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Ilya Ehrenburg and His Picaresque Jewish Bodies of the 1920S

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Ilya Ehrenburg and His Picaresque Jewish Bodies of the 1920S Chapter 4 Ilya Ehrenburg and His Picaresque Jewish Bodies of the 1920s “Beneath his fresh shirt of a communist kulturtreger, Ehrenburg managed to preserve ‘an old body.’ He managed to remain ‘a stinking Jew.’ I reiterate, we are talking here not about the so called ‘moral impurity,’ but about elementary (Jewish) corpophilia — the love of the body” Boris Paramonov. 1993. 87–88.1 Ilya Ehrenburg (1891–1967) was a Russian writer of Jewish descent who lived a long and dangerous life. As a young man he survived the tsarist police, as a Soviet patriotic journalist he survived the bullets and bombs of the Russian-German front during World War II, and as a Jew he survived Stalin’s reign of terror. Although he lived almost half of his life in Europe, he survived Stalin’s campaign against the cosmopolitans. And although he was a member of the Jewish Anti-fascist Committee, most of whose members were killed by Stalin or died in gulags, he stayed alive long enough to witness Khrushchev’s debunking of Stalin’s rule as a cult of personality.2 Indeed, it was Ehrenburg who coined the term “The Thaw,” which was the title of his 1954 novel, to characterize the new political trend in Soviet society after Stalin’s death and the new democratic ideas on which the generation of the men of the sixties, the shestidesiatniki, was raised.3 And it was Ehrenburg who openly stated that he would consider himself a Jew for as long as the last antisemite was still alive.4 He made this statement in the 1960s at a time when Soviet discourse had pronounced the building of the internationalist Soviet nation to be complete. His statement attests to the possibility of Jewishness as an optional condition — something that you could consider yourself to be, something that could be changed. It suggests that Jewishness is not necessarily inherited, that it is not a genetic category, but rather an attitude toward an historical past held by a group of people united by religion and a cultural belief system. This concept of Jewishness as articulated by Ehrenburg is of utmost polemical importance, 8888 Ilya Ehrenburg and his Picaresque Jewish Bodies of the 1920s because it presents a challenging conclusion at the end of a life that was lived during periods marked by the triumph of racist theories and resulting in the Holocaust. Ehrenburg knew perhaps better than any other Jewish personality of the atrocities committed both by German troops and Nazi collaborators from the local population against the Jews during the Nazi occupation of Russia. As one of the most prominent war correspondents, Ehrenburg never disguised his Jewishness by taking a pseudonym or hiding behind a surname that could not be identified as Jewish. As such he was Jew Number One on the Nazi hit list.5 The Nazi leadership was familiar with Ehrenburg’s fiery articles in newspapers and radio speeches disseminated or broadcast at the Front, and it considered him to be a major enemy. The fact that Ehrenburg was Jewish was used by the Nazi propagandists as an explanation for his supposedly biased reporting of the events at the Front and in occupied territories. Of particular relevance to this investigation is the fact that Russian Jewish soldiers and civilians, as well as members of the local population who witnessed Nazi atrocities against the Jews, wrote to Ehrenburg because they saw him as the only person powerful enough to convey their messages and to give a true account of the events unfolding. The result of this process was an accumulation of witnesses accounts that Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman edited and endeavored to publish as a book in the Soviet Union—a book that was released only after the fall of the USSR under the title Chernaia kniga russkogo evreistva (The [Complete] Black Book of Russian Jewry).6 This book contains witnesses’ accounts of how Jews in occupied territories had been murdered by Nazis and betrayed by the local population. Just as the fact that Jews were killed because they were Jews — a nation defined by ethnic and racial unity — is central to the history of Jewry in World War II, so it is to The Black Book of Russian Jewry. And just as the Jews’ physical body was viewed as the marker of Jewishness throughout the war, such physical identification was fundamental to Ehrenburg’s own perception of Jews. Ehrenburg witnessed physical violence against Russian Jews throughout the years of the Civil War, during which he fled the country fearing for his own life. As he reminisced in his autobiographical Liudu, gody, zhizn’ (People, Years, Life) in 1966, “During the Civil War I became a witness to a pogrom against Jews, which was organized by the White Army. A few months after that a drunken White Army officer wanted to throw me into the sea from the ship on which I was escaping. He shouted: ‘Beat the Yids, save Russia!’” (451).7 Clearly Ehrenburg’s much-quoted statement about his intention to keep proclaiming himself a Jew until such a time as antisemitism had disappeared from the face of the world has to be taken in the context of such experiences by Russian and European Jewry in the first half of the twentieth century. The Jew’s body is central to this experience. 8989 Chapter 4 Ehrenburg is relevant to the theme of this book for a number of reasons: as a man born at the end of the nineteenth century, whose formative years coincided with antisemitic pogroms and the Beilis Affair, he serves both as an historical witness to the epoch and a man who absorbed all the political and ethnic stereotypes of the Jew at the time of heightened political crises and outrageously racist antisemitic policies. At a time when economic stereotypes of Jews were acceptable to the majority of the Russian Jewish youth of his generation who shared the revolutionary and socialist sentiments of the epoch, Ehrenburg could not avoid internalizing some of the ethnic stereotypes of the Jews. It is this latter theme that is of special interest to this investigation. Ehrenburg wrote during the period following the October Revolution — arguably, his most productive and certainly most experimental work was written in the 1920s. His work thus gives voice to a period that functions as a link between pre- and post-Revolutionary antisemitic and Jewish-related discourse. This chapter analyzes Ehrenburg’s writing of this period with special focus on the theme of the Jewish body. Ehrenburg also serves as a link between the pre-and post-World War II periods, as well as between Stalinist and post-Stalinist Russia. This chapter will cover chronologically the theme of the Jew’s body in Ehrenburg’s two major novels of the 1920s: The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and His Disciples (Neobychainye pokhozhdeniia Khulio Khurenito [1921]) and The Stormy Life of Lasik Roitschwantz (Burnaia zhizn’ Lazika Roitshvanetsa [1928]). It will also make references to his later work.8 Julio Jurenito and the Jewish Body The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and His Disciples, the novel that brought Ehrenburg international fame, contains an eponymous character of supposedly Mexican origin. This character, Jurenito, whom Ehrenburg calls his Teacher (Uchitel’, sometimes translated into English as “Master”) acts as the great Provocateur, a debunker of all ideologies and logical and philosophical systems. Jurenito is a cynic; he has limitless talents, knows a dozen European, Asian and American indigenous languages, and is capable of feeling at home in all civilized societies. Although Ehrenburg points out that Jurenito was born into the Catholic faith, some commentators regard him as a crypto-Jew.9 Of particular interest in this regard is evidence of Ehrenburg’s interest in aspects of body discourse — when he describes Julio 90 Ilya Ehrenburg and his Picaresque Jewish Bodies of the 1920s Jurenito after his death as his much-missed mentor, he centers his attention on aspects of Julio’s physicality. These aspects have an uncanny resemblance to aspects of Rozanov’s body politics: namely bodily aromas and bodily secretions in combination with an emphasis on home and homeliness. Such descriptions must have been of programmatic importance to Ehrenburg as he assigns them a place on the first page of his novel in the Introduction, signed with his full name: Let my words be as warm as his [Teacher’s] hairy arms, inhabited and homely as his jacket reeking of the smells of tobacco and of his sweat, the jacket on which little Negro Aisha used to cry, and let my words be as trembling from pain and rage as his upper lip during bouts of nervous twitching (35).10 And: I remember how Teacher, pointing to the seed of the maple tree, told me: “Yours is more effective, since it flies not only into space, but also into time” (36). Not only are all the ingredients of Rozanov’s philosophy of sexuality present in this Introduction (semen “seed,” sweat, smell — bodily secretions), but even the author’s attitude toward the reader is reminiscent of Rozanov’s famous opening of his Solitaria in which he describes leaves flying in the wind and expresses a totally new attitude towards the reader — a new form of relationship in which the author can tell the reader to go to hell and vice versa: “The reader can tell me without ceremony: Go to hell. O.K, you can go to hell too…” (3).11 Ehrenburg’s Introduction ends with a similar attitude toward the reader — one that suggests that he wrote his work not for his contemporaries but for people of a future formation, a future not of this world: “So, it is not for spiritual heights, not for those exclusive few among my contemporaries I write, but I write for the coming times, for the land which will be ploughed not by an earthly tool, the land on which not his children but my brothers will play in idiotic bliss” (36).
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