University Alabama Press
Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg
Key Metrics
- Joshua Rubenstein
- University Alabama Press
- Paperback
- 9780817309633
- 9.24 X 6.04 X 1.46 inches
- 1.72 pounds
- Biography & Autobiography > Literary Figures
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
Rubenstein uncovers the man behind the controversies, the gifted writer whose life embodied all the tragic dilemmas of a Russian Jewish intellectual under totalitarianism.
Journalist, novelist, and 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 a correspondent for Izvestia 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 memoir People, Years, Life outraged the Kremlin in the 1960s by describing a conspiracy of silence that had prevailed under the dictator.Ehrenburg was a young Bolshevik who turned anti-Communist and 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, as Joshua Rubenstein shows, Ehrenburg retained a measure of 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 Andr� 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. This penetrating biography will challenge our assumptions about collaboration, assimilation, dissent, and moral survival.Author Bio
Joshua Rubenstein is Associate Director for Major Gifts at Harvard Law School. He was the Northeast Regional Director of Amnesty International USA for 37 years.
His first book, Soviet Dissidents: Their Struggle for Human Rights, was the first general history of the Soviet dissident movement. Tangled Loyalties, his biography of the controversial Soviet-Jewish writer Ilya Ehrenburg, came out in 1996. Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, received a National Jewish Book Award.
He then edited The KGB File of Andrei Sakharov and The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German-Occupied Soviet Territories. His interpretive biography of Leon Trotsky is part of the Jewish Lives Series of Yale University Press. The Last Days of Stalin is his tenth book; it is scheduled to appear in Azeri, Estonian, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese, and Ukrainian.
Source: Harvard University
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