On the destruction of small Jewish family – Deborah Friedell in LRB:

“No one thought that Ethel Rosenberg would be executed. At the time of her trial in 1951, no federal judge had sentenced a woman to death in nearly a hundred years. She hadn’t been accused of murder or of being an accomplice to a murder or of conspiracy to commit a murder. These, it seems, were the only crimes for which the American government might kill a woman. Female traitors during the Second World War – Tokyo Rose, Axis Sally, the ‘Doll Woman’ – had received prison terms. And no American civilian, man or woman, had ever received the death penalty in peacetime for ‘conspiracy to commit espionage’, the official charge against her. Almost until the last moment, she expected President Eisenhower to intervene. In her letters she had called him the ‘liberator’ to millions, ‘whose name is one with glory’. Surely, in his own country, he wouldn’t permit the ‘savage destruction of a small unoffending Jewish family’.”

(…)

“When the FBI first arrested Ethel’s brother, then Ethel’s husband, then Ethel, reporters kept failing to discover anything interesting about them. Among other poor Jews on New York’s Lower East Side, the whole family had appeared to be so unremarkable that the historian John Neville would say that ‘they might have been chosen at random from the telephone directory.’ Ethel’s father, Barney Greenglass, repaired sewing machines. Her mother, Tessie, was from Galicia (now part of Ukraine), and raised their four children in a cold-water tenement apartment. Tessie was illiterate, and sympathetic to the Left, though unsophisticated: she once gave money to a door-to-door canvasser for the Nazis because a ‘national socialist’ party sounded good to her. She was envious of her clever only daughter and favoured her youngest child, David. One of Ethel’s childhood friends remembered that Tessie was ‘more bigoted than religious ... If God had meant for Ethel to have music lessons, he would have provided them. As he hadn’t there was something sinful about music lessons.’”

(…)

“In 1936, when she was 21, she met Julius Rosenberg, an 18-year-old engineering student, when she sang at a benefit performance to raise funds for American volunteers fighting with the republicans in Spain. ‘I have loved her ever since that night, and always when I hear her sing it is like the first time,’ Julius later wrote. When his Soviet handler asked him what she was like, he ‘closed his eyes and blew a kiss into his hand’.”

(…)

“Ethel’s brother David claimed that during the war Julius strode into the Russian consulate in Midtown Manhattan and announced himself: ‘He goes knocking on their door, and he says: “Look I want to be a spy for you.” What chutzpah. What craziness. He was crazy.’ Russian sources, more plausibly, suggest that Julius was recruited by Soviet intelligence in Central Park during a Labour Day rally in 1942. By then he was a junior engineer for the Army Signal Corps and married to Ethel.
In 1999, Julius’s handler, Alexander Feklisov, published his memoirs over the objections of the Russian intelligence service. He was a decorated Hero of the Russian Federation, credited in Moscow with having helped resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis: he figured they’d let him get away with it, and, if not, he was at the end of his life anyway. Sebba may be right that his ‘recollections of the Rosenbergs have to be treated with extreme caution’, or at least some scepticism, but in twenty years no one has contradicted the substance of his account, and he often writes against his own interest. He says that he had loved Julius, and is angry that Russian intelligence didn’t do enough to protect him, or to honour the help he’d given them during the war. There’s a monument to the Rosenbergs in Havana: Feklisov thought there should be monuments everywhere.”

(…)

“Yet it was decided that Julius might be even more valuable as a handler of other spies, since as an American citizen he could move more freely than Feklisov, who had an FBI file and was often followed. (Feklisov’s official posting was as a trainee at the New York consulate: when he wasn’t running agents, he helped people with visa problems.) Feklisov considered Julius a ‘born recruiter who could communicate forcefully and passionately his boundless faith in socialist ideals’, and they quickly ‘built a whole network’ of engineers, almost all of them Julius’s former classmates from City College, now engaged in war work. At least eight men passed along technical drawings and manuals about ‘the production of new planes, artillery pieces, shells, radar and electronic calculators’. They weren’t to think of themselves as spies: the two countries were, after all, allies.”

(…)

“In January 1950, under interrogation in London, Fuchs confessed that when he’d been a senior scientist at Los Alamos, he’d passed information to the Soviet Union and had answered questions from their scientists. He either revealed the identity of the Russian agent he talked to in New Mexico or the Americans figured it out for themselves through the Venona intercepts. In any case, when a photograph of the chemist Harry Gold ran on the front page of the Herald Tribune in May – ‘US Arrests Go-Between for Soviets in the Fuchs Case’ – Julius knew the game was up. Gold had received information from David and given him money. It was a profound failure of tradecraft, Feklisov says, for the same courier to meet agents from different spy rings: ‘compartmentalisation is a basic rule of all clandestine work.’ Julius arranged for David to travel to Mexico City, where a Russian agent would meet him with passports that would allow David, his wife and their two children to go to Sweden or Switzerland, then Prague, then Moscow. But David didn’t want to live in the workers’ paradise: he liked New York. He wasn’t even entirely sure that Gold was the same man who’d been his courier – they had met only once, for less than fifteen minutes. Sebba asks why, when David didn’t leave the country, the Rosenbergs didn’t go themselves. She suggests that so far as they knew, David was the only person who could connect them with Gold and Fuchs. Since they wouldn’t have betrayed David, they assumed he wouldn’t betray them.”

(…)

“The trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg began on 6 March 1951 and lasted sixteen days. The syndicated columnist Inez Robb offered a warning that went out in more than a hundred newspapers: Ethel might appear too dumpy to be a spy, ‘innocuous and vacuous’, but she couldn’t disguise her ‘extremely intelligent’ eyes. Sebba thinks that ‘Ethel’s interpretation of dignity in court, possibly in an attempt to control her nerves, was to try not to smile.’ She miscalculated. For reporters, her ‘stony expression’ became evidence that she was ‘cold and unfeeling’ with a ‘contempt for the proceedings’ that was ‘barely concealed’. It also went against her that she was older than Julius and was sometimes falsely portrayed as being taller. She might have expected support from the left-wing press, but so long as the Rosenbergs refused to admit that they were communists, the party worried that helping them might backfire. The Jewish community stayed away until after the trial too. The Rosenbergs didn’t claim that there had been an antisemitic government plot to frame them, only that the FBI had in good faith been deceived by David and Ruth Greenglass. The defence presented their clients as participants in an embarrassing family drama, not the Dreyfus Affair. Some Jewish families (I suspect this may have been the case with my own) were gratified that the trial judge and the chief prosecutors were Jewish. One of them was the 24-year-old Roy Cohn, now best known as Donald Trump’s mentor in his Studio 54 days. We would clean up after ourselves.”

(…)

“After sentencing, Ethel’s lawyer tried to persuade left-wing newspapers to support the Rosenbergs’ appeals, but the CPUSA wasn’t interested: for too many Americans, being a communist was already tantamount to being a traitor and the editors of the Daily Worker worried that the Rosenbergs would only taint the whole movement. At first, the only paper willing to take on the case was the radical weekly National Guardian, which argued in a series of editorials that there might never have been any atomic spies at all: the Soviets were so technologically superior to the Americans that they had probably developed the bomb first, but refused to use it for the good of humanity. The editors dismissed the prosecution’s case as a ‘hoax’ and claimed the Rosenbergs as the ‘first victims of American fascism’. Readers set up a Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg Case, which organised rallies and a letter-writing campaign. Not everyone was persuaded that the Rosenbergs were innocent, but they were opposed to the death penalty – either on principle, or because they didn’t like to see it applied to a young couple who appeared so ordinary and had children. Arthur Miller warned that killing the Rosenbergs would undermine ‘America’s most attractive ... point of superiority’ over the Soviet Union: ‘her humane justice’.”

(…)

“The State Department planted articles in world newspapers that claimed the Rosenberg trial demonstrated ‘the superiority of the American judicial system’, but the left-wing press told a better story: the Americans had lost face and, for all their claims to moral superiority after the war, were now the ones scapegoating Jews. In Britain, Labour MPs called for the Rosenbergs’ sentences to be commuted: the executions would promote anti-American sentiment and disrupt the ‘Anglo-American accord’. On Elizabeth II’s first outing after her coronation, she saw a ‘Save the Rosenbergs’ banner draped on the Monument to the Great Fire of London. Two thousand demonstrators in Calcutta protested outside the US embassy; in Paris, tens of thousands marched on the Place de la Concorde. There was no comment from the Soviet Union. Although Eisenhower accepted that he might be playing into their hands by turning the Rosenbergs into martyrs, he feared that granting clemency would make America look ‘weak and fearful’. Besides, most Americans – according to polls at the time, more than 70 per cent – wanted them to die. In her journals, Sylvia Plath wrote that the ‘appalling thing’ was the indifference all around her. ‘The largest emotional reaction over the United States will be a rather large, democratic, infinitely bored and casual and complacent yawn.’ In The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood (Esther was Ethel’s legal name) is surrounded by girls who say they’re only too glad the Rosenbergs were going to die: ‘It’s awful such people should be alive.’”

(…)

“On 19 June 1953, the night the Rosenbergs were scheduled to die, two stenographers were sent to the prison in case they were needed to take confessions. Six FBI agents were there too, with a list of questions to ask Julius, including one – ‘Was your wife cognisant of your activities?’ – that shows they were rather less certain of Ethel’s guilt than the trial judge had been. According to Clune, the ‘Sing Sing warden believed that Ethel was stronger and should die first, but FBI director Hoover refused, claiming that it would look bad if Julius confessed after they had killed the mother of two children.’ So Julius died first, just before the beginning of Shabbat, then Ethel a few minutes later. ‘She called our bluff,’ the deputy attorney general said. There had been a ‘Save the Rosenbergs’ protest in Madison Square Garden that night, but it dispersed once the executions were announced. No Jewish cemetery was willing to take the bodies. In order to bury them, someone claimed that a pair of plots were needed for sisters who had died in a car accident.”

(…)

“(In Angels in America, Tony Kushner imagines her becoming the author of ‘some personal-advice column for Ms. magazine’.) But she told her lawyer that she couldn’t do it: she was disgusted by anyone who suggested that her sentence be commuted but not Julius’s. She would ‘far rather embrace my husband in death than live on ingloriously’ at his posthumous expense: How diabolical, how bestial, how utterly depraved! Only fiends and perverts could taunt a fastidious woman with so despicable, so degrading a proposition! A cold fury possesses me and I could retch with horror and revulsion, for these unctuous saviours, these odious swine, are actually proposing to erect a terrifying sepulchre in which I shall live without living and die without dying! While in Sing Sing, she read Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan and wrote out Joan of Arc’s speeches. As the months went on, she spent less time talking to her lawyer about her sons: she wanted his editorial help instead, to make her letters – bound for publication – more literary. She was delighted that in Holland a child had been named Ethel Julia in her honour, and told the readers of the National Guardian: ‘I pledge myself anew to the unceasing war against man’s inhumanity to man in whatever form it may rear its brutal head. I shall never sell short the faith and trust that the Guardian readers have reposed in my husband and me.’ In the end, she had fallen in love with her own martyrdom.”

Read the article here.

What a beautifully written and insightful article.

The clumsiness and indeed naiveté of it all, the cold brutality of the state – not much has changed since then. The state and its agents believe they have to be ice cold in order to defend the homeland. (Besides the war in Afghanistan one of the main effects of 9/11 was a new department in DC, called Homeland Security.)

The story of the Rosenbergs is also an interesting footnote in the slightly absurd and slightly repugnant discussion whether Jews (in the US) are white or not.
When the Rosenbergs were executed Jews in America were not yet white. So much is for sure.

And even though I’m in favor of voluntary assimilation (I’m equally in favor if of the choice not to assimilate) the ‘whiteness’ of American Jewry has been not so much a process of making the Jewish people in the US less Jewish, but making them less European.

One of the horrific side remarks in this article was that no Jewish cemetery was willing to accept the bodies of the Rosenbergs. Speaking of guilt by association.

Many people fall in love with martyrdom, most people don’t die as a martyr.