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This is a sensitive portrait of the American civilian who was executed for allegedly passing atomic secrets to the Russians
The Rosenbergs were executed for spying in 1953. Can their sons reveal the truth?
The case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, the young Jewish American couple executed in June 1953 at the height of the cold war for allegedly passing atomic secrets to the Russians, has weighed heavily on the US political and cultural conscience for 70 years. They were the first civilians to be charged and put to death for conspiracy to commit espionage in peacetime, and the case has long been judged, including by many of those on the political right, as the US’s ugliest mistake of the cold war.
Meanwhile, fiction has made rich play with the strange truths and metaphors of the stories swirling around this “stubbornly mundane” couple. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar famously opens with the line: “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs …’’ But it is EL Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel, published in 1971, told from the perspective of the clever, restive elder son of the slain couple (the Isaacsons in the novel) that still stands as the most inventive evocation of the story’s deeper political meanings and human consequences. Anne Sebba was first introduced to the tragedy by Doctorow’s “highly fictionalised but desperately dramatic version of events”, a “pocket sized paperback” that she devoured when she was a young mother living in New York in the 1970s. She became fascinated by “what can happen when fear, a forceful and blunt weapon in the hands of authority, turns to hysteria and justice is wilfully ignored”. Continue reading...