Word: caraboid
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Corruption of a Caraboid. This second volume of memoirs (the first carried Ehrenburg from his Moscow childhood through World War I) deals largely with writers and artists, good, bad and indifferent, whom Ehrenburg met in the capitals of Western Europe in the interwar years. Ehrenburg seems almost under a compulsion to mention as many as possible, as if to atone in some slight way for their "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short lives. His portraits are touching, affectionate, anecdotal, but he scrupulously avoids discussing the writers' ideas. Only obliquely does he hint that many of the Russian writers were...
Ehrenburg is equally vague about himself. He expresses few of his own thoughts, has scarcely any explanation for the abrupt shifts in his career. A confirmed skeptic in the 1920s, he was dubbed "the caraboid," the name of a beetle which ejects a fine stinging spray. In his early novels, Julio Jurenito and The Stormy Life of Lasik Roitschwantz, Ehrenburg mocked Right and Left, capitalism and Communism (when Roitschwantz was republished in the U.S. in 1960, it was much to his embarrassment). But in the 1930s, he became a militant Communist, began cranking out "social realism" clinkers that glorified...
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