Ilya gerol biography

Ilya Gerol was an unusual and wholly original figure in Canadian journalism.

Born into a prosperous Jewish family in Riga, Latvia, during the Second World War, Gerol survived the Holocaust and the war, and built a career as a journalist in the Soviet Union before running afoul of the Kremlin.

Expelled from the country, he settled in Vancouver and, improbably, launched a career as a foreign affairs columnist in Canada, where he became a powerful critic of the Soviet regime.

He joined the Citizen in September 1985, and as a globe-trotting foreign affairs analyst, scored a series of interviews with leading world figures such as Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Poland's Lech Walesa, Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov and Austrian President Kurt Waldheim.

Never a master of written English — and with an uncertain grasp of western journalism conventions — Gerol dictated all of his columns to editorial assistants, pipe in hand.

“He was very clever and huge