ETHEL ROSENBERG

The short, heartbreaking life of a woman caught in the meat grinder of history.

Like British biographer and journalist Sebba, many readers first encountered Ethel Rosenberg (1915-1953) through E.L. Doctorow's fictionalized account in The Book of Daniel (1971) or in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963) and came away with a general romantic impression that she was a martyr. This riveting biography, pulling together decades of previous work on the Rosenbergs as well as chilling new evidence released in 2014, fills in the blanks and proves the case. As Sebba demonstrates, Ethel was certainly a communist, as were many liberals in her pre-McCarthy era, but she was not a spy, as was her husband, Julius. The author’s sharp portrait of Julius is decidedly unflattering, whether he is slavering for the approval of his Russian handlers or keeping silent about his wife's (non)role to increase his own meager chances of survival. On the other hand, it's clear that the importance of the information he passed was exaggerated and executing him for it was barbaric. Though a juror saw Ethel as "a steely, stony, tight-lipped woman…the mastermind" of the operation, Sebba suggests that nothing could be further from the truth. What took her down was her unshakeable loyalty to her husband and a shockingly weak legal defense against Roy Cohn and a team of prosecution hotshots, plus a hanging judge. The author compellingly narrates Ethel's early life, the course of her relationship with the brother whose perjury sent her to the electric chair, and both her difficulties as a mother and her commitment to overcoming them. Could there be a better time to review "what can happen when fear, a forceful and blunt weapon in the hands of authority, turns to hysteria and justice is willfully ignored"?

A concise yet thorough account of a 1953 miscarriage of justice with alarming relevance today.