The Press: Ehrenburg Goes South

Just outside of Livingston, Ala. the dusty 1941 Buick convertible pulled up beside the road. Four men pored over rumpled road maps. The sallow one with tousled, thinning grey hair said he wanted to get to Moscow. He said it in Russian. The maps didn’t help; the whim of Ilya Grigorevich Ehrenburg to visit Moscow, Ala. was not satisfied.* But by last week the Soviet Union’s foremost journalist had spent 15 days rambling through the South at his own pace, following his own itinerary with companions of his own choice. It was the kind of reportorial freedom that U.S. correspondents in Moscow often dream about but never know.

The owner and driver of the Buick was Virginia-born, 29-year-old Daniel Gillmor, editor & publisher of the late, Communist-line magazine Friday. An amiable State Department employe, Bill Nelson, had come along as friend and interpreter. Self-invited, but welcome, was the New York Post’s stocky New Dealish Columnist Sam Grafton, who went along for the informative ride. But it was quick-tongued, 55-year-old Ilya Ehrenburg’s junket. He asked to see, and was shown, TVA, the South’s big cities, its villages & farms, a cotton plantation, a sharecropper’s acreage. (Once, watching Negro field hands, he turned to Grafton, wisecracked: “Uncle Sam, meet Uncle Tom.”)

Ehrenburg, an untypical Russian, is a journalistic sophisticate who lived more than 20 years in Paris. He had an idea of what to expect in the South from reading Erskine Caldwell and William Faulkner.

In the bigger cities, Ehrenburg had press conferences. As often as not, Ehrenburg asked most of the questions. His practiced polemics were a delight to polemical Sam Grafton but something of a puzzle to Southerners. His reply to questions about Soviet aggression was typical: “That is like asking a wounded soldier who has come home whom he intends to attack next.” Initially the answer created sympathy; on second thought it seemed suspiciously oblique; on further thought it seemed to be no answer at all.

Sometimes his fellow travelers were embarrassed by the questions people asked Ehrenburg: Was he a Red or White Russian? Did he favor buttons or zippers for his trousers? Why are Russians so dirty? Ehrenburg was surprised by schoolchildren who could name no Russian cities.

People everywhere asked Ilya how the differences between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. could be resolved. Maybe, they suggested helpfully, by trips such as his. Said he: “Tourists learn nothing. You could begin by educating your children to be friends of the Soviet Union.”

*Moscow, Ala. was about eleven miles to the southeast.