Attributed to Mademoiselle Bertin, a milliner to Marie Antoinette, the young and frivolous Empress beheaded by the French Revolution, is the following quote:
"There is nothing new except what is forgotten."
What is forgotten is the swath of blood and rape and mayhem a Jewish-Soviet journalist called Ilya Ehrenburg caused half a century ago. This was Stalin's favorite writer, in a position comparable to Minister of Propaganda - and what has stuck in my mind over all these years and decades is one oft-repeated slogan, printed in millions of leaflets and passed on to the Red Army, which Ehrenburg used to whip up the murderous frenzy of the Soviet conquerors as they swept into moribund Berlin:
"Kill! Kill! Kill! Nobody is innocent. Nobody! Nobody! Nobody! Neither the innocent nor the yet unborn!"
Now comes a Mr. Joshua Rubenstein with a new title, "Tangled Loyalties, The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg", a biography of this controversial Soviet writer - known far and wide in all of Europe but certainly no household name here in America.
This book has just been published, reportedly after thirteen years of research and writing, including two months of examining newly available material in Russian archives and libraries. The author also conducted personal interviews with more than one hundred people who knew Ehrenburg, locating them in Russia, England, France, Spain, Israel, and the United States.
Mr. Rubenstein is well-connected and widely published. He has contributed articles and reviews on Russian and international affairs to many publications - including Commentary, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, The Columbia Journalism Review, The New York Times and The Boston Globe.
Since 1975, Mr. Rubenstein has been the Northeast Regional Director of Amnesty International USA, overseeing Amnesty's work in New England, New York and New Jersey.
Rubenstein's responsibilities are reported to have been wide-ranging. They include acting as an official Amnesty spokesman on radio, television and in the print media; maintaining extensive press contacts and initiating editorial board meetings on breaking "human rights" stories; organizing public forums and benefits; establishing Amnesty chapters in high schools, colleges and the community; directing a staff of five people and many volunteers in the Northeast Regional Office located in Boston; and "participating in numerous human rights activities at the national and international level".
Joshua Rubenstein has been professionally involved with "human rights" and international affairs for more than twenty years as an activist, scholar and journalist with particular expertise in Soviet affairs.
A long-time Fellow of Harvard's Davis Center for Russian Studies, he has made many research trips to Moscow and other Russian cities. He has lectured and written widely on the Soviet "human rights" movement, including a series of lectures in Russian at the Mendeleev Institute in Moscow in the fall of 1990 and in the spring of 1991.
His first book, "Soviet Dissidents, Their Struggle for Human Rights" (Beacon Press, 1980; 1985), was based on research and interviews in Western Europe, the Soviet Union, Israel, and the United States. In a review in The New York Review of Books, it was praised by Leonard Schapiro, the dean of Soviet scholars in Great Britain, as "sympathetic, scholarly, and comprehensive," and "recommended to all who want to get a fair picture of the development and tribulations of the movement, and of the experiences of some of its most prominent protagonists."
What movement? The Communist movement?
Now read what some of the reviewers say of what this Rubenstein has authored:
For instance, Harrison Salisbury, known far and wide for his pro-Communist leanings and writings: "Joshua Rubenstein has written a brilliant analysis and biography of Ilya Ehrenburg, the famous Russian iconoclast and critic. It is a pity that Ehrenburg is not alive to appreciate the quality of this work and the merit which is thus cast on his reputation."
Robert C. Tucker, Professor of Russian Politics, Princeton University: "More than a needed biography of Ehrenburg . . . Tangled Loyalties is a contribution of much significance to our understanding of the history of Russia in Stalin's time and of her relations with the West."
Kirkus Reviews: "The story of a particular man and time, but also a finely drawn portrait of a writer and his conscience under siege in a place where the ill-chosen word could lead to exile or death."
Jane Taubman, Professor of Russian at Amherst College, in The Boston Globe: "Well-written, meticulously researched . . . In the awful compromises he had to make in order to survive, Ehrenburg is very much a man of Europe's 20th century. Did the good he did outweigh the lies he had to tell? This thoughtful and engaging account of his life should remind us how seldom most Americans have had to confront such choices."
Stanislaw Baranczak, Professor of Polish language and literature at Harvard, in The Wall Street Journal: ". . . succeeds in presenting Ehrenburg's life against a panorama of historic events. It also helps us discern the baffling ironies of Ehrenburg's career. The book's chief value, however, lies in Mr. Rubenstein's deliberate refraining from unequivocal judgment. He clearly means to convey his subject in all his complexity rather than offering wholesale absolution or damnation."
Adam Ulam, Professor of History and Political Science, Harvard: "(The author) paints a convincing portrait of this exceedingly complex individual, approving but by no means wholly flattering, balancing his courageous and at times heroic qualities with instances of his equally shifty and sometimes downright scoundrelly characteristics." -
Washington Jewish Week: "A masterpiece of painstaking scholarship."
All this about a man who has the blood of millions of European men, women and children on his hands - who, more than anyone else of Stalin's henchmen, was responsible for the rape of millions of East European women and girls, who advocated cruelty, sadism and robbery on a scale unprecedented in European history!
Yet what do we get? Here is what we get: Once again, a Jewish writer sanitizes and excuses the acts of a psychopath, and a docile, intellectually dull and lazy mainstream American intelligentsia consumes and advocates this dribble.
Ingrid
Thought for the Day:
"In this bright little package,
Now isn't it odd?
You've a dime's worth of something
Known only to God."
(Edgar Albert Guest)