Read Rebecca Abrams’s review in the Weekend FT Life and Arts (21-22 August 2021)
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Read Rachel Cooke’s review of Ethel Rosenberg in The Observer (27 June 2021)
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On June 19, 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed by electrocution for their part in a conspiracy to provide to the Soviet Union top secret information on the development of nuclear weapons. Their co-conspirators received long prison sentences, but the Rosenbergs became the first American civilians to be sentenced to death in peacetime.
At their trial, Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, testified that his brother-in-law Julius had recruited him into a spy ring, and that Greenglass, working in 1944 on the atomic bomb project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, had supplied drawings of a lens mold as part of the espionage that led to the first Soviet nuclear test on Aug. 29, 1949, years ahead of American scientists’ expectations.
The shock of the Soviet blast came at a time of increasing tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, now no longer a World War II ally but regarded as a menace to world peace because of its aggressive takeover of Eastern Europe and its employment of espionage networks in the United States and among its allies. At sentencing, Judge Irving Kaufman denounced the Rosenbergs for their perfidy which had put millions of American lives in jeopardy. His view, as Anne Sebba recounts, was seconded by President Dwight Eisenhower, who refused all pleas to grant clemency to the couple who steadfastly proclaimed their innocence. They became a cause around the world with protests at the inhumanity of executing the parents of two young children when other guilty parties, notably scientist Klaus Fuchs (tried in England), had been spared the death penalty. Many Americans supported the Rosenberg verdict, and others attacked what they considered a hysterical persecution of two Jews suspected of espousing radical views but not treason.
Sebba concedes the now overwhelming evidence that Julius Rosenberg was in fact a Soviet spy who recruited others, but like other recent commentators on the case, she regards the evidence against Ethel as nearly nonexistent, trumped up by one of the prosecutors, Roy Cohn, who persuaded David Greenglass to concoct a story about how Ethel typed up her husband’s espionage reports.
Sebba provides a compassionate account of Ethel’s character as a wife and mother, dutifully standing by her husband no matter what, and at the same time doing everything in her power to nurture her two boys, who emerged remarkably unscathed by their parents’ ordeal and who honor their parents’ memory in Sebba’s account of their lives.
In this engrossing narrative, Ethel emerges as a doctrinaire Communist, and yet the opposite of the contemporary attacks on her as an unfit mother. Ironically, Ethel conformed to the period’s American ideal of the wife and mother with fealty to her family while she was attacked for being the spy ring leader who manipulated her husband and was thus unfaithful to her role in society and her ties to her kindred.
Review source: Datebook. Review by Carl Rollyson in the San Francisco Chronicle (8 June 2021)
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“Sebba has dug deep beneath this famous and archetypically male story of spying, weapons and international tensions to give us an intelligent, sensitive and absorbing account of the short, tragic life of a woman made remarkable by circumstance.”
Read Melissa Benn’s full review of Ethel Rosenberg in The Guardian (24 June 2021)
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“Anne Sebba has written a powerful biography of a wife, mother and woman, caught by a system determined to make an example of her and betrayed by those she thought she could trust.”
Read Andrew Lownie’s full review of Ethel Rosenberg in The Oldie (24 June 2021)
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Read Andrew Rosenheim’s review of Ethel Rosenberg in The Tablet (23 June 2021)
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Read Deborah Friedell’s review of Ethel Rosenberg in The London Review of Books (23 June 2021)
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Read Clare Mulley’s review of Ethel Rosenberg in The Spectator (19 June 2021)
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“This shattering story of a courageous woman swept up in one of America’s greatest miscarriages of justice is enthralling and deeply moving. With her usual brilliance, Anne Sebba has brought to light the real person buried under decades of propaganda and has finally succeeded in humanising Ethel Rosenberg. This is a magnificent work, meticulously researched and skilfully crafted”
Ariana Neumann, author of New York Times bestseller When Time Stopped
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Read Jake Kerridge’s review of Ethel Rosenberg in The Telegraph (18 June 2021)
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Read Kate Saunders’ review of Ethel Rosenberg in The Jewish Chronicle (18 June 2021)
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“Anne Sebba’s Ethel Rosenberg is a tour de force, a tale of a woman betrayed and executed. Sebba’s painstaking research creates a new picture of a woman caught up in accusations, an activist, a devoted mother sent to the electric chair, a tale of idealism and government’s demand for a scapegoat, a moving, fascinating picture of the first woman to be executed in the US for espionage.”
Kate Williams
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“Anne Sebba’s brilliant biography is the story of a woman who fell victim to a fatal cocktail of prejudices”
Read Kate Saunders’ review of Ethel Rosenberg in The Jewish Chronicle (17 June 2021)
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“Sebba produces a brilliant biography of a woman whose life personified a nation divided and the consequences of living under a frightened government”
Read the review of Ethel Rosenberg in The New European (1 June 2021)
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Read Gerald Jacobs’s review of Ethel Rosenberg in The Critic.
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Read Adam Sisman’s review of Ethel Rosenberg in the Literary Review.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/books/review/anne-sebba-ethel-rosenberg.html
