Word: rubinstein
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...also helped launch the discount-brokerage business, restructured the company's debt and supervised advertising and marketing. Until a few months ago, he spent 50% to 60% of his time at JB Oxford's headquarters--in an office that was larger than Rubenstein's own digs. (Although Rubinstein points out, "I have the corner office...
This means that, while he didn't dare speak out on behalf of persecuted writers like Babel, Mandelstam or Anna Akhmatova during the Stalin years, Ehrenburg worked assiduously to resurrect their reputations in the more lenient Khrushchev period. As Rubinstein documents, Ehrenburg used his position as the Soviet writer best known to the Western intelligentsia in order to blackmail the censors: he would repeatedly announce the publication of a controversial book or article, then protest that its failure to appear due to censorship would reflect badly on the Soviet regime in the West...
...Still, Rubinstein often seems too quick to give his subject the benefit of the doubt. In the book's final pages, he mentions the Prague Spring uprising which took place 1968, one year after Ehrenburg's death, and comments offhandedly that it was "a cause Ehrenburg surely would have supported." Rubinstein seems to have forgotten his own account of how, during the similar 1956 revolt in Hungary, Ehrenburg was dispatched to a foreign writers' conference to defend Khrushchev's brutal intervention against criticism, a job he performed without complaint. True, Ehrenburg was no fawning Stalinist; but to imply that...
Nevertheless, Rubinstein's sympathy never completely blinds him to his subject's many ambiguities. The Ilya Ehrenburg who emerges from Tangled Loyalties is not a heroic man, but he is marvelously complex, as fascinating as the era he lived through. Tangled Loyalties must be of interest to anyone concerned about the troubled relationship between art and politics, both in the last century and in the century about to start...
Harvard Authors at the Harvard Book Store. From 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Harvard-affiliated authors will be on hand to discuss their recent books. Some of the highlights: Michael Sandel (10 a.m.), Alan Dershowitz (11 a.m.), Stanley Cavell (11:30 a.m.), Werner Sollors (2 p.m.) and Joshua Rubinstein (3 p.m.; see review of Tangled Loyalties, page...