Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg (Judaic Studies Series) [Paperback]

Joshua Rubenstein (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0817309632 | ISBN-13: 978-0817309633 | Publication Date: February 17, 1999 | Edition: 1

Journalist, novelist, poet --Ilya Ehrenburg (1891-1967) was one of the most important Russian cultural figures of the 20th century. A political exile from Czarist Russia, he spent years in Paris as a bohemian poet and later became Izvestia correspondent in Western Europe. He was one of the few distinguished Soviet writers to survive Stalin. Ehrenburg's 1954 novel, "The Thaw" lent its name to the critical period following Stalin's death. His memoirs "People, Years, Life" outraged the Kremlin in the '60s for describing a conspiracy of silence that had prevailed under the dictator. In this groundbreaking biography, Joshua Rubenstein tells the story of one of Russia's most controversial and enigmatic figures. Ehrenburg was a young Bolshevik who turned anti-Communist, then two decades later became a spokesman for Stalin. He was an assimilated Jew who fought anti-Semitism, and a Russian patriot who was both mistrusted by orthodox Communists and denounced by Hitler as his main enemy. As a Jew, he was said to have betrayed his people; as a writer, his talent; as a man, his conscience. Yet Ehrenburg retained a measure of personal integrity. He helped other writers, including Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak. He battled censorship and championed European art in Moscow. His circle of friends included Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Diego Rivera, Ernest Hemingway, Isaac Babel, and Andre Malraux. In vivid detail, "Tangled Loyalties" draws extensively on new material from Russian archives, from Ehrenburg's private correspondence, and from interviews with scores of family members and friends. The book uncovers the man behind the controversies, whose personal life was asunconventional as the career he fashioned.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Journalist, novelist, poet - Ilya Ehrenburg (1891-1967) was one of the most important Russian cultural figures of the twentieth century. A political exile from czarist Russia, he spent years in Paris as a bohemian poet and later became Izvestia correspondent in Western Europe. He was one of the few distinguished Soviet writers to survive Stalin. Ehrenburg's novel The Thaw lent its name to the critical period following Stalin's death. His memoirs People, Years, Life outraged the Kremlin in the sixties for describing a conspiracy of silence that had prevailed under the dictator. In this groundbreaking biography, Joshua Rubenstein tells the story of one of Russia's most controversial and enigmatic figures.

Ehrenburg was a young Bolshevik who turned anti-Communist, then two decades later became a spokesman for Stalin. He was an assimilated Jew who fought anti-Semitism, and a Russian patriot who was both mistrusted by orthodox Communists and denounced by Hitler as his main enemy. As a Jew, he was said to have betrayed his people; as a writer, his talent; as a man, his conscience.

Yet Ehrenburg retained a measure of personal integrity. He helped other writers, including Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak. He battled censorship and championed European art in Moscow. His circle of friends included Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Diego Rivera, Ernest Hemingway, Isaac Babel, and Andre Malraux.

In vivid detail, Tangled Loyalties draws extensively on new material from Russian archives, from Ehrenburg's private correspondence, and from interviews with scores of family members and friends. The book uncovers the man behind the controversies, whose personal life was as unconventional as the career he fashioned.

Joshua Rubenstein portrays Ehrenburg as a man of great gifts whose life embodies all the tragic dilemmas of a Russian intellectual under communism. This penetrating biography will rekindle inteerest in a man whose career challenges our assumptions about collaboration, dissent, and moral survival. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Rubenstein's superb biography of Soviet journalist, poet and novelist Ilya Ehrenburg (1891-1967) probes the moral complexity of a major cultural figure. Ehrenburg joined the Bolshevik underground at age 15. Imprisoned two years later, he fled Czarist Russia for Paris, where he met Lenin, whom he ridiculed in a satirical journal. The disillusioned ex-radical denounced the Bolshevik revolution in his poetry and became a cafe crony of Picasso, Modigliani and Chagall. But as an Izvestia correspondent in Paris during the 1930s, Ehrenburg became a key component of Stalin's propaganda machine. Yet Rubenstein, an Amnesty International director and a fellow at Harvard's Russian Research Center, maintains that Ehrenburg's courageous, even outspoken stances against Soviet repression far outweigh the compromises and silences of a career played out under dictatorship. He argues that Ehrenburg's subversive novel, The Thaw (1954), helped launch de-Stalinization, and he pressed for the rehabilitation of Isaac Babel, Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva. An assimilated Jew, Ehrenburg, in a personal letter of protest to Stalin, fearlessly opposed the dictator's planned round-up and deportation of the Soviet Union's Jewish citizens to Siberia and Birobidzhan in 1953. Photos.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 512 pages
• Publisher: University Alabama Press; 1 edition (February 17, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0817309632
• ISBN-13: 978-0817309633
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #567,986 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ilya Ehrenburg and the Crime of Survival, June 5, 2005

By 

Leonard Fleisig "Len" (Washington, D.C.) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg (Judaic Studies Series) (Paperback)

If someone had submitted a manuscript based on Ilya Ehrenburg's life to a publisher it would have been tossed away as too unbelievable, even for fiction. Ilya Ehrenburg joined the Bolsheviks as a young man but had broken with the party well before the Russian Revolution. He was a childhood friend of Nikolai Bukharin and spent time with Leon Trotsky in Geneva. While living in Paris before the revolution he was befriended by Lenin but the friendship ended when Ehrenburg mocked him in a satirical piece he had published. He lived abroad for years, both before and after the Revolution, he spoke French and hobnobbed with Europe's literary intelligentsia. He was Jewish. Thousands of people in Stalin's USSR were purged or summarily executed for having just one of these characteristics. Millions were purged for less. Yet Ehrenburg not only survived but prospered. Joshua Rubenstein's "Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg" does an excellent job of setting out the fascinating details of Ehrenburg's life and the many factors that `conspired' to keep Ehrenburg in the public eye and far away from the Gulag.

For those that survived the Holocaust the fact of survival is often an interior matter for the survivor, sometimes marked by remorse and guilt simply because one survived against all odds. For those that survived the purges and executions of the Stalin era in the USSR, the fact of survival is often an exterior matter in which the outside world questions the means by which the survivor escaped unharmed. The historian A.J.P. Taylor, in a review of Ilya Ehrenburg's Memoirs suggest that in "years of danger and crisis, it becomes almost a crime to survive." The fact of Ehrenburg's survival and the means by which he managed to survive is the central theme of Rubenstein's biography.

Rubenstein takes the reader through Ehrenburg's early years as a student revolutionary and his flirtation with the Bolsheviks. The description of Ehrenburg's pre-revolutionary time in Paris and his initial contacts with Lenin and his cadres in exile is particularly interesting. After the revolution, a revolution that Ehrenburg condemned, we see him changing his mind and becoming a staunch supporter of the regime after the Bolsheviks defeated the white army in the Civil War. From there Ehrenburg's years in Paris the 1920s and 1930s where he became well known in artistic and literary circles are outlined very nicely. Ehrenburg became the de facto ambassador of art and literature of the USSR. In fact, it may very well have been Ehrenburg's rather exalted status in the west that protected him all those years. From there we see Ehrenburg's increasing involvement in the anti-fascist movement culminating in his extensive reporting from Spain during the civil war. Ehrenburg survived and prospered despite the fact that Stalin's purges often focused on people who had spent time abroad and who participated in the Civil War. When WWII started Ehrenburg's fame increased as a result of his forceful and intelligent reporting for Red Star, the Red Army newspaper. It was during the war that Ehrenburg, along with his colleague Vasily Grossman, began the compilation that became known as the Black Book of Soviet Jewry. The monumental Black Book may very well represent the most important work of Ehrenburg's life.

From the time the war ended and through his death in 1953, Stalin's anti-cosmopolitan campaign and his doctor's plot caused thousands of Jews, including many friends of Ehrenburg to be purged and sent to the Gulag. Through it all, Ehrenburg continued to be published, not without some difficulty in the Soviet Union. At the same time, Ehrenburg became one of the Soviet regime's greatest apologists. As he had done in the 1930's Ehrenburg attacked western left-leaning intellectuals that deviated from the party line. Throughout Stalin's rein and through Khrushchev's leadership Ehrenburg became perhaps the best known and most-intellectually well thought of defender of the Soviet regime. It is for these actions that many find fault with Ehrenburg.

However, at the same time, and within the constraints of an oppressive regime where any untoward step could have severe repercussions, Rubenstein sets out those many instances where Ehrenburg went out of his way to help friends and fellow artists who had been arrested or could not get published. Rubenstein takes pains to point out how many of those who had been imprisoned respected and were grateful for Ehrenburg's efforts on their behalf.

It is the portrayal of this conflict between Ehrenburg's arguably craven kow-towing to the Soviet regime and his efforts on behalf of his friends or fellow writers that make Rubenstein's work so interesting. Rubenstein, and others, fall squarely on the side of absolving Ehrenburg of most of the responsibility for his acts. Nevertheless he does not bludgeon the reader over the head with that opinion nor does he withhold information that might lead a reader to come to a different conclusion.

I tend to fall a bit onto the non-judgmental side of the ledger although not perhaps as fully as Rubenstein. The deciding factor for me is the thought that Ehrenburg's severest critics seem to be those in the west who did not have to walk the deadly tightrope Ehrenburg walked for years. Those that seem most accepting of Ehrenburg's behavior were those who lived and suffered during those years and appreciated Ehrenburg's efforts on their behalf.

Rubenstein's Tangled Loyalties is a fascinating look at the life of someone who spent a life making hard choices. I recommend this to anyone interested in Soviet history and leave it up to the reader to determine whether Ehrenburg was guilty of the crime of survival.

L. Fleisig