EHRENBURG, ILYA GRIGORYEVICH

EHRENBURG, ILYA GRIGORYEVICH (1891–1967), Soviet Russian writer and journalist. Born to an assimilated middle-class Jewish family in Kiev and, with no ties to Jewish religion or culture, Ehrenburg is typical of many Jewish left-wing intellectuals of this century, whom Hitler and Stalin would not allow to forget their origins. A feeling of outrage at antisemitism recurs in Ehrenburg's books and journalistic output throughout his career and was a major factor in his youthful revolt against Czarist and, at the end of his life, against Stalinist injustice. Forced to flee Russia because of participation in revolutionary activities, he lived abroad, mainly in Paris, between 1908 and 1917. Ehrenburg returned to Russia after the February Revolution, criticizing sharply in his essays the October Revolution and its leaders, Lenin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, and others. He left again in 1921 and lived mainly in Berlin, where he witnessed the rise of the Nazis to power. Understanding that Nazi ideology was a danger to the world, he proposed to Stalin in September 1934 to turn the International Organization of Revolutionary Writers into a movement against Fascism and in support of the Soviet Union. His proposal was accepted. He did not permanently settle in the U.S.S.R. until shortly before the Nazi attack on the U.S.S.R. in the summer of 1941. On the eve of the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement, the   publication of his poems and essays was stopped, but renewed on the eve of the German attack on the Soviet Union. From 1948 he was active in the pro-Soviet World Peace Movement, serving as its vice chairman. Of the nearly 30 volumes of Ehrenburg's literary and journalistic output, including collections of poems, the most successful was his first novel, Neobychaynye pokhozhdeniya Khulio Khurenito (1922; The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito, 1958), an all-out sardonic attack on different aspects of modern civilization, including its persecutions "of the tribe of Judah." A series of rather undistinguished novels dealing with different subjects followed in rapid succession. These include Zhizn i gibel Nikolaya Kurbova (1923; "The Life and Death of Nikolai Kurbov"), the story of the undoing of a Soviet secret policeman; Lyubov Zhanny Ney (1923; "The Love of Jeanne Ney"), an account of a love affair involving a Russian Communist and a "bourgeois" French woman; Rvach (1925; "The Grabber"), a typical tale of a Soviet revolutionary corrupted by peacetime prosperity; and Zagovor ravnykh (1928; "The Conspiracy of Equals"), which tells the story of Babeuf, one of the heroes of the French Revolution. Closest in spirit to Julio Jurenito is Ehrenburg's "Jewish" novel, Burnaya zhizn Lazika Roytshvantsa (1927; The Stormy Life of Lazik Roitschwantz, 1960) a biting lampoon of injustice, hypocrisy, and pretense both under capitalism and in the new Soviet republic. Its hero, a pathetic Jewish tailor, is a direct descendant of the ne'er-do-wells and Luftmenschen of shalom aleichem . Try as he may, Lazik Roitschwantz cannot understand why both the Reds and the Whites consider harmless folk like himself dangerous enemies of the State. Though outwardly a rogue, all Lazik Roitschwantz really desires is to earn a livelihood and to be left alone by the authorities. Though liberated by the revolution from the yoke of official Czarist antisemitism, he is now suspect to the Soviet bureaucrats as a petty bourgeois individualist artisan. Escaping to Western Europe, he finds himself mistaken for a Communist agent and is packed off to jail as a Jewish Bolshevik. When he finally makes his way to Palestine, fate decrees that he die of starvation in the land of his ancestors. There are no grounds to doubt Ehrenburg's assurances that the main reason he opposed reprinting the novel in the post-Stalin nine-volume set of his works brought out in the 1960s was his feeling that the old caricature of the "little Jew" should not be revived only a few years after millions of real-life "little Jews" were murdered in Nazi crematoria. Ehrenburg's loyalty to the Soviet regime did not waver during Stalin's bloodiest terror as well as during the Nazi-Soviet pact, and for years he was a most vocal apologist for some of the most abhorrent features of the Soviet regime. His activities in the latter capacity frequently smacked of cynical opportunism, just as his later championing of freedom might have been dictated by a desire to expiate his guilt as a verbal accomplice in Stalin's crimes. There is, however, one aspect of Ehrenburg's activity in which the writer's sincerity is beyond all questioning, namely his opposition to Nazism. His novel Padeniye Parizha (1941; "The Fall of Paris"), written during the period of Nazi-Soviet friendship, was published in its entirety only after Hitler's armies had invaded Russia. Ehrenburg had become the leading Soviet journalist on the strength of his reports in Izvestia on the Spanish Civil War and, during World War II, his impassioned diatribes against the German invaders were distributed to millions of Soviet soldiers. A member of the jewish anti-fascist Committee, he stressed his Jewish identity during the war. On the assignment of the Committee he prepared together with Vasily Grossman the "Red Book" on the heroism of Jewish fighters and the "Black Book" on the Holocaust of Soviet Jewry. The first book was banned outright by the authorities. The second was even typeset, but during the liquidation of the committee in 1948 it was halted by the KGB. Parts of the book were then published in Yiddish (1944) and Romanian (1946), and it was fully published in Russian in 1980 in Jerusalem by Yad Vashem. Ehrenburg's usefulness as the Soviet Union's foremost anti-German ideologist came to an end with the defeat of Nazism, but he was soon to achieve eminence in the propaganda onslaught on the West, which is also much in evidence in his two novels of that period, Burya (1947; The Storm, 1949) and Devyaty val (1952; The Ninth Wave, 1958). In the fall of 1948 he played a significant part in the Soviet Union's swing away from outright support for the State of Israel. In an article in Pravda he opposed Jewish nationalism and warned Soviet Jews against cultivating any special attachment to Israel more than any other capitalist land. A controversy that is not likely to be solved for years to come relates to Ehrenburg's role during the sinister antisemitic purges which claimed the lives of scores of Ehrenburg's friends and colleagues, such as the actor solomon mikhoels , the poets itzik fefer and peretz markish , the novelist david bergelson and others. Not only did Ehrenburg escape their tragic fate, but in 1952, the year when the others were executed, Ehrenburg was awarded the Stalin Prize. However, he detached himself from the official line over the "Doctor's Plot." Almost immediately after Stalin's death in March of 1953 Ehrenburg became a spokesman for those Soviet intellectuals who demanded liberal reforms. His novelette Ottepel (1954–56; "The Thaw") was a major event in the struggle for a more humane Soviet society: it was an indictment of many aspects of Stalinism, including crudely propagandistic art and the antisemitic campaigns. Yet in retrospect Ehrenburg's crowning achievement may well prove to be his memoirs Lyudi, gody, zhizn (1961; People and Life 1891 – 1921, 1962; Memoirs: 1921 – 41, 1964), which were serialized in the monthly Novy Mir between 1960 and 1965. In spite of all the evasions and distortions, these presented a relatively truthful picture of Russia's and Western Europe's artistic and literary intelligentsia during the 1920s and 1930s and included several loving portraits of Yiddish cultural figures. Ehrenburg's memoirs constitute, in fact, the closest Soviet approximation to date of cultural history. On the occasion of his 70th birthday celebrations, Ehrenburg stated: "Even though my passport declares me to be a Jew,   I am a Russian writer," implying that Soviet Jews were allowed entry into Russian culture, but not into the Russian people. Toward the end of his life Ehrenburg frequently clashed with Soviet official spokesmen, stubbornly championing the cause of a greater degree of artistic and personal freedom and, whenever the opportunity presented itself, heaping scorn on Soviet antisemites. Thousands took part in his funeral, many of them young Jews who saw him as a liberal and a fellow Jew. A major biographical study of this Soviet Jewish writer in English appeared in 1984: Ilya Ehrenburg: Writing, Politics and the Art of Survival by Anatol Goldberg, with an introduction, postscript, and additional material by Erik de Mauny. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: M. Friedberg, in: G.W. Simmonds (ed.), Soviet Leaders (1967), 272–81; M. Slonim, Soviet Russian Literature (1964), 208–17; T. Trifonova, Ilya Ehrenburg (Russ., 1952); V. Alexandrova, A History of Soviet Literature (1964), 127–42. (Maurice Friedberg / Shmuel Spector (2nd ed.)