A Tormented Career

This biography of Ilya Ehrenburg is the first serious attempt to assess the career of one of the most controversial men of our century. A writer and journalist by profession, Ehrenburg was widely regarded during the Stalin years as Russia’s most effective spokesperson in the West, a talented “house Jew,” whose evident success and freedom to travel helped camouflage the regime’s repression and anti-Semitism. But there was more to Ehrenburg’s career than his useful...