NONFICTION
How Ethel Rosenberg Offered Her Own Life as a Sacrifice
*
<https://www.facebook.com/dialog/feed?app_id=9869919170&link=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2021%2F06%2F08%2Fbooks%2Freview%2Fanne-sebba-ethel-rosenberg.html%3Fsmid%3Dfb-share&name=How%20Ethel%20Rosenberg%20Offered%20Her%20Own%20Life%20as%20a%20Sacrifice&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2F>
*
<https://api.whatsapp.com/send?text=How%20Ethel%20Rosenberg%20Offered%20Her%20Own%20Life%20as%20a%20Sacrifice%20https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2021%2F06%2F08%2Fbooks%2Freview%2Fanne-sebba-ethel-rosenberg.html%3Fsmid%3Dwa-share>
*
<https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2021%2F06%2F08%2Fbooks%2Freview%2Fanne-sebba-ethel-rosenberg.html%3Fsmid%3Dtw-share&text=How%20Ethel%20Rosenberg%20Offered%20Her%20Own%20Life%20as%20a%20Sacrifice>
*
<mailto:?subject=NYTimes.com%3A%20How%20Ethel%20Rosenberg%20Offered%20Her%20Own%20Life%20as%20a%20Sacrifice&body=From%20The%20New%20York%20Times%3A%0A%0AHow%20Ethel%20Rosenberg%20Offered%20Her%20Own%20Life%20as%20a%20Sacrifice%0A%0AAnne%20Sebba%E2%80%99s%20new%20biography%20tells%20the%20story%20of%20a%20fanatical%20Communist%20and%20loving%20mother%20who%20went%20to%20her%20death%20proclaiming%20her%20innocence.%0A%0Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2021%2F06%2F08%2Fbooks%2Freview%2Fanne-sebba-ethel-rosenberg.html%3Fsmid%3Dem-share>
*
*
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, March 1953
Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, March 1953Credit...Associated Press
BUY BOOK▾
When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we
earn an affiliate commission.
ByJoseph Dorman
* NYT, June 8, 2021
*ETHEL ROSENBERG*
*An American Tragedy*
By Anne Sebba
ETHEL ROSENBERG
An American Tragedy
By Anne Sebba
320 pp. St. Martin’s Press. $28.99.
Few trials in American history can match that of Ethel and Julius
Rosenberg for its sensationalism. The young couple were arrested in 1950
for atomic espionage. Less than a year earlier, the Soviet Union had
unexpectedly tested its first nuclear bomb, a mere four years after the
U.S. atomic strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mao Zedong had just
declared the People’s Republic of China. Cold War hysteria was at its
peak. The couple were quickly convicted, sentenced to death and, after
two years of international protest and a series of failed appeals,
executed in June 1953. They remain the only individuals put to death for
peacetime espionage in American history and most everyone agrees neither
should have been killed.
BOOKS:Be the first to read books news and see reviews, news and features
in The New York Times Book Review.
Sign Up
To the very end, the Rosenbergs protested their innocence. Though they
took the Fifth regarding their Communist Party affiliation, they
insisted that they were being persecuted for their radical political
views. In left and liberal circles, how one stood on the Rosenberg case
became not just a proxy for one’s views on Communism and the Soviet
Union but also, like the Dreyfus case in France a half-century earlier,
instantly defined who one was.
There was high family drama as well. Ethel’s own younger brotherDavid
Greenglass
<https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/15/us/david-greenglass-spy-who-helped-seal-the-rosenbergs-doom-dies-at-92.html>admitted
to spying at Los Alamos for the Russians. Julius, he testified in court,
was his handler; Ethel, Julius’s accomplice.
And then there was the other “family” affair. The Rosenbergs were
Jewish. So were both the defense and prosecution teams (featuring a
young Roy Cohn in a debut supporting role), as was the judge,Irving
Kaufman
<https://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/03/nyregion/judge-irving-kaufman-of-rosenberg-spy-trial-and-free-press-rulings-dies-at-81.html>.
Many saw the proceedings as playing out a particularly Jewish American
drama, with both prosecution and judge intent on proving their loyalty
to America and ridding Jews of any Communist taint through their fierce
prosecution of the couple.
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/books/review/anne-sebba-ethel-rosenberg.html#after-story-ad-1>
Over time, research by scholars and the release of once-classified
documents, first in America and then in the former Soviet Union, have
proved that Julius was, in fact, guilty of running an espionage network
intent on stealing the secrets of the Manhattan Project among other
defense programs, though he did not provide the most significant
information that led to the Soviet bomb.
Regarding Ethel, the case has always been muddied by two significant
facts. Her brother’s key testimony against her — that she typed some of
the documents he provided to Julius — was a lie, as he later admitted,
meant to deflect attention from his own wife’s involvement. Even more
damningly, Ethel was mercilessly used as a pawn by the government to
force Julius to confess. This has led some, including her two sons, to
continue to insist on Ethel’s innocence and seek her exoneration. But
the Soviet archives provide strong evidence that while Ethel was never a
formal agent, she not only knew of Julius’s work but aided him at times,
including in the recruitment of her brother and sister-in-law.
Anne Sebba’s <https://annesebba.com/>new book, “Ethel Rosenberg: An
American Tragedy,” comes in the wake of the public release of the last
of the grand jury testimony in the case, that of David Greenglass, after
his death in 2014. But while that testimony reaffirms that David lied on
the stand, it adds nothing substantive to the record. On the question of
Ethel’s guilt, Sebba, who has written many biographies of famous women,
waffles and confuses, declaring at the beginning that Ethel was not
“legally complicit,” only later to write that she was, in fact,
“complicit to a conspiracy,” but then asks: “Was that a crime?” She also
points to the relevance of the Rosenberg case in demonstrating how
widespread fear of foreign enemies can lead to government abuses, though
she stops short of directly tying the case to recent events.
Editors’ Picks
Three Ways to a Better Chicken Breast
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/04/dining/chicken-breast-recipes.html?action=click&algo=bandit-all-surfaces-breadth-75&block=editors_picks_recirc&fellback=false&imp_id=830371108&impression_id=375e3de0-cd46-11eb-8f56-b5ff44b88bc7&index=0&pgtype=Article&pool=editors-picks-ls®ion=ccolumn&req_id=37638215&surface=home-featured&variant=3_bandit-all-surfaces-breadth-75&action=click&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article®ion=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending>
‘I Wasn’t Quite Finished With the Cigarette When My Car Pulled Up’
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/nyregion/metropolitan-diary.html?action=click&algo=bandit-all-surfaces-breadth-75&block=editors_picks_recirc&fellback=false&imp_id=34819065&impression_id=375e3de1-cd46-11eb-8f56-b5ff44b88bc7&index=1&pgtype=Article&pool=editors-picks-ls®ion=ccolumn&req_id=37638215&surface=home-featured&variant=3_bandit-all-surfaces-breadth-75&action=click&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article®ion=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending>
Answers to 20 Questions About Getting a Good Night’s Sleep
<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/well/sleep-questions.html?action=click&algo=bandit-all-surfaces-breadth-75&block=editors_picks_recirc&fellback=false&imp_id=781921345&impression_id=375e3de2-cd46-11eb-8f56-b5ff44b88bc7&index=2&pgtype=Article&pool=editors-picks-ls®ion=ccolumn&req_id=37638215&surface=home-featured&variant=3_bandit-all-surfaces-breadth-75&action=click&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article®ion=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending>
Continue reading the main story
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/books/review/anne-sebba-ethel-rosenberg.html?action=click&module=editorContent&pgtype=Article®ion=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending#after-pp_edpick>
ImageDavid Greenglass after his conviction, April 1951.
David Greenglass after his conviction, April 1951.Credit...Associated Press
In the end, the book is a plea for Ethel the woman, an attempt to
understand who she really was, to free her from the confines of the
stock political figure she inevitably became. Because of the dour
demeanor she publicly showed, many viewed her not just as an accomplice
but also as the calculating mastermind behind the espionage. This was
far off the mark. Less so was the portrait of her as a kind of political
fanatic. According to one woman who met her in prison, Ethel “followed
the party line uncritically, unquestionably and aggressively.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Continue reading the main story
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/books/review/anne-sebba-ethel-rosenberg.html#after-story-ad-2>
But she was more than this. Sebba gives us a portrait of Ethel as a
smart, ambitious and thoughtful woman, one with a beautiful singing
voice and dreams of a career in music and theater. She was also
emotionally fragile, wounded by a mother who denied her talents, and
always placed her brothers before her. Ironically, the only one of her
three brothers to whom she was close was David, her future betrayer, on
whom she doted. As a mother herself, she sought out therapy, worried
that she, too, would not be a good enough parent.
But as biography the book falls short. The information to really fill
out her story, to add depth and richness to her early internal
struggles, is lacking. Sebba wants us to see Ethel as an extraordinary
woman, but instead we feel her ordinariness. The book’s strongest
chapters are the later ones, among them one on Ethel’s years in prison,
which she spent in almost complete isolation with no support from her
family and only occasional visits from her sons, who were 10 and 6 when
their parents were executed. She was, somehow, granted the right to
visits from her psychiatrist, who became her only real outside lifeline
and to whom, in the midst of her emotional turmoil, she began to write
passionate letters.
Equally interesting is Sebba’s meditation on Ethel in the context of
American culture. Here Ethel becomes a stand-in for a generation of
ambitious women who willingly sacrificed their own careers to their
sometimes less talented husbands.
And yet what partly doomed Ethel was her perceived lack of femininity.
Her refusal to court the press or the public and her stony-faced
stoicism throughout the trial were taken as signs of her coldness, even
masculinity. No one understood that this was, at least in part, her only
protection against the onslaught she felt to her fragile being.
President Eisenhower, to whom she appealed for clemency, worried about
sending a young mother to the electric chair, but then absolved himself
because “in this instance it is the woman who is the strong and
recalcitrant character, the man is the weak one.” Is there a more
revealing example of the straitjacket of postwar femininity than this
outrageous comment, which helped to seal Ethel Rosenberg’s fate?
Sebba sees Ethel as the one actor in the drama who did not betray
anyone, who insisted on protecting her husband even to the point of her
own death. The only thing that apparently would have saved her was a
confession from Julius, which he, with her full support, refused to
make, or her own willingness to implicate her husband and others. Yet
she refused to say anything to save herself to the very end, even in the
moments after Julius’s execution. Was it because of an inner defiance
and stubborn rigidity? A misguided idealism and belief in the Soviet
cause that amounted to a kind of moral confusion, a refusal to see
espionage as a crime, particularly for a country that had once been a
wartime ally? Or perhaps it was far more personal, a link to her husband
that she saw as inviolable, a belief that her fate was inextricably tied
to Julius’s.
“A cold fury possesses me and I could retch with horror and revulsion
for these unctuous saviors, these odious swine [who] are actually
proposing to erect a terrifying sepulcher in which I shall live without
living and die without dying,” she wrote of the prospect of surviving
without Julius.
The choices made by this outwardly strong, cold and “masculine” woman
became in effect a form of suttee. Ethel, who had been subordinated to
her brothers as a child, now willingly immolated herself as a sign of
ultimate devotion to Julius (and perhaps to Stalin), even if it meant
leaving her two young sons behind.
Joseph Dorman is a writer and independent filmmaker. His latest film is
“Don Quixote in Newark,” a documentary about the battle against
childhood AIDS in America.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#9188): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/9188
Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/83539183/21656
-=-=-
POSTING RULES & NOTES
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
#4 Do not exceed five posts a day.
-=-=-
Group Owner: [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy
[[email protected]]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
