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

Anne Sebba - A Discussion of Anne’s Book: ‘Ethel Rosenberg An American Tragedy’

- Well, good evening, everyone. And tonight we have a very special treat. I’m absolutely delighted to welcome the novelist, Anne Sebba, I should say biographer, to our lockdown family. She’s had an extraordinary career. She’s been a foreign correspondent. She was actually the first woman to be accepted on the Reuters Graduate Scheme. She was in charge for two years of the Society of Authors. She’s done plenty of radio programmes for Radio 3, Radio 4. She’s written 11 books and she’s had an incredible career. And for example, the book on Wallis Simpson really changed people’s views on that woman, she’s written on Jennie Churchill, she’s written on Mother Teresa. Tonight, because it is the anniversary of the execution of Ethel Rosenberg, she’s chosen to talk about her latest book. And I know that she is at the moment working on a very important project. She’s going to bring out a book on the woman’s orchestra in Auschwitz. And, of course, she’s been interviewing Anita Lasker-Wallfisch who’s known to you all. And that’s going to come up for the 80th anniversary of the Liberation. So, Anne, welcome and thank you so much for coming here.

• Thank you so much for inviting me. And on this auspicious occasion, as you mentioned, I love starting with this picture because I think it really shows the woman who was in the toils of men. But just a little bit of background to start with, why did I want to write this book 70 years after the death, after the cruel and botched electrocution of Ethel, who we’re talking about tonight, but also her husband, Julius Rosenberg? Well, I picked 70 years when I started my research, not just because it’s a convenient publisher’s peg. I think 70 years is really important because I hope that it was a time when there would be some perspective, when the dust would’ve settled, when people would talk about this story without getting completely worked up and hide bound in their own political views. Well, how wrong I was! Of course, it still touches a terribly raw wound, especially in America. But there is another good reason for picking 70 years, if you want to interview people who are still alive, you need to do it now, you can’t hang about. And I was lucky enough to have a few interviews before lockdown with Ethel’s two sons, who you see here, age 10 and 6, Michael and Robbie. That’s how they learned about their parents’ death from the media. I didn’t want to do an authorised book, but I did want to speak to them. Of course, they knew things that nobody else could tell me. And also they introduced me to people. They introduced me to two wonderful women, a woman called Miriam Moskowitz who’d been in prison with Ethel, and Dr. Elizabeth Phillips, who had been a psychotherapist, really for Michael, but also for Ethel. So that was very important. Why else did I feel this was the moment to retell this story? Well, particularly in England where I’m speaking, really the story of Ethel is not terribly well known. She’s certainly not an icon as she is in America. And if people know anything about Ethel in this country, they would often say to me, the Rosenbergs, those spies, as if they were one indissoluble unit. So my first task really was to extrapolate Ethel to see her as an individual, to restore her humanity, her voice that was so cruelly cut short.

And that really was the task that I set myself. But then I found, as I say, people knew so little about this story, and if they knew anything, they seem to know about the death. And I’m sure many of you will have read Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar,” so you’ll know her potent opening line, “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs.” So this is June the 19th, 2023 and Ethel was killed on June the 19th, 1953. It was a Friday night. And perhaps I’ll talk more if there’s time about why they picked a Friday night. The judge who was absolutely determined to make this his golden moment of being the judge in the Rosenberg case who made sure that Ethel and Julius were killed. And, of course, being a Friday night, he needed to make sure that it was completed before the Sabbath came in. He failed in that as in so much else. But I do really want to celebrate the life, as I said. But just before I do, I’m going to set the scene by playing you a clip of the announcement of the death. So Bob Considine, the veteran reporter, the Walter Cronkite of his day, if you like, had to witness this botched electrocution. And I just want you to listen very carefully because at the beginning of his report, he says something that really explains the toxic stew of misogyny, anti-Semitism, anti-feminism that went on anti-communism in this case. In order to persuade the American people, which the government did, that Ethel was guilty, although there was not any credible evidence against her, they somehow spun the myth that Ethel was wicked, transgressive, deviant, the stronger partner, there was no evidence for any of this. So by the time she was killed, 70% of Americans believed that that was the correct procedure. So just take a listen to this.

• She died a lot harder. When it appeared that she had received enough electricity to kill an ordinary person and had received the exact amount that had killed her husband, the doctors went over and pulled down the cheap prison dress, a little dark-green printed job, placed the stethoscopes to her and then looked around, looked at each other dumbfounded and seemed surprised that she was not dead. Believing she was dead, the attendants had taken off the ghastly strappings and electrodes and the black belts and so forth, and these had to be readjusted again. And she was given more electricity, which started again that kind of a ghastly plume of smoke that rose from her head and went up against the skylight overhead. After two more of those jolts, Ethel Rosenberg had met her maker. She’ll have a lot of explaining to do.

• So the reason for playing that is not an anywhere an attack on Bob Considine, who was a good man and who actually devoted his life to campaigning against capital punishment after that. And you can see how he’s visibly moved. He can barely get the word stethoscope out. Now, the point is, I hope you heard right at the beginning that when they gave Ethel the same amount of electricity that they gave Julius, which would’ve been enough to kill an ordinary person. So somehow the government had to work hard to persuade people that Ethel was not an ordinary person, as I say, transgressive, deviant, as if somehow she had come in the three years that she spent in prison, she had come to symbolise an attack on the American way of life. And the government didn’t know which one of the pair, Julius or Ethel, to execute first. And they decided in the end that because Julius was weaker, this again they had no evidence for, but he was two and a half years younger. Therefore, they had to kill him first because they were worried that if they killed Ethel first, and Julius changed his mind and confessed, how awful that would look that they’d killed the mother of these boys but the father was a allowed to go free. So in order not to allow that to happen, and there were discussions at the highest level as to which one of the pair to kill first, but they were convinced that Ethel was the stronger or the ringleader as Eisenhower ultimately called her. And therefore she had to wait while Julius was killed. And then they tried to give her the same electricity, but it didn’t work. So it was particularly botched and gruesome. That’s all I want to say about the death because I really do want to celebrate this life. And this is where Ethel Greenglass was born in 1915. You can see the tenement on the Lower East Side, 64 Sheriff Street. So she was born into great poverty. Her parents both came from Eastern Europe, but she was born in America. She was their first daughter. And you would think they might dote on a daughter, but no. So her father, Barney Greenglass, and you can see his repair shop, the window right at the bottom in this picture.

Barney was not ambitious. He was by all accounts kind and sweet and gentle. It was her mother Tessie, who was the problem. She didn’t cherish Ethel. She didn’t cherish girls education. Ethel was a clever girl. She skipped a year at school. She was talented, she was musical, she sang, but Tessie really couldn’t see any purpose in any of that. And probably never went to any of Ethel’s concerts or performances. There were three sons, but it was the one who was born seven years after Ethel, David, the chubby cheeked, curly hair, cherubic face David into whom all the love was poured. Now, Ethel loved David as well and did what was expected of her as a sort of mother surrogate. She read to him, but David was not clever, will come to him later. So Ethel was clever and skipped a year at school, and this is where she went to school, Seward Park High School. And she was quite a shy and timid girl. But the minute she walked through these doors into the assembly hall, which doubled as a theatre, she somehow lost her inhibitions and was able to perform. All her classmates believed she would be an actress. So Ethel was quite right to imbibe the American dream. Her parents were semiilliterate, they only spoke Yiddish and Ethel interpreted for them. But Ethel really believed that anything was possible. And when I say she was quite right to imbibe that dream, also at this school, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Zero Mostel, so that was the sort of transformation that Ethel hoped for herself. Now I call myself very grandly a footsteps biographer in that I like to go to the places that mean something to my subjects. And you just have to walk through the doors of this school. And you can see how Ethel’s ambitions would’ve been immediately expanded. There was an Olympic-sized swimming pool in the basement. Everybody had to pass a swimming test before they could leave. And there was also an amazing Olympic-sized library. So Ethel really hoped to go to college and held out until the last minute university education, free university education for girls was just starting. But unfortunately it was the Depression when Ethel graduated.

And here she is aged 15, graduating in 1931. Her parents really were not happy for her to stay on and go to college. So she had to do a stenographer’s course, a secretarial course. And she was upset about that because she was certainly clever enough and a few of her classmates were continuing their education and going to college. But because this was the Depression, Ethel knew what she had to do. And after she took these stenographers course, she took a job at a packing company. And what I learned about her at this point, because even though she worked all day in a packing company, she continued with her love of the theatre at night and she went to a settlement house, Clark Settlement House, and continued with amateur dramatics in the evening, which further widened her horizon because of the other people she met. Now, I just want to say a brief word about photographs. I’m sure you all know how important the yearbook is for anyone who graduates from an American school. But the yearbook for 1931, the year Ethel graduated, was missing. And the man who showed me around Seward Park High School was very apologetic because they had a full set except they didn’t have this one that showed Ethel. Why? Because when Ethel and Julius were arrested by the FBI in 1950, the FBI searched the homes and possessions of anyone who had been at school or who had known Ethel and Julius. So anyone who had this yearbook immediately wanted to destroy any evidence that they had actually known Ethel. And I went through all the classmates and finally found somebody in California whose mother had been a supporter and very friendly with Ethel, and it was COVID and lockdown and they didn’t want to go and get it copied, but we arranged to have it digitised. So that’s why I’m able to show you this particular copy of the yearbook. And you can see that Ethel signed it to a rare character. And here is Ethel in am-dram.

Now, as I say, I wanted to explain about the photographs. The young children who I showed you right at the beginning, Michael and Robbie had to grow up without any pictures of their parents because everything was taken by the FBI and destroyed. So the pictures that I’m showing you such as this are those that have come back to them as adults. Who knows whether Ethel were would’ve been any good as an actress or a singer, but that was really what she wanted to do. And the two factors that I learned about her adolescent years were really very important for my understanding of her. In the first place, while working for the this packing company, she got involved in a strike and she somehow became a bit of a leader of this strike. And she laid down on her raincoat on the road to stop the lorries entering to deliver the materials for the packing company. And lost her wages for six months. Now, this was very new, this fight for recognition of labour rights, and there was a new National Labour Relations Board that was asked to pronounce whether Ethel had acted justly and they found in her favour afterwards. And the money, her wages that had been docked had to be reissued to her. So she was exonerated, she was justified. And the woman I met in prison told me that this was a seminal moment for Ethel because she understood the importance of social action, that you could actually change things by what you did. The other thing that I learned was that she wanted to continue singing after she left school. She had a high soprano voice, untrained. And she went not just any old Lower East Side choir, but Ethel decided she had to audition for the Schola Cantorum, which was very prestigious, and it sang at Carnegie Hall. Not surprisingly, the first time she auditioned, she was refused because she didn’t know how to sight sing. She went home and because this was the Depression, she found a piano that had been thrown out on the street because it was more important to have the floor space and take rent than to have a piano in your living room. Ethel taught herself sight singing and went back and auditioned a second time. And the second time she was accepted in this choir and she was the youngest member of the choir.

She was 19. And I know how important that was to her because when the judge asked her something about herself, she was very proud about her achievements in being accepted in this choir. Why did she only stay here? Probably, because they started to tour abroad and Ethel knew that she had to give her wages to her mother so she couldn’t tour with them. But they not only sang avant-garde Russian and a lot of modern music, but they had conductors like Toscanini and Klemperer. So Ethel’s worldview is yet again being expanded. And the importance of these two stories is just because they showed me how extraordinarily single-minded and focused Ethel was when she turned her mind to something. Now, at one of the concerts where Ethel was singing, because she acquired a bit of a reputation on the Lower East Side, she used to sing at fundraising galas, and particularly for the orphans of the Spanish Civil War. We know Ethel and Julius who you see here, joined the Communist Party in 1936. They’re often referred to as card-carrying communists. I don’t think anyone really expects the card still to exist if indeed it ever did. But of course they were communists sympathisers. I think Ethel’s communism was twofold. On the one hand, she believed in social action, she believed that capitalism had failed and there had to be an alternative, but it was also geopolitical.

Because in 1936, how else do you stop the dictators? This was when Hitler marched into the Rhineland destroying the Treaty of Versailles, and nobody stopped him. There was also Mussolini in Italy and above all there was Franco in Spain. And Ethel and Julius had many friends who went to fight on the side of the communists against the dictators in Spain. And it was at one of these galas where Ethel was singing to raise money for the orphans that she met Julius. Apparently, she was a bit shy that night, and Julius who’d heard of her reputation came to listen and calmed her nerves and they were an item as we’d say today from then on, probably Ethel didn’t have another serious boyfriend. They were deeply in love. And I’m just going to play you a little clip of the song that Ethel was singing that night. This is not Ethel, it’s Jeanette MacDonald. But just to give you an idea of the sort of voice Ethel had and the song that she… I hope it’s not too loud.

♪ By the river idly dreaming ♪ ♪ While the moon shines bright above ♪

• That’s all I’m going to play. And I’m sorry if it blasts you out. But somehow for me, every time I hear that, I imagine what would Ethel have achieved if she’d had some training and some real lessons on her voice. And I’m not the only one to think that Julius was apparently said that to a jailer because Ethel used to sing in prison. So here they are, the happy couple. Another of those photographs that has been returned to the family. They married in 1939, although both families were perfectly happy for them to go ahead, and certainly it was a step up for Ethel to marry a college boy. Her own parents didn’t think that really mattered, but nonetheless it was. But being a communist in 1939 was uncomfortable. I don’t want to give you a history lesson, but you probably know that’s the year of Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, so Nazi-Soviet Pact, how on earth could you remain a communist if you are fighting against Hitler when suddenly the Soviet Union has joined forces with Hitler? So it was very uncomfortable and many people left the Communist Party, but not Ethel and Julius, they somehow believed it would come right in the end. And indeed it did, because by 1941, when Hitler marched into Russia, of course, then Russia changed sides and became an ally. They’d earned two years to prepare themselves. And later in 1941, of course, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour, and then America joined in the war as well. Now, the reason for giving you this terribly potted history is just to explain that there was a lot of yo-yoing going on in American politics because, of course, initially the American attitude had been how wicked and evil the Soviet Union was and this system called communism, but now of course, they had to change tack and say that the Russians in fact are brave allies fighting incredibly bravely and courageously and they should be supported.

Now, in order to change the attitude of ordinary Americans, there were a number of propaganda films and there were big rallies trying to explain who the Russians and who the Soviet Union were and what they believed in. It was at one of these rallies that Julius, who was not called up, he was not called up because of his poor eyesight and he had asthma, and also because he worked in a restricted occupation. He was inspecting weaponry material for the American government, for the American military. And that was an important occupation. He graduated from CCNY in engineering and many of his friends were working in similar jobs. I’m just going to digress for one minute to explain why he was working for the government, because when he graduated in engineering, he and many of his colleagues found that commercial companies were not so keen on hiring these clever American young Jewish men from the Lower East Side who’d graduated from CCNY. It was much easier to get a job with the American government. So that’s why Julius had a number of friends who worked in similar occupations. He made himself known and said that he thought he could introduce a number of people and provide important information. I’m not in any way justifying that it’s in the gift of an individual to believe that you can help a foreign part, albeit an ally. I’m simply explaining how it’s happened and why because I think it’s important to understand Julius’s motivation.

So Ethel in the war was really involved in mothering and like everything else, she threw herself into it totally. Beforehand, she had worked for the East Side Defence Council trying to persuade America to join in the war. But in 1943, her first child was born, who you see here, Michael. And if I had only one picture in the book, it would be this because she was so devoted and such a determined mother determined to be better than her own mother. And I think this picture speaks volumes of how she was trying to do it. So she went to mothering classes, and again, being Ethel, not just any old Lower East Side mothering classes, she found a Viennese refugee called Edith Buxbaum. And she went to her classes. She took out a subscription to “Parents” magazine. There was an expert called Dorothy Whipple, and she devoured her advice. A lot of it was very new, this was a new science that you could be a better mother. And Ethel really believed in the discoverability of all things. She thought you could learn how to be a good mother. I don’t think she’d had a good example. So it didn’t come naturally to her. So there were these books as well, which I’m sure are familiar to many of you. She took herself off to music classes because she believed that she could learn music and then transmit the music to her sons. And actually she obviously did a really good job because they both still play the guitar. So she was absolutely, totally involved in being a mother to Michael, Robbie was born just after the war in ‘47. But how did it all unravel? So here is the only known picture of Ethel with this seven year younger brother David. And as you can see from the body language, they were close at this point. So David fluffed many of his exams.

He left school without real qualifications. He didn’t even go to Seward Park High School. It was decided that he should go to a vocational school, but he failed many of his exams and he was an avid communist and a known communist. So it’s really rather extraordinary that when his platoon went to Europe, David was not sent with his platoon to Europe. David was sent to Los Alamos where the Manhattan Project was being built. The Manhattan Project was America’s attempt to build a nuclear weapon. Extraordinary lapse in security. I know from the letters that the FBI took from David that his communism was completely open and overt. He and his wife Ruth wrote extraordinary love letters to each other that had communist calls to action in the middle of them. And he’d sign off with the love of Lenin and the humanity of Marx. And when we have children, they’ll be brought up without any need for material objects. And in fact, a quite a well-known physicist called Ben Bederson had to request when he was in Los Alamos, a different room. He said he couldn’t bear the proselytising of this man, David Greenglass. So as I said, lapse of security, David was a machinist in Alamos, and he and Ruth were involved in spying. So how did it all unravel? So the best known photograph of Ethel and Julius is this appalling mugshot of them. They were both arrested for conspiracy to commit espionage. Julius was arrested three weeks before Ethel. It unravelled because of something called the Venona transcripts. Venona is a made-up name. So the Americans were involved in deciphering, decrypting cables sent from American spies to their Russian handlers, so they were Russian spies effectively. And they didn’t want to reveal their knowledge, they didn’t want to reveal that they were decrypting thousands and thousands of these cables.

But of the 3000 that they were working on and had deciphered by 1950, it became clear that Klaus Fuchs, a brilliant East German physicist who was working in Cambridge, had given the Russians really important information. So Klaus Fuchs was arrested in England and he was given 14 years, which is the maximum for espionage in England, of which he served only nine. And it was kept very low key because the British were really rather embarrassed. Klaus Fuchs was so brilliant and he had given so much information away. He was a really key person in this whole unravelling of how Russia had had access to nuclear weapons. So Klaus Fuchs did what everybody did. He named names in addition to confessing, he named his courier Harry Gold, who was a serial liar who was already in prison, and he named David and Ruth Greenglass. David named only one name, and this is very important, he named Julius Rosenberg. And from his grand jury statements, which were only released in 2015 after David’s death, he lived til he was 92, and in his grand jury statements, it’s quite clear, he said, “Leave my sister out of it, not because she’s my sister, honest to God, she had nothing to do with it.” Nobody knew about that until 2015. He constantly changed his story, but he did name Julius. So Julius is arrested. Julius doesn’t talk, unlike the others, he proclaims his innocence. He will not name names. So at this point, Hoover and the FBI are stumped. And that’s when three weeks later, they decide to arrest Ethel. She’s a mother, they think her two boys are at home, of course, she’ll talk. So Ethel is also arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit espionage.

And she too does not talk and doesn’t name names. And when she’s arrested, Hoover says the evidence against her is rather weak, shaky at best. But they arrest her “as,” and I quote, “a lever.” So this is the final time that Ethel and Julius are allowed to touch or to embrace because from now on the American government is busily engaged in building a case against them. And part of that building of the case involves not something sympathetic like this. This picture would result in people feeling sympathetic to the couple who were so obviously in love, so they’re never allowed to touch again. And when they do subsequently meet Julius’s brought in a cage outside Ethel’s prison cell. So while the government is building a case for them to go to trial, I do just want to tell you a little bit about the other side. Of course, America was deeply fearful. This was an existential battle as far as America was concerned. So what they believed was that they had won the war. Clearly we had, but they were in danger of losing the peace. And that’s why Ethel, as I say, came to symbolise this attack on American post-war life. There was a belief that Ethel was too clever by half. In 1949, the Russians had exploded an atomic bomb in Kazakhstan. How on earth did they have the know-how to do this? America was convinced that the Russians were years behind. Well, of course, they weren’t.

They had a lot of knowledge. They lacked the some finesse, particularly the logistics of transporting a bomb. But there was a belief that we must root out these spies and we must make people realise that the Soviet Union and communism poses an existential threat. So American school children were taught that there might be a bomb that would fall on Manhattan and they must duck and dive. And I don’t want to imply that it was completely imaginary because the Chinese Civil War had ended with the victory of communism. And then of course in 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea. And that really persuaded the American government that all forms of communism were won and America really had to fight back. And that’s why I’m showing you this dystopian edition of a “Collier’s” magazine with really well-known writers like Arthur Koestler, Marguerite Higgins, trying to show the very credible dangers that America faced if they didn’t put these spies on trial and give them a really tough penalty to deter all others. And that’s why the assistant prosecutor was a young man, a 23 year old, brash, clever Jewish lawyer called Roy Cohn. I’m sure you know who the other man is in this photograph. I’m showing you Roy Cohn as an older man because after the trial, he went to work for McCarthy and then eventually he went to work for Trump. And in the final days of Trump’s presidency, you may have picked up in the headlines, although Roy Cohn was long since dead, Trump wandering around saying, “Where is my Roy Cohn?” So Roy Cohn determined to make his name in this trial was responsible for persuading Ethel’s brother David to do a plea bargain.

And David agreed to purge himself on condition that his wife Ruth was never indicted. And it was known that Ruth and David were spies. They’d handed a package of information and money to Harry Gold. And because Roy Cohn persuaded David to tell a story that he had seen his sister do the typing, and everybody knew that Ethel was actually a very efficient typist. That was the story that stayed, that was the perjury that enabled his sister to be electrocuted. And it was a very clever story because it was so believable and people were so scared that if secretaries couldn’t be trusted because the secretary was one of the few jobs open to women at this point. And that was why Irving Saypol, who was the chief prosecutor, made so much of this typewriting evidence in his summing up. He talked about how Ethel had struck the keys blow-by-blow against her country. And it was that sort of fighting talk that persuaded the jury that they really were guilty. And the judge, Irving Kaufman, also a brilliant young man, determined to make his name and sentence this couple to death because he wanted to show that these Lower East Side communist Jews usually, simply had to be told that there was no place for them in a patriotic America. Now, the trial was really a theatrical mishmash. There was no real scientific evidence used. Tone took this Jell-O box effect.

Similarly, of course, if there’d ever been a real one, it no longer existed. And he made the jury watch as he cut it up in that asymmetric way to show it was a recognition symbol. Again, a Jell-O box is a symbol of what it means to be a housewife in America and to take these objects and spend the three weeks of the trial, talking about a typewriter and a Jell-O box, but not to introduce any atomic scientists who could easily have put David through his paces and shown that he was not capable of drawing a lens mould either then or certainly not now, five years after he’d been in Los Alamos. And the tea towel on the right is just to show how so much art has been made in the 70 years since using this trial to show that whereas Ethel actually was at home bringing up her children, actually was trying to be a good mother, the jury was sold a lie of Ethel as a tough woman, as the ringleader. This tea towel is based on the letter that Eisenhower sent to his son who was fighting in Korea, in which he showed that he’d swallowed the prevailing narrative because Ethel was two and a half years older, and how deviant is that, she was obviously the ringleader. As I say, there was no evidence beyond the perjury of her brother. He also said that we can’t have women’s spies because where on earth will that end. I just want to show you this picture of Ethel’s smiling because there were never any pictures of Ethel smiling produced at the time. The idea was that she was a woman who dressed badly and she did dress badly. She didn’t have any money, she didn’t care about clothes, but somehow this was used against her, that she was cold and heartless not to be trusted.

She hid behind the Fifth Amendment. And while she was in prison, that picture, by the way, was taken after she’d been given the death penalty. She was being taken to Sing Sing where she had two years in solitary confinement. And while she was there, she wrote extraordinary letters. And I’m just going to read you a snatch from one of them. The letters to her husband and lawyer are legal and some of them were used for publication. But just listen to this, “My dearest darlings, this is the process known as sweating it out and it’s tough, that’s for sure. At the same time, we can’t let a lot of chickens that go about their business without panic, even when something’s frightening them, we can’t let them put us to shame, can we? Maybe you thought that I didn’t feel like crying too when we were hugging and kissing goodbye, huh, even though I’m slightly older than 10. Oh, darlings, that would’ve been so easy, far too easy on myself. And I had to resist a very real temptation to follow your lead and break down with you because I love you more than myself. And because I knew you needed that love far more than I needed the relief of crying.” It’s unimaginable saying goodbye to her children. But Ethel was always more realistic than Julius. She always believed that they would actually be killed. So here is the funeral procession and here is the actual burial at Wellwood Cemetery. And just before I finish with a small coda, what happened to the boys? I just want to say that I think if my book is about anything, it’s about the importance of the rule of law.

So this was a multiple miscarriage of justice. There were multiple failures. It would never have been a allowed today. Not only did the judge constantly refer to Ethel and Julius’s treachery and treason, they were not being charged for treason. For all sorts of legal reasons, it couldn’t be a treason trial because the information they’d given was to Allies, but she was convicted on the basis of perjury. In addition, Kaufman had frequent ex parte discussions with the other side, which he didn’t share. So just remember the importance of the rule of law. But then it was also about families. It’s about a very damaged family at the beginning and a redemptive family at the end. The two boys were adopted by Anne Meeropol, who you see here, and Abel Meeropol, who wrote lyrics. The most famous lyrics that you probably are aware to, “Strange Fruit.” And it was really on the royalties to that anti-lynching song that they lived throughout the time that the two boys remained with them. I think the Meeropols did the most extraordinary job because they were both disciplined and kind, and they trod that incredibly narrow line whereby Ethel and Julius were not, the boys were not brought up to believe that their parents were martyrs, but they were brought up to respect their parents because after all their parents gave them life. So I probably should hand over to questions, but there is just one other thing I do want to say to the point about the importance of the rule of law and why this was such a miscarriage of justice. It was not a crime then, nor is it now to know, nor was it a crime to approve, the only crime was to prove that Ethel had taken some kind of overt action.

And that’s why this story about the typewriter was so important. That was Ethel’s overt action. But when David came out of prison, he admitted to all and sundry that he had invented the story. And he said, “What am I going to do? Call my wife a liar. I sleep with my wife, not my sister.” “Ethel,” he said, “was stupid.” So on that note, perhaps I’ll hand over to questions. There is so much more I could say about all the artistic representations of Ethel in the 70 years since, but that’s for another time because I think everybody realises that while Julius was, as we now know, a spy ring recruiter, a fairly low level, but that’s beside the point, spy ring recruiter. There is no evidence that Ethel did any more than believe in her husband and love her husband. And she died really for loyalty as opposed to the betrayal that she believed her brother’s family, the Greenglasses stood for. So any questions?

Q&A and Comments:

Q - [Host] Yes, Leslie is asking, “What attracted you to this story in the first place?”

A - 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.

Q - [Host] Thank you. David is asking, “How do we know that Ethel did not type what she was accused of?”

A - Because, David, when he came out of prison, said that he honestly couldn’t remember who’d done the typing if indeed anybody did the typing. And perhaps it was my wife, but maybe it was nobody. So we know that that was an invented story.

• [Host] Great.

• There’s slightly more, perhaps I should say there. So these Venona transcripts that I referred to, which are the messages to the KGB. So in the 19 out of about 3000 that were deciphered by these brilliant cryptographers, Meredith Gardner and Robert Lamphere, there are only three where Ethel is mentioned at all. And in these three, Ethel is referred to by her own name, Ethel, no code name. Ruth had a code name, she was Wasp, Julius had a code name, he was Liberal or Antenna. So the KGB did not give Ethel a code name, which is really important. They didn’t think she was working for them. And there’s additional evidence in one of these memos, it says she does not work. And the cryptographers thought that needed an additional memorandum to explain what is meant by that. And they said it doesn’t necessarily mean the going out of and getting her daily bread. It means she doesn’t work for the KGB. So the KGB did not think that Ethel was working for them. She might have typed it up, but all the evidence that we do have indicates that she absolutely did not. And David himself said that it was a made up story.

Q - [Host] Linda’s asking, “If the sons ever got compensation if David admitted that he lied about that.

A - No, not financial compensation. And actually when David finally wrote his book, David came out of prison after about nine years and he lived under an assumed name. And I do know what that assumed name was. And I think I know where his son Steven lives. Steven’s a dentist. And I decided with the agreement of the two sons that I would not mention that name because we didn’t feel that the children deserved to be punished for the deeds of their parents. However, there is no love lost. So David clearly never had any money. And finally in his 80s, he decided to cooperate with a New York Times journalist. And there was a bestselling book written called "The Brother.” And the only way he would cooperate is by being paid for that. So David was additionally paid. So he’s the brother of Ethel and that’s what the book is called. But Michael and Robbie would not take money. Well, they weren’t offered any, so no compensation.

Q - [Host] And did the Rosenbergs get paid for their passing information to the Russians?

• Sorry, I didn’t hear the question. A plane went over. Can you repeat it?

• [Host] Sure. Ruth is asking, “If the Rosenbergs got paid for their passing of information to the Russians.”

A - No. Money was not really what drove them. There was some money paid, but it was mostly money paid for Julius to give the people working for him because he had these, it was a spy ring, he was employing other people. So he needed some expenses, but he didn’t do it for money, he really believed that if Russia was an ally, they needed access to all the useful information that we had in order to prosecute the war. Look, it’s very easy. Now we know what a discredited philosophy communism is, how naive they were, and particularly how naive Julius was. But he felt he was doing the right thing in passing this information. But it was an idealism thing. It was not for money.

Q - [Host] Sandra’s asking, “Where are the Rosenberg boys now? What became of them?”

A - Well, Michael has just turned 80 and I saw him a week ago. And I haven’t seen Robbie for a while other than on Zoom. They’re both retired college professors. What became of them? I feel it’s deeply inappropriate really for me to make any more comments other than factual. But they are just delightful. Let me stick to the factual. The retired college professor’s Michael in economics and Robbie qualified later in life as a lawyer and then set up the Rosenberg Fund for Children, which is a fund, you can Google it, for children who have suffered because of the political beliefs of their parents. So that’s really what he devoted his later life to. They’re still trying to get a Freedom of Information Act and more and more documents. And I think their phrase is, let’s see how the dice falls. They completely understand that their father was involved in aspiring, they would like their mother to be exonerated. And they believe that there are thousands more documents, they’ve already fought all sorts of Freedom of Information Acts to get these documents released. And they just believe that they should be out there in the open. So they’re still fighting is the answer.

Q - [Host] A couple of people are asking how anti-Semitism affected the case.

A - 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.

Q: Why did no Jews appear on the jury?

A: 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.

So just back to the question. Because this is such a complicated story, I want to make sure I’ve given you all the facts. Arthur Miller, who’s played “The Crucible,” opened in 1953, said on the subject of is this a trial about anti-Semitism? This is only five years or six years since the end of World War II when 6 million Jews were killed in the gas chambers, gassed or burnt. And here you have these two Jews about to be burnt again. And you cannot say therefore that there is no role for anti-Semitism in this story. It’s just that actually pinning down the precise moment is hard, but it’s there. It’s in the atmosphere of all of it. So I hope that goes some way to answering the question.

• I think, Anne, that this has been such an extraordinary event for us. You are a wonderful writer and you are also a spellbinding storyteller. Thank you so much for sharing this with us. And I hope you’ll come back soon, certainly to come back to talk about your newest book. But before that, I’d love you to come back and talk about some of your other books. So thank you very, very much.

• Oh, thank you. It’s such a privilege to talk about this story. I feel it’s so important today for a government not to get carried away and taking away the rights of one of its citizens because of mob rule or fear or hysteria. So thank you for letting me tell the story.

• Thank you so much. And good night, everybody. Take care. Bye-bye.