and believing that the wor-
ld moves on what they say to one another there. And I
was completely absorbed in those characters. Years ago,
when I gave my dissertation advisor, Norman Naimark,
the first draft of that first chapter (producing your first
full dissertation chapter is kind of a big deal), he sat me
down in his office (this was at Stanford, in California)
and he said, “Okay, Marci, let me tell you something.
The people you’re writing about—they are crazy. And
your job is to make us believe that you are one of us,
explaining them to us. But somehow I read this and I
get the feeling that you’re right there with them.”
Distance, he told me. A little more distance. And he was
right: I was totally immersed in these characters. I had
read myself into their world.
The protagonists of that first book had all no longer
been living for quite some time. My most recent book,
The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History of Revolution,
involved different dilemmas because I was writing a
history of the present, so to speak. It was a book I never
intended to write. I was on sabbatical in Vienna when
the Ukrainian revolution broke out in 2013-2014, and I
was captivated. I couldn’t turn away. Initially I promised
myself I would just write one essay, trying to put a hu-
man face on this revolution. The original title was “A
Phenomenology of the Ukrainian Revolution,” and the
method was phenomenological: I was trying to capture
the revolution as pure experience given to subjectivity,
without delving into political analyses. I wanted imme-
diacy. I wanted to convey the experience of revolution.
I published the essay in German translation, and I was
happy with it at the time. But I had trouble finding an
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“I was trying to
capture the revolution
as pure experience
given to subjectivity
[...] I wanted to convey
the experience of a
revolution.”

8. English-language venue. The essay was too long and
too few Americans cared very much about the details of
what was happening in Ukraine.
I showed it to one editor, Steve Wasserman, asking his
advice as a friend, and he said: Don’t cut it. Go back
to Ukraine, develop it, it should be a short book. But
not—he said—with that title. You will never write a
book with phenomenology in the title. Americans do
not buy books with phenomenology in the title.
I’m sure Steve was right. I ended up going back to
Ukraine several times and writing a book without phe-
nomenology in the title. There is a lot of philosophy
between the lines, so to speak, but it’s also a book very
intentionally written for a broad audience. You don’t
need the philosophical references to follow the story.
When I was working on that book in 2014 and 2015,
I was thinking about how to explain certain things
happening in Ukraine that would seem very bizarre
to Americans. By the time I finished the book in 2017,
so much of what had happened there had come to us.
And if I appreciated the meaning of certain things
when Trump came on the scene before other Ameri-
cans did, it was not because I was smarter, but because
I understood things—like post-truth—that had already
been playing out in Russia and Ukraine. I had a head
start, so to speak.
You also talk about how American exceptionalism
translates into our language, too. We are monolin-
guals in every sense of the word. Our ability to un-
derstand what's happening in other countries and in
other languages, our complete lack of interest in it.
Could talk about how that role as a translator bleeds
into your scholarship? Anyone who has lived and
worked in different languages knows what it means to
code-switch. I can’t prove this, but I strongly suspect
that monolingualism is a source of some of our Ame-
rican pathologies. It’s more than a linguistic deficit.
It’s also an imaginative deficit. If you speak two lan-
guages—if you know what it means to flip that switch
or put on those different glasses—you can theoretically
imagine a third or a fourth of a fifth. But if you’ve only
ever spoken one, the second is unimaginable. The idea
that the world could be just as real but different in ano-
ther language is unimaginable.
All of what I write involves translation—I’m always
translating my sources, both literally and conceptually.
I’ve also dabbled in literary translation for its own sake,
so to speak. I translated a beautiful book by the Polish
literary theorist Michał Głowiński, a beautiful memoir
of his childhood in the Warsaw ghetto, called The Black
Seasons. More recently I translated the short story “Se-
ven Dillweeds” by a Ukrainian writer named Vladimir
Rafeenko set at the beginning of the (still-ongoing)
war in eastern Ukraine. I love translation. It’s a kind of
voyeuristic exercise, taking on someone else’s voice.
Last question: Can you please describe yourself in
two sentences, one personal and the other profes-
sional? Describe myself in two sentences? I’m a very,
very anxious person. Very neurotic. Kind of Woody
Allen-esque neurotic, so that colors everything. At mo-
ments during the past several months I’ve felt tempted
to subtitle the news “vindication of the neurotic catas-
trophists” (being myself a neurotic catastrophist).
Four years ago, on the day after the election, I picked
myself up off the floor of my office at the Whitney Hu-
manities Center and went to teach my seminar. I didn’t
expect my students to be there, but they were all there,
waiting for me with bloodshot eyes. The one who spoke
first said, “Professor Shore, is it going to be okay?” And
I could not tell them yes. I knew the answer was no.
To combine both of them: One thing I’ve come to ap-
preciate this semester is just how dependent I was on
being in the classroom. In German there’s a word hei-
misch—something that gives the feeling of being at
home. For me the classroom (in whatever country it
might be) has always been a heimisch space. I feel at
home there. After the November 2016 elections, I felt
like my calmest, most centered moments were in the
classroom. I would come to class and close the door and
know that for an hour or two hours it was just myself
and the students and the texts. And I felt like: now it’s
okay, I know what I’m doing. I’m doing the thing I can
do. For me the classroom has been a space of compo-
sure, of feeding off the responses, energy, and questions
of the students, of thinking together. It’s been very hard
for me to lose that during this pandemic. I don’t feel
“at home” on zoom. I can’t feel the mood through the
screen; I don’t have my finger on the pulse of the class
the same way. I don’t trust my intuition.
8 MARCI SHORE