To the Editor:
May I add one delayed firecracker to Martin Thomas’ wonderful demolition of Ilya Ehrenburg in your August issue?
In Bucharest the man who probably deplores Ehrenburg most is one Marius, major-domo of Kapsha’s famed restaurant on the Calea Victoriei. To this mecca of all surviving gourmets in liberated and hungry Rumania, Ehrenburg came one day during his reportorial tour of Russia’s Europe.
“I served him with my own hands, that Ehrenburg,” Marius told me, his voice quivering with remembered indignation. “He said his mission in Bucharest was to make a big story about how well Rumania was getting along under the glorious Soviet occupation. For evidence, I gave him the best meal he had eaten since Paris before the war. He said so himself. He ate and ate. He sent his congratulations to the chef. And then, when he had finished, he wrote a terrible story about us, about the decadent capitalist atmosphere, the sickeningly rich food, the ‘snivelling bourgeois clientèle.’”
Hal Lehrman
New York City
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