Joshua Rubenstein's Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg

...He spent most of the 1930s outside of Russia, traveling to Spain to cover the Civil War and all over Europe to report on the rapidly deteriorating situation...

...One cannot avoid judging Ehrenburg's behavior...

...From 1953 until he died, he paid his debts of friendship, making restitution by bringing to the attention of an avid public the names, the works, and the fates of scores of writers and artists...

...He was arrested neither then nor later, and as Rubinstein rightly says, we can never know for certain why not...

...Dissent republished portions of Turner's account in 1957, as did Le Monde...

...More than this: while never forgetting the safety created by decades and distance, one ought not avoid judging and at times condemning him...

...In my own case I came to a couple of conclusions, however speculative, about Ehrenburg's choices...

...His mother's early orthodoxy left no trace on Ehrenburg, though he loved her and did not, as far as one can tell, much care for his rakish and secular father...

...A friend who later regretted that Ehrenburg had "assassinated the artist" in himself was generous...

...Ehrenburg wrote too of the "conspiracy of silence," engendered by terror, on which rested the whole Stalinist edifice...

...He came near to being arrested himself: NKVD files show that his name was given by several people, including Babel and Meyerhold, when they were tortured during interrogation...

...On the contrary: when Stalin refused his request for permission to leave Russia so that he could better serve her by covering Spain, Ehrenburg had the desperate chutzpah to ask again—and got it...

...it's not clear there was an artist to assassinate...

...Art was what mattered, and Ehrenburg was writing up a storm...

...The issue is not whether I like Pasternak, Babel, Sholokhov, etc., but what will more easily and reliably attract the European intelligentsia to us...

...he used it again with Khrushchev...

...He also managed to bring his daughter to France for her education (and enjoyed several vacations in the French countryside...

...The story is nonsense, and Rubinstein makes appropriately short shrift of it, but it dogged Ehrenburg's footsteps, testimony not to any actual guilt but to the suspicions inevitably engendered by his ambiguous position...

...On balance, however, he rates the sum of the compromises as less than the sum of accomplishments, and he makes a good case for his bookkeeping...

...Ehrenburg wanted to stay in Europe, yet he wanted to reach a Soviet readership and to safeguard his family, which meant he had to keep his Soviet passport...

...He was actively engaged, wearing one or another of his multitude of professional hats—poet, novelist, journalist, quasi-official diplomat, chronicler of his own and other people's history, interpreter of culture for a generation cut off from its own past...

...A brief dalliance with the Whites, routinely brought up against him in later years, dissolved in the fearful anti-Semitic pogroms they countenanced and exploited, if not indeed organized...

...Finding a good subject is a biographer's first hurdle, and in choosing Ilya Ehrenburg, Joshua Rubinstein flew right over the bar...

...Ehrenburg was indeed lucky—lucky to be out of the country so much of the time, lucky that circumstances had conspired to make him a symbol it could be awkward to eliminate...

...According to them, Turner reported, Ehrenburg was "the chief witness" for the state...

...He was a Jew because Jews were uniquely persecuted, and his involvement grew proportionately as the persecution grew...

...He was no Bolshevik, though he flirted with Bolshevism after the 1905 revolution, when any self-respecting student from his kind of liberal Jewish background had to choose a left-wing political affiliation, and he was shocked to find himself in a czarist prison for several months...

...He became an accredited correspondent for Izvestia, in 1932 edited by his friend Bukharin...

...He got away again in 1935, but was back in 1937, after writing his own version of the party's excoriation of Andre Gide...

...Nadezhda Mandelstam, an implacable critic of her peers, offered him comfort: "People always wanted the impossible from you and were angry when you did the possible...

...Ideological differences fractured the Russian emigre communities of Berlin and Paris and eventually strained many of Ehrenburg's friendships, but among Ehrenburg's set, which included almost every major left-wing European intellectual and artist, ethnic and national boundaries were irrelevant...

...Harsh anti-German rhetoric was no longer timely, and Ilya Ehrenburg— the Soviet Union's most famous and most popular war correspondent—was unable to publish his articles in the press...

...Yet it is perhaps his friends, loyal to him as he was to them, who should have the last word in assessing Ilya Ehrenburg...

...Rubinstein's mastery of the many aspects of Ehrenburg's "life and times" is unrivaled, and he presents this spider web of people and places, politics and art, with admirable clarity...

...It is a question inherently mistrustful, as if Ehrenburg's very survival made him morally suspect: what, the question suggests, did he "sell" in order to "buy" his survival...

...It was published in Berlin in 1921 and a year later in Russia...

...But from the mid-1930s until Stalin's death, Ehrenburg was deeply afraid...

...Rubinstein carefully traces the process of Ehrenburg's accommodation to a continually more repressive and mendacious Soviet regime...

...In 1963, Ehrenburg was despondent over Khrushchev's strident condemnation of the memoirs...

...Friends were Ehrenburg's family: he cared deeply for them and sustained his relationships with them for decades...

...Rubinstein calls Ehrenburg's vision in Julio "startlingly prescient," but in fact his forebodings were shared by others at the time, most notably by Evgeny Zamyatin, who wrote his own apocalyptic glimpse into the totalitarian future, the novel We, in 1920...

...He compares Ehrenburg's obsequious flattery of Stalin, in 1951, with Mandelstam's attempt to save his life by writing an "Ode to Stalin" in 1936, and Akhmatova's attempt to save her son in 1947: the stakes were not the same...

...Bukharin's trial was then taking place, and Ehrenburg received a pass to attend, a "privilege" he could not refuse...

...By the time the Bolsheviks actually took power he had another decade of life under his belt, much of it spent among bohemian artists in Paris, and his youthful infatuation was long gone...

...The harm they were prepared to do was, though irritating and humiliating, relatively trivial...

...In 1960, after much effort, he pushed through the Russian publication of The Diary of Anne Frank...

...For their sake he wrote his multivolume memoir, People, Years, Life, the book that precipitated his final battles with the regime...

...This was a pattern: during the Soviet-Nazi pact the physiological symptoms of his distress lasted several months and took forty pounds off him...

...Ehrenburg seems to me to have been driven by two overriding considerations...

...After March 1953, Ehrenburg's overpowering fear vanished...

...In 1947, he called on Anna Akhmatova in Leningrad when she was absoWINTER • 1997 • 133 Books lutely persona non grata—an act of courage...

...As the troika of political nightmares galloped through the 1930s, the journalist Ehrenburg saw and understood better than many the fearful potentials of fascism and Naziism...

...Nor was 132 • DISSENT Books Ehrenburg's identification of Jews with a spirit of negation unique, though his anxiety on their behalf was all too well-founded...

...What a life...

...If (more) proof were needed, it came in the last weeks of the war, when Stalin's strategy vis-à-vis Germany, especially the Eastern Zone, had altered...

...Under Julio's guidance the world will be purged of "suspicious elements," particularly the nation that incarnates the spirit of negation, the Jews...

...That trip home shocked him, the ubiquitous dread and the long list of friends, all of them loyal communists, under arrest...

...in 1966, he delivered a lecture on Zola and anti-Semitism, which—though the censors considered it "seditious"—was published in Izvestia's literary supplement...

...His Jewishness was, given the times he lived in, another likely trap...

...In 1949, he employed as his secretary the daughter of a labor camp inmate, a choice both unusual and risky...

...The question of complicity haunted Ehrenburg's life and lies at the heart of Rubinstein's biography...

...He abstains from probing too deeply into Ehrenburg's psyche, preferring to present actions and allow readers to infer motives...

...The postwar years were still worse, as the Zhdanovshchina clamped down on artists and the anticosmopolitan campaign targeted Jews...

...The demonic Julio, whom Rubinstein characterizes as "a metaphysical cheerleader for mankind's ability to destroy itself," has several disciples, the most frightening among them the proto-Nazi Karl Schmidt and his ally in Moscow, an unnamed leader obviously modeled on Lenin...

...Ehrenburg's seventy-six years stretched from the Pale of Settlement to the Six Day War, from the coronation of Nicholas II to the rule of Leonid Brezhnev...

...During Stalin's lifetime, especially the last phase between 1946 and 1953, Ehrenburg wrote his share of lies on behalf of the Soviet state...

...Ehrenburg was on a long leash...

...Nor was Ehrenburg an onlooker in the events of those overstuffed decades...

...Scores of articles and a dozen more novels, virtually all now forgotten, quickly followed...

...It sat uneasily on him, never denied yet important almost exclusively as a badge of proud defiance against bigots...

...He was useful to Stalin's regime, and he was cagey, shrewdly exploiting his reputation in the West and his links to Western left-wing public opinion, always a matter of concern to the Kremlin...

...His gorge literally rose: he was unable to swallow food, his body rebelling in reaction to what he heard and saw...

...But a leash it was, and when the master tugged, home he came...

...The price was twofold...

...Now . . . it is obvious how much you did and are doing to relax our usual ways, how great your role is in our life and how we should be grateful to you . . . I am happy to tell you this and to shake your hand...

...Ehrenburg's taste was for modernism, but his talent was decidedly limited...

...For this, even more than for reviving 134 • DISSENT Books "mouldering literary corpses" (in the words of one hardline critic), Ehrenburg incurred the wrath of political and cultural watchdogs, and they did their best to make his last years as miserable as possible...

...Censorship notwithstanding, Ehrenburg's memoirs opened a tightly shut window onto the Soviet past, and Rubinstein does not overstate when he calls the memoir "an attempt to restore the country's cultural history...

...He returned for the 1934 First Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers, proving his worth by bringing along Andre Malraux and acting as both chairman of several sessions and translator for many eminent foreign guests...

...He poured out his first novel, The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and His Disciples, in just one month...

...in life, as he later wrote, internationalism was his "preferred nationality...

...The most damning accusations came in 1956 from an Israeli journalist, Bernard Turner, who claimed to have been in a labor camp together with Itzik Fefer and David Bergelson, two of the Yiddish writers executed in 1952...

...But Julio is honest and inventive, a red-hot satire on European complacency, a modern Candide minus Pangloss...

...And what a puzzle Ehrenburg presents, to have survived it all when so many aspects of his complex political, ethnic, and artistic identity seemed to invite disaster...

...He used much the same argument seventeen years later, writing to Stalin of the need to provide "a powerful deterrent to foreign slanderers and . . . sound arguments for our friends who are fighting for peace...

...But his choice of party was dictated less by conviction than by admiration for his slightly older buddy Nikolay Bukharin ("Bukharchik") and a desire to rebel WINTER • 1997 • 131 Books against his father's moderate brand of political opposition: he was, after all, just fifteen...

...The post-Stalin leadership could be nasty, they could be brutal, they could defer or prevent publication of Ehrenburg's work, they could demand cuts or changes, they could make it hard for him to travel—but they would not arrest him and they would not kill him...

...And he became a nonaccredited Soviet diplortiat, a bridge between the Soviet Union and Western communist (and some noncommunist) intellectuals, many of whom were old friends...

...As the lies and the corpses piled up, however, his unique status grew ever more costly...

...Unlike Isaac Babel, whose snarled relationship with his Jewish identity included both knowledge of and affection for its traditions, Ehrenburg knew no Yiddish and had no firsthand knowledge of Jewish life in the shtetlakh of the Pale, or even in such cosmopolitan centers as Odessa...

...His relationship to the third -ism—Russia's homegrown variety—was more problematic...

...Ehrenburg was unique in his relative freedom to shuttle between Europe and the Soviet Union, and in his almost unbroken success in publishing his work...

...In Ehrenburg's The Stormy Life of Lazik Roitschwantz (1927) the hero is one of those Jews, a mocking Menachem Mendl whose subversion of all authorities—civil, religious, political— lands him in one prison after another, till he ends in Palestine only to be jailed yet again, this time by Jewish cops...

...During the pogroms in Kiev in 1919 he wrote articles exposing the mentality ("Beat Jews, Save Russia") that scapegoated Jews...

...But back in 1921, when Ehrenburg managed to escape the chaos of Russia for the capitals of Western Europe—an escape Bukharin helped to engineer, authorizing a Soviet visa for Ehrenburg months before such documents were accessible—his Jewish identity took a back seat to other concerns...

...In 1936, for instance, when a few drops of the vitriol splashed onto Shostakovich and other modernist artists spattered Ehrenburg for his repeated praise of Pasternak, he fought back by allying his own activities to "general political considerations...

...The Second World War made his name literally a household word, but as long as Stalin lived nothing was stable and no one secure...

...In a sense, anti-Semitism made a Jew out of Ehrenburg...

...Jewishness, under no immediate threat, could assume the literary form of irony, via his fictional characters...

...In 1935, his public defense of Babel and Picasso took nerve...

...One was fear, the other friendship...

...Rubinstein is no apologist for Ehrenburg, though he occasionally confuses physical survival with material rewards, as when he comments that Ehrenburg's compliance—he had just lied to friends at the World Peace Congress in 1949 about the fates of Peretz Markish and Solomon Mikhoels—"was the price for his survival...

...He wrote poems about the Bolsheviks as "rapists" and "conquerors...

...But he wasn't arrested...

...Luck was a large part of it...

...Twenty-five years later, in the wake of an infinitely greater menace, he and Vasily Grossman gathered testimony to the destruction of Soviet Jewry during the Second World War, compiling The Black Book, which went unpublished in Russia for nearly fifty years...

...His lifetime spanned two world wars, a civil war at home and one in Spain, three Russian revolutions, the Great Terror and Khrushchev's Secret Speech, the murder of Yiddish writers and the publication of Yevtushenko's "Babi Yar...

...Yet there were limits to what Ehrenburg would do, and even then, there were moments of boldness, or kindness, or both, to match his caution...

...And once the vise of fear loosened, friendship surged back, as did Ehrenburg's guilt for the years when he was free and successful, collecting kudos and cars while his friends— most of them, as he well knew, far greater artists than he—were disappearing...