Anne Sebba
Anne Sebba Discusses her Book ‘Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy’

Oh, I think it’s one of the most important stories of the 20th century. But the slightly longer answer is that I lived in New York about 40 years ago and I read E. L. Doctorow’s book, one of these artistic interpretations of the story. And in the E. L. Doctorow book, which is called The Story of Daniel, long before details were known, it’s a brilliant imagination, he takes a boy and a girl, not two boys. And I was the mother then of a boy and a girl. And I just could never get that story out of my head. It’s probably taken me 40 years to digest it and process it. So that’s what attracted me.

Now that’s a really important question. Thank you for asking it. I don’t specifically refer to it other than part of this sort of toxic stew because it’s really hard to pin down. What I hope I’ve shown is that there was a specific process, the decrypting of the Venona documents that led through Fuchs and Harry Gold and David Greenglass to Julius. So they weren’t picked up because of anti-Semitism, but of course anti-Semitism is there. And also their execution didn’t lead to an increase in anti-Semitism. The Jewish community in America was deeply divided. And that’s why the clemency campaign was very slow to get off the ground because the natural base of support on the Lower East Side of people who would’ve felt that they were being framed didn’t want to put their heads above the parapet because they thought it looked as if Jews were not being patriotic. So the upper class, if you like, the waspish Jews, the wealthy Jews who belonged to clubs were only too keen to show that the Jewish community was deeply patriotic and wanted to disassociate itself from this couple who were standing accused of selling secret information to the Russians. So, because the Jewish community was divided, it’s hard to pinpoint and because they weren’t arrested because of anti-Semitism. But you have to look at the courtroom where everybody in the courtroom is Jewish, from the judge, the prosecutor, the defence counsel, Manny Bloch, everybody is Jewish except the jury.

Well, many prospective jurors, PJs, if they were Jewish, would’ve recused themselves before it came to trial because they didn’t want to stand in judgement of their fellow Jews. And it wasn’t obvious to Manny Bloch who was given a generous amount of time to reject PJs who he thought would be prejudiced. It wasn’t obvious that by having more women, they’d have a more sympathetic hearing. In fact, the one female on the jury was one of the keenest to make sure that Ethel was electrocuted. It wasn’t obvious that having more Jews would get a different verdict. And perhaps I should say about the verdict, it was for the jury to decide if they were guilty or not, but then it was for the Judge Kaufman to decide whether or not to impose the death penalty. And he absolutely was so keen to do that to show that Jews knew where their patriotic duty lay. He paid a heavy price. Nobody has forgiven him for his harshness. I think what I want to say is that, of course, Ethel could have been given a custodial sentence of a few years, and then I wouldn’t be telling this story, but it was so harsh to give a capital sentence. And when there obviously was doubt, the government knew that there was doubt. The Attorney General Brownell said, “She called our bluff.” Hoover himself did not want to go ahead with killing Ethel. The two men who were responsible for decrypting Venona wrote to Eisenhower saying that Ethel should not be executed. They knew that there was no evidence and this execution of Ethel should not go ahead. Nonetheless, it did.