40 Facts About Ilya Ehrenburg

Ilya Ehrenburg later clarified that his writings were about "German aggressors who set foot on Soviet soil with weapons", not the whole German people.

Ilya Ehrenburg was born in Kiev, Russian Empire to a Lithuanian-Jewish family; his father was an engineer.

Ilya Ehrenburg's household was not religiously observant; he came into contact with the religious practices of Judaism only through his maternal grandfather.

Ilya Ehrenburg learned no Yiddish, although he edited the Black Book, which was written in Yiddish.

Ilya Ehrenburg considered himself Russian and, later, a Soviet citizen, and wrote in Russian even during his many years abroad.

Ilya Ehrenburg took strong public positions against antisemitism, and left all his papers to Israel's Yad Vashem.

When Ilya Ehrenburg was four years old, the family moved to Moscow, where his father had been hired as director of a brewery.

In 1908, when Ilya Ehrenburg was seventeen years old, the tsarist secret police arrested him for five months.

Ilya Ehrenburg became attached to the bohemian life in the Paris quarter of Montparnasse.

Ilya Ehrenburg began to write poems, regularly visited the cafes of Montparnasse and got acquainted with a lot of artists, especially Pablo Picasso, Diego Rivera, Jules Pascin, and Amedeo Modigliani.

Foreign writers whose works Ilya Ehrenburg translated included those of Francis Jammes.

Ilya Ehrenburg wrote a series of articles about the mechanized war that later on were published as a book.

In 1920 Ilya Ehrenburg went to Kiev where he experienced four different regimes in the course of one year: the Germans, the Cossacks, the Bolsheviks, and the White Army.

Finally, Ilya Ehrenburg returned to Moscow, where he soon was arrested by the Cheka but freed after a short time.

Ilya Ehrenburg became a Soviet cultural activist and journalist who spent much time abroad as a writer.

Ilya Ehrenburg wrote avant-garde picaresque novels and short stories popular in the 1920s, often set in Western Europe.

Ilya Ehrenburg continued to write philosophical poetry, using more freed rhythms than in the 1910s.

Ilya Ehrenburg arrived in Spain in late August 1936 as an Izvestia correspondent and was involved in propaganda and military activity as well as reporting.

Ilya Ehrenburg was offered a column in Krasnaya zvezda days after the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

Ilya Ehrenburg saw the Great Patriotic War as a dramatic contest between good and evil.

In 1943, Ilya Ehrenburg, working with the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, began to collect material for what would become The Black Book of Soviet Jewry, documenting The Holocaust.

Austrian historian Arnold Suppan argued that Ilya Ehrenburg "agitated in the style of Nazi racist ideology", with statements such as:.

Ilya Ehrenburg later accompanied the Soviet forces during the East Prussian Offensive and criticized the indiscriminate violence against German civilians, for which he was reprimanded by Stalin.

However, Ilya Ehrenburg denied this and historian Antony Beevor claims that it was a Nazi fabrication.

In January 1945, Adolf Hitler stated that "Stalin's court lackey, Ilya Ehrenburg, declares that the German people must be exterminated".

Ilya Ehrenburg fell into disgrace at that time and it is estimated that Aleksandrov's article was a signal of change in Stalin's policy towards Germany.

On 21 September 1948, at the behest of Politburo members Lazar Kaganovich and Georgii Malenkov, Ilya Ehrenburg published an article in Pravda which signified Stalin's absolute political break with Israel, which he had been supporting through enormous shipments of Czech arms.

Ilya Ehrenburg's name was high on a list presented to Stalin by the chief of police, Viktor Abakumov, of people selected for arrest.

Ilya Ehrenburg was accused of having 'made attacks on Comrade Stalin' when talking to the French writer Andre Malraux in Spain in 1937.

Ilya Ehrenburg was accused of informing on his comrades, but there is no evidence to support this theory.

In 1954, Ilya Ehrenburg published a novel titled The Thaw that tested the limits of censorship in the post-Stalin Soviet Union.

Just prior to publishing the book Ilya Ehrenburg received the Stalin Peace Prize in 1952.

Ilya Ehrenburg is particularly well known for his memoirs, which contain many portraits of interest to literary historians and biographers.

Ilya Ehrenburg criticized writers like Boris Pasternak, author of Doctor Zhivago, for not having been able to understand the course of history.

Ilya Ehrenburg's memoirs were criticized by the more conservative faction among the Soviet writers, concentrated around the journal Oktyabr.

Yermilov alleged that this proved that Ilya Ehrenburg had been in a privileged position in those years but said nothing, when others, less privileged, had spoken out when they believed an innocent person had been arrested.

Ilya Ehrenburg retorted that he had never been to a single meeting nor read a single article in which anyone had protested about the arrests, whereupon Yermilov accused him of having insulted a 'whole generation of Soviet people'.

Ilya Ehrenburg was active in publishing the works by Osip Mandelstam when the latter had been posthumously rehabilitated but still largely unacceptable for censorship.

Ilya Ehrenburg was active as a poet till his last days, depicting the events of World War II in Europe, the Holocaust and the destinies of Russian intellectuals.

Ilya Ehrenburg died in 1967 of prostate and bladder cancer, and was interred in Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow, where his gravestone is etched with a reproduction of his portrait drawn by his friend Pablo Picasso.