Anne Sebba Explores an American Tragedy
Biographer Anne Sebba recently joined me to discuss her latest book, Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy, where she creates a nuanced, compassionate, and ultimately humanizing portrait of an often misunderstood figure. As Sebba explains, “I’m not relitigating the case. I’m not really even trying to justify Julius. I’m trying to understand — who was Ethel Rosenberg?” Our conversation is below.
David Newstead: What’s the reaction been like to the book so far?
Anne Sebba: I would say 99% has really found this is an important story that needed to be told from this different perspective. There have been a couple of people, as I expected, who want to relitigate the case and who don’t really understand. My premise was to separate Ethel from Julius and I wanted to understand who Ethel was and why her story mattered. There are some people who believe that passing secrets to the Soviets was such a heinous crime — and since we now know that Julius was someone who passed secrets — that Ethel therefore was guilty by association.
I’m sure she knew that Julius was passing information. I’m not sure we can know the extent of her knowledge. I’m quite sure she approved, but that wasn’t a crime. It’s clearly a love story. I think it’s three things really. If the book is about one overarching issue, it’s about the importance of the rule of law. And ultimately, Ethel was convicted on a miscarriage of justice or multiple miscarriages in a flawed trial. And I think it behooves us to remember that. It’s also about families. On one end, you have this dysfunctional family, the Greenglasses. And at the other end, you have the redemptive family, the Meeropols which you know all about. The more I’ve thought about that, it is a quite extraordinary set of two extremes with much unhappiness and difficulty in the middle.
In answer to your question, the response has been really fantastic and I’ve been thrilled by it. A lot of people in England didn’t know the story or they only knew the outline of the story. And I think most people have felt it’s about time that Ethel was restored her own voice. I mean, her metaphorical voice, not her actual singing voice, although singing of course is important. She was brutally denied her voice. And I’ve done what I can to restore her humanity. And I don’t see how anyone can object to that. Even people who believe she was a wicked spy and deserved to die must understand that it’s important to see her for who she was.
David Newstead: In terms of interviews you’ve had or people you’re talking to… I feel like Americans know about this case or at least portions of it, but maybe this has helped renew interest in it. But are you speaking more to American or European audiences?
Anne Sebba: I would say it’s roughly divided, but you are absolutely right that most Americans probably already have a view on this. For those who are on the left, they’re prepared to take a look who Ethel was and want to understand her. And those who believe that anyone who was sympathetic to the communists deserve their punishment, then their views are reinforced. In some ways, there’s a more open mind in England, but I wouldn’t like to generalize really. I could say that Ethel has certainly had a sympathetic reading by most women. I think the misogyny of the period is extraordinary and that needs explaining and understanding.
I mean, the weight that the judge put on the fact that she was three years older and therefore must be a fully-fledged partner. The way that many in the Jewish establishment particularly people like Morris Ernst and Roy Cohn believed in this sort of mangled Nietzschean philosophy that Ethel must have been the slave driver, the master, and Julius the weak slave. I mean, there was no evidence for that, but that ultimately passed to President Eisenhower. In his desperately sad letter to his son in Korea, Eisenhower says that although it goes against the grain to electrocute a mother, it has to be said that she was the senior partner. And that sort of misogyny, that Ethel was somehow some sort of wicked woman who had stepped out of her box within the home. Because she didn’t show emotion during the trial, because she was a communist believer, and because she was three years older, therefore she must be the leader in all of this. That is absolutely tragic, because the irony is, as I’ve gone to great pains to show, her primary focus was being a good mother at this point. Before she was a mother when they were in Washington, she passed the civil service exams before Julius. She, of course, gives up her job like a “good wife” and comes back to New York as soon as Julius does. Her whole loyalty towards Julius is really showing that she is a wife of the period, but she wasn’t believed to be that. At every stage you can see that because she wasn’t feminine in the traditional ways, somehow she was accused of subverting what it meant to be a good American wife. She came to stand for something really transgressive. Ethel came to symbolize an attack on whole American way of life really. This belief that they won the war, but they are in danger of losing the peace. I don’t at any stage deny that there was a real and genuine threat from the Soviet Union and there were American spies who were passing information. I’m not sure how much of it was Julius, but that’s not really the point. We know it wasn’t Ethel. We know that the KGB didn’t think Ethel was a spy. She had no codename in the Venona transcripts, which were known at the time of the trial. It just was not necessary to kill this woman. She could have so easily been given a custodial sentence. It’s just extraordinary, the harsh attitudes towards her as woman. The belief that she simply had to be punished and punished by death.
David Newstead: When I talk about this case with people, usually in relation to their sons and the Meeropols, I think a lot of people are surprised that both Julius and Ethel were executed. Sometimes, there are a cases where a mother and a father go to jail, but it has to be extremely rare at least in the United States for something like this.
Anne Sebba: She was the only American woman killed for a crime other than murder. It’s more than extremely rare. It’s unique.
David Newstead: I had heard about the true bonds between Julius and Ethel in the past. And you do great job talking about some of their love letters and other things. But a relationship I didn’t know anything about before your book was the complexity of Ethel’s relationship with her mother. And the fact that her mother denounced her. I just wanted to ask more about that. Can you explain that relationship?
Anne Sebba: I think that it probably wasn’t that unusual for immigrant parents to put an emphasis on the son’s education, but not necessarily to the exclusion of the daughter.And perhaps this was exacerbated because Ethel was bright! Ethel was so much brighter than her brother, David (Greenglass), whom her mother Tessie clearly adored. I don’t know this, but Tessie might have been bright, but unable to achieve anything. She was semi-illiterate and spoke Yiddish. Ethel helped and translated, so there could have been some jealous there. But I thought it was interesting that not only did Ethel not go to college when she could have, but also that David’s wife, Ruth Greenglass, who was very clever didn’t attend college either. It was difficult, because I suppose that they had to start earning money. Perhaps, Ethel would have gone back to college.
A psychotherapist from the case I spoke with said that Ethel was just about to break through with being a good mother. I suppose she wasn’t a natural mother, but what would she have done as a career? She might well have become a teacher or a psychotherapist. I think she was not done with her career is what I’m saying. But in terms of the mother-daughter relationship, I think that defined everything that Ethel tried to be the reverse of. I think when she was in prison and she was trying to think what can I leave these boys? I can’t leave them any material legacy, I can only leave them a legacy of how to behave. And I want to be a better mother than my mother was to me. I mean, she took mothering classes for goodness sake. Who do we know who does that? Mothering was a big new science and Ethel believed in the discoverability of all things. You know, she had this subscription to Parents magazine and she would have read childcare books by Dorothy Whipple or probably Dr. Spock and all of those thing were just emerging. But Ethel was trying to be a progressive mother unlike her own and the legacy she wanted to leave was the opposite of betrayal, so she focused on loyalty as the thing that she could bequeath her sons and I think that became really, really important to her. So, her mother’s behavior really focused her mind on what she wanted at the end, but probably throughout her life. She wanted to be a creative, artistic person and was denied that opportunity partly by circumstances. It was the Great Depression and they had no money. And partly by a mother who didn’t cherish her, didn’t value her, and thought that the only thing that mattered was getting married. Both Tessie and David Greenglass believed that Ethel was stupid to stick with Julius, she should have named names, and confessed, but I don’t think that was an option for her.
David Newstead: This case still comes up quite a lot in American culture. Meryl Streep portrayed Ethel at one point. Why do you think this case and Ethel Rosenberg specifically still resonates so much with people?
Anne Sebba: I think that’s such an interesting question and such an important one and one of the reasons why, of course, I was attracted to it. I first came across the story through the E.L. Doctorow novel, The Book of Daniel, which is highly fictionalized and doesn’t really tell you anything about Ethel. It tells you about the effect on the sons. It tells you about the madness of the country at the time. More potent I think is The Bell Jar, the Sylvia Plath novel. And in the last 70 years, it’s gone on and on and on. This very year, there was Francine Prose’s The Vixen, which I think is a very, very interesting novel. Writer Robert Coover. Angels in America as you say where Ethel is played by Meryl Streep in the HBO version. There are paintings of this story. Jack Levine. There are numerous artistic interpretations of the electric chair including Warhol engravings. What on Earth is it to make art out of an electric chair? There are collages. There’s a song cycle. But all of them have one thing in common really. They look at Ethel, not Ethel and Julius.
Julius is really, very straightforward… Ethel is a much more complex figure. She just doesn’t respond to this one-dimensional stereotyping. She clearly wasn’t simply a housewife. She wasn’t simply a communist. She was a singer-monkey. I don’t suppose she was particularly brilliant, but then she wasn’t trained. And the mere fact that she taught herself is something. I am convinced that she would have gone on to do something notable. But it’s the complexity of her role. Her love for her husband. Her loyalty. Her attempt to be the best mother she could. What did she know? And I think we will never know the extent of her knowledge. But as I’ve said many times, knowing and believing is not a crime. So, the crime for which she was electrocuted was an overt act that we now know was invented. It was perjury. And for someone to go to their death on the basis of their brother’s perjury… I don’t know if that’s a Shakespearean tragedy, a Greek tragedy, all I know is that it’s a tragedy.
And one can’t make sense of this. I mean, I don’t say that this story is America’s Dreyfus affair, because I don’t believe that antisemitism played the role that it did in France’s Dreyfus case. They were arrested following a clear chain of events. It wasn’t antisemitism that led to their arrest. Nonetheless, antisemitism is absolutely part of the toxic stew with misogyny and anticommunism that played into this story. And all of those are very potent still today. These issues have not gone away. A divided country is still something we’re certainly suffering from in England and I’m sure you would agree you are too. So, they’re important issues. And above all, the main issue for me is when a country overrides its own rule of law and dispatches one of its own citizens against whom it knows there is no firm evidence. You know, that is always going to be relevant. So, of course, Ethel is going to interesting to artists. While we’re never going to know the precise extent of what she knew and what she said, it’s always going to be a compelling story for artists to try to interpret.
