Odd Man Out?
Ilya Ehrenburg: Writing, Politics, and the Art of Survival.
by Anatol Goldberg.
Introduction, postscript, and additional material by Erik de Mauny. Viking. 312 pp. $17.95.
The career of the writer Ilya Ehrenburg is an inextricable part of the odyssey and travails of Russian Jewry in the 20th century, under both czars and Soviets. Born in 1891 into a comfortable, assimilated family in Kiev, Ehrenburg grew up in Moscow where he became friendly with Nikolai Bukharin, the future Bolshevik leader and ideologue who introduced him to underground political activity. The youthful Ehrenburg was arrested and imprisoned, but then allowed to leave Russia to study in the West. Thus began his lifelong affair with Paris, where, during and after World War I, he enjoyed the companionship of such artists and writers as Picasso, Soutine, Cocteau, Apollinaire, and Modigliani.
Ehrenburg returned home in 1917, and thenceforth moved continuously between Russia and the West. In the 20’s and 30’s, he was Paris correspondent for several Soviet journals, reporting among other things on the Saar plebiscite of 1935, the Spanish Civil War, and the fall of Paris to the Nazis. During World War II, he became one of the leading members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, and won international stature as an anti-Nazi propagandist par excellence.
It was perhaps this role that helped to insure his survival during Stalin’s “anti-cosmopolitan” campaign of the late 40’s and early 50’s. In any event, Ehrenburg was one of the very few leading Soviet-Jewish intellectuals to live into the Khrushchev era. (His role in the formation of the World Peace Council may also have helped.) Ehrenburg then became the prophet who wrote The Thaw, and the brilliant autobiographer of People, Years, Life. He died in 1967.
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As even so brief a summary of his life suggests, Ehrenburg’s role in Soviet political and intellectual affairs is susceptible of conflicting interpretations. Was he simply an apologist for Stalinism, or was he a covert fighter for the liberalization of Soviet society? As a Jew, was he primarily an assimilationist, or did he identify strongly with his people? The answer, of course, is that he was both.
In the old Russian tradition of the writer at odds with the censor (whether czarist or Soviet), Ehrenburg sometimes wrote in a sort of “Aesopian language,” telegraphing his meaning to those who understood the code. For example, only a few months after the establishment of Israel in 1948, he contributed an article to Pravda that already heralded the prospective switch in Soviet policy away from its earlier pro-Zionist stance. In this piece he denounced the Zionists as “mystics” and warned Soviet Jews not to develop any special sympathy for Israel or indeed to succumb to notions of solidarity with Jews elsewhere. True, Ehrenburg wrote, the Soviet Union welcomed Jewish aspirations to statehood, but the “workers” in Israel “must fight not only against the [Arab] invaders but also against the bourgeoisie. . . .”
Three weeks later when Golda Myerson (Meir), the first ambassador of Israel to the Soviet Union, celebrated the Jewish New Year at Moscow’s central synagogue amid the tumultuous enthusiasm of fellow-worshippers, it was clear why Ehrenburg had written as he did. Such demonstrations could not be tolerated. The Soviet onslaught on Zionism and Israel had not yet developed anti-Semitic overtones, but the message Ehrenburg was delivering was certainly an ominous one. Or was it only a timely warning?
Even more ambiguous, not to say sinister, was Ehrenburg’s position with regard to the dissolution of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and the arrest of its leading members, all of whom were later executed (1949-52). They included friends and colleagues of Ehrenburg—the writers Dovid Bergelson, Itzik Fefer, and Peretz Markish, and the actor/director Shlomo Mikhoels. When the question of their fate was raised at a London press conference in 1950, Ehrenburg merely replied: “If anything unpleasant had happened to them, I would have known about it.” His biographer, Anatol Goldberg, calls this a “lie . . . deliberately decked out to sound like the truth.”
Yet Ehrenburg avoided the worst servilities of the Stalinist period, and in a curious way he did preserve his integrity. He knew and recognized what was happening, and when the time was ripe—that is, when it was safe, after Stalin’s death—he revealed something of what he had seen. He then became a spokesman for some degree of liberalization of Soviet society and greater freedom for creative writers. In 1966, a year before his death, Ehrenburg was one of the 62 members of the Soviet Writers’ Union who sent a letter of protest to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet over the condemnation of two of the earliest dissidents, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel.
As a Jew, Ehrenburg was a constant target of party hacks like the novelist Mikhail Sholokhov, to whom he (and also Pasternak) were not “Russian writers.” Yet unlike Pasternak, Ehrenburg never forswore his Jewish origins, and just before his death in 1967 he identified himself fully with Israel’s cause in the Six-Day War.
Nadezhda Mandelstam perhaps sums it up best in her memoirs when she calls Ehrenburg “always the odd man out among the Soviet writers. . . . He was as helpless as everybody else, but at least he tried to do something for others.” At his funeral, she adds,
there was a great crowd and the faces were decent and human ones. It was an anti-fascist crowd and the police spies who had been sent to the funeral stood out very conspicuously. It was clear, in other words, that Ehrenburg had done his work well, difficult and thankless though it was.
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Ehrenburg was an extraordinarily prolific and versatile writer. There are to his credit thirty-odd volumes of novels, poems, plays, reportage, chronicles, memoirs, literary criticism, polemics, and so forth. The great bulk is ephemeral, but two of the early novels stand out as lasting contributions to Russian literature. The first is The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito, first published in Berlin in 1922 and shortly afterward in a Soviet edition with an introduction by Bukharin, then editor of Pravda and a member of the Politburo. The second is Lazik Roitschwantz (1927), also published in Berlin.
Julio Jurenito is Ehrenburg’s response to war, revolution, and the general state of the world. A satire that at times recalls Swift, Voltaire, and Aldous Huxley, it is iconoclastic, spirited, witty, anarchic, tasteless. The plot—of which Goldberg gives an ample summary—concerns a conspiracy to destroy the world by exacerbating its already abundant disorders and abuses. The aim of the conspirators is to achieve a state of perfect freedom, beyond both capitalism and socialism; indeed, a curious feature of the novel is the lightly disguised figure of Lenin, shown as “the captain on the bridge” who desires to make men free—but by force.
Lazik Roitschwantz is satire in a different genre and tradition, that of Yiddish literature. Ehrenburg takes the familiar figure of the Luftmensch and makes of it a tragicomic vehicle for exposing and illuminating corruption and pretense. Lazik, a tailor, undergoes a series of picaresque misadventures; he is alternately exploiter and exploited, an innocent and a charlatan. At one point he falls victim to the chicanery of Soviet bureaucracy; at another he plays the part of a Marxist literary critic whose impressive jargon takes in his fellow critics; at still another he poses as a modern painter of unique originality who through his guile undermines at once the cultural self-importance of rich Frankfurt Jews and the clichés of modern art. In a final irony, Lazik dies in Palestine, his ancestral homeland. An extraordinary book, extraordinary both for the evenhandedness of its wit and for its flavor of Jewish nationalism, Lazik has understandably never been published in the Soviet Union.
In the end, not much more remains of Ehrenburg’s voluminous writings than these two works of satire. The rest—the literary “peace” campaigns, the endless record of adjustments and accommodations to the shifting Soviet line—all belong to the past. But it is a past well worth recalling, and Goldberg has done it justice.
Like Ehrenburg, his biographer was also born in Russia of a middle-class Jewish family. He migrated to the West in the mid-1930’s and became a respected commentator on Russian affairs for the BBC. This familiarity with the two worlds, combined with a certain remoteness from both, gave Goldberg, who unfortunately died before completing this book, the necessary feel for the nuances of a slippery, dark, and still enigmatic subject.
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