Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy

"“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York,” writes Sylvia Plath in the opening lines of her only novel, The Bell Jar . The execution of an American Jewish couple, Julian (‘Julie’) and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 for espionage was one of those moments that rocked the world. In this book, historian Anne Sebba stops looking at them as a couple and tells Ethel’s story. She was born into poverty but was blessed with brains and a great voice and wanted to become a singer. She cared deeply about social justice and thought communism might be a solution. Through her activism, she met her husband. They had kids. She worried about being a bad mother and read piles of parenting books. Her husband was a spy for the Soviet Union, she probably wasn’t. She was executed by electric chair, leaving behind two boys, aged 10 and 6. As the subtitle says, it was a Cold War tragedy indeed."