Fictionalizing the Rosenbergs

Exactly 25 years to the day after Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed, I was born. While my mother was laboring in a hospital in Philadelphia, the Rosenbergs’ grown sons were still protesting the anniversary of their parents’ deaths in a demonstration in Union Square in New York City.

One of the first images I saw as I began researching for my latest novel, The Hours Count, which re-imagines the years leading up to the Rosenbergs’ executions through the eyes of a fictional neighbor, was a photograph of one of their sons on that day. I saw the caption, my birthdate and the 25th anniversary of the execution, and I got chills.

I first started thinking about the Rosenbergs a few years earlier when I was reading an anthology of women’s letters. I was drawn to a letter that Ethel and Julius wrote to their sons on the day they were executed, June 19th, 1953. They implored their young sons (aged 10 and 6 at the time) to always remember that they were innocent, and that they could not wrong their conscience. Then, that evening, Julius and Ethel were both put to death in the electric chair at Sing Sing. Ethel did not die after the normal amount of electricity and was shocked again. This image — and Ethel’s last words to her sons, stating her innocence — would come to haunt me as I began writing my novel. They haunt me still.

Up until a few years ago, when I first came across this letter, all I knew about the Rosenbergs was the little I’d learned in a high school history class. I had this vague recollection that they’d been executed for spying in the 1950s. That was what I was taught as the Rosenbergs were briefly skimmed over in high school, anyway. But as I began researching, I learned they were actually the only Americans executed during the cold war for “conspiring to commit espionage.” As I read more about the case, I also learned that the evidence against them, especially Ethel, was flimsy at best. Ethel was convicted, and then executed, based on her brother’s testimony that she typed up notes. In fact, years later in the 1990s her brother admitted that this was a lie, that he’d perjured himself to save his own wife.

When Ethel was first arrested in 1950, her sons were three and seven (very close to the ages of my own sons as I began writing my novel), and this was what compelled me to tell this story the most. As a mother myself, it was hard to comprehend what she went through, the horror of being taken from her sons, arrested, jailed for three years, and finally, sent to the electric chair. I could think of almost nothing more terrifying than what Ethel went through; worse, I personally believed that all of this had happened to an innocent woman. I knew I had to write about her, if only so I could re-imagine her the way I believed she really was: as a loving, caring, mother who didn’t deserve to die.

My book is fiction, and it is steeped with characters who never existed at all, but I kept mostly to the timeline and factual details of what happened to the Rosenbergs. The crucial pieces that led me to this story, that haunted me, all made it into my story in one way or another: Ethel’s refusal to die in the electric chair, the image of her son 25 years later in 1978, and most of all the spirit of what she and Julius wrote in that last letter to their children, to always remember that they were innocent.

This summer, nearly a year after I finished writing my novel, new evidence came to light that supports what I’ve now long believed, what I wrote about in The Hours Count, that Ethel was innocent, after all. Her brother’s grand jury testimony was finally unsealed, and in it, he says Ethel was not involved in espionage.

The title of my novel comes from a 1951 Pablo Picasso quote about the Rosenbergs: The hours count, the minutes count, do not let this crime against humanity take place.

The Hours Count came out this fall and the writing is long finished, but I still often think about what happened to Ethel and her family. I know I will not pass another birthday without remembering what else occurred on that day. This past June I turned thirty-seven (two years older, I realized, than Ethel ever got to live.) On that same day, it was the 62nd anniversary of the Rosenbergs’ execution.

So many hours, so many minutes have passed since then. I hope that anyone who reads my novel will think about what happened to Ethel, to her family, the way I have. That it will haunt my readers the way it has come to haunt me.