Soviet Witness

Tangled Loyalties:
The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg
by Joshua Rubinstein
Basic Books, 1996. 482 pp. $35.00.

Finding a good subject is a biographer’s first hurdle, and in choosing Ilya Ehrenburg, Joshua Rubinstein flew right over the bar. What a life! Ehrenburg’s seventy-six years stretched from the Pale of Settlement to the Six Day War, from the coronation of Nicholas II to the rule of Leonid Brezhnev. His lifetime spanned two world wars, a civil war at...