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Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy
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About This Book
New York Times bestselling author Anne Sebba's moving biography of Ethel Rosenberg, the wife and mother whose execution for espionage-related crimes defined the Cold War and horrified the world. In June 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a couple with two young sons, were led separately from their prison cells on Death Row and electrocuted moments apart. Both had been convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage for the Soviet Union, despite the fact that the US government was aware that the evidence against Ethel was shaky at best and based on the perjury of her own brother. This book is the first to focus on one half of that couple for more than thirty years, and much new evidence has surfaced since then. Ethel was a bright girl who might have fulfilled her personal dream of becoming an opera singer, but instead found herself struggling with the social mores of the 1950's. She longed to be a good wife and perfect mother, while battling the political paranoia of the McCarthy era, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and a mother who never valued her. Because of her profound love for and loyalty to her husband, she refused to incriminate him, despite government pressure on her to do so. Instead, she courageously faced the death penalty for a crime she hadn't committed, orphaning her children. Seventy years after her trial, this is the first time Ethel's story has been told with the full use of the dramatic and tragic prison letters she exchanged with her husband, her lawyer and her psychotherapist over a three-year period, two of them in solitary confinement. Hers is the resonant story of what happens when a government motivated by fear tramples on the rights of its citizens.
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Reviews
"Sebba makes clear her own distaste for communism, and her explicit mission is human rather than political: it is to 'extrapolate' Ethel the woman from the whole notorious, sordid story."
"The author compellingly narrates Ethel's early life, the course of her relationship with the brother whose perjury sent her to the electric chair, and both her difficulties as a mother and her commitment to overcoming them."
"In this engrossing narrative, Ethel emerges as a doctrinaire Communist, and yet the opposite of the contemporary attacks on her as an unfit mother."
"Sebba's heartbreaking biography leaves little doubt that Ethel's trial was 'tiddled with miscarriages of justice', based as it was on the false testimony of her co-accused brother David and a deadly game of realpolitik in which she was the pawn ..."
"Sebba's careful reconstruction of Ethel's early life depicts both complexity and ordinariness, while Ethel's letters from prison reveal immense courage in the face of overwhelming suffering ..."
"sympathetic yet opaque ..."
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