The Stormy Life of Lasik Roitschwantz

Ilya Ehrenburg is widely considered one of the most prominent and prolific Soviet writers of the postwar period. During World War II, his patriotic articles were a mainstay of Soviet propaganda. Known in the interwar period for his many novels and war reportage, Ehrenburg was a popular literary figure in leftist circles in Europe. Throughout his career as a journalist, he often reported on issues of antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. A member of the Soviet Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during World War II, Ehrenburg, along with the writer Vasily Grossman, spearheaded a project to document Nazi atrocities against the Jews, in the so-called Chernaia kniga (The Black Book), a publication that was not released in its entirety in the Soviet Union until 1980. Ehrenburg’s short novel Ottepel’ (The Thaw), which broke with socialist realist conventions, was to give its name to an entire political era, the age of post-Stalinist liberalization under Nikita Khrushchev. Ehrenburg’s memoirs provided important insights into Soviet cultural policy and postwar antisemitism. They were especially valuable because they were written not by a dissident, but by a major establishment figure.