A Tragedy Without a Hero
DRAPER, ROGER
SPRING BOOKS A TRAGEDY WITHOUT A HERO BY ROGER DRAPER The trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, in 1951, was among the greatest public dramas in American history. Against the defendants stood...
...The only aspect of the prosecution case he challenged was the involvement of the Rosenbergs...
...Myself, I thought that was foolish...
...Everyone in the office knew she was the driver...
...In September, she has Ethel telling us that he "wants us to know that he's been right in there with all the big shots" at Los Alamos...
...David Evanier, the author of the funny and strangely compassionate black comedy Red Love (Scribners, 340 pp., $19.95), assumes the Rosenbergs' culpability but makes no effort to prove it...
...Ethel thinks, "Maybe he's not getting the strong reaction that he wants from us, because he grabs a pad from the kitchen table and draws a sketch...
...When the admittedly strange Gold appeared at the Rosenbergs' trial, however, he had already been convicted and sentenced to a term longer than the prosecution had promised him...
...Surely Gold too must have had some reason for accusing himself...
...Nonetheless, a man named Harry Gold confessed that he had been the intermediary and had identified himself in just this way...
...As chief witnesses, the government produced Ethel's brother David Greenglass—"the lowest of the lowest animals that I have ever seen," insisted defense counsel Manny Bloch in summing up—and his wife, Ruth...
...Five years later, in Nason's version, David is under investigation by the FBI—in part, we are told, because he really had "conspired with someone else in the party" to spy for the Soviet Union...
...we'd be set for the next hundred years...
...Against the defendants stood a charge that seemed to have few if any equals in gravity: that they had conspired to steal "the secret of the atomic bomb" for the Soviet Union...
...And then she'd write back—about her own activities—moving from the YCL [Young Communist League] into the party, things like that...
...No more wars...
...As Nason informs us in an Author's Note, she "relied on available information, written and oral, to provide the necessary and important clues...
...Yet Ethel had only a high school degree...
...Here,' he says, 'you wanta see something...
...David recalls, "Now, I said to Ruth when they dropped it, if only Russia had the bomb...
...President Eisenhower claimed that she had "obviously been the leader in everything they did...
...Ethel is, neither fact nor properly fiction...
...Earlier, she submits, the very insecure David had dropped broad hints about the importance of his top-secret assignment...
...In the final letter, in late 1944, David wrote: "I most certainly will be glad to be part of the community project that Julius and his friends have in mind...
...Fictional names—Dolly and Solly Rubell—are used for the two principals...
...The author aims to help Ethel "make a case for her own innocence" by recreating "her reality, not conceivable except through fiction...
...No one was surprised when Julius was condemned to death, but even the prosecution hadn't expected Ethel to receive a capital sentence...
...Or is it the assistant prosecutor, based on Roy Cohn, who represents Evanier?: "He sincerely hated faggot Jew Commie bastards...
...Was I? No, but I loved them...
...In 1961, a visit to Israel changed Lerner's politics, but the Old Left still obsessed him, and in 1980, he started work on Red Love...
...Nason doesn't name even one of David's partners...
...In the mid-1950s, Lemer confides, "I started to hang around the Communist Party...
...Lies—from beginning to end," replies Nason's Ethel...
...Their ingratitude, their betrayal, their worship of Stalin...
...A generation ago this tragedy without a hero inspired E.L...
...He failed to convince the jury, probably because he could never suggest who, if not Julius, had directed Gold to Greenglass...
...Dolly was vicious...
...A similar theory was advanced to justify Ethel's execution...
...Moreover, Lemer shares the stage with additional narrators who contradict him and one another...
...Tema Nason's Ethel(Delacorte, 306 pp., $ 18.95) is a fictional autobiography of its subject, in a style very much less bombastic than hers (as revealed in her death house letters), yet also resolutely pedestrian...
...First there is the fictional author, "Gerald Lerner," who makes his appearance in the Prologue to Red Love...
...The copyright page notifies the reader that "Any resemblance to events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental...
...Like Evanier, Lemer has already published two novels, and parts of his new work have appeared in a variety of "reactionary literary magazines" (inEvanier'scase, Commentary and the egregious American Spectator...
...Doctorow's eloquent (albeit politically silly) bestseller, The Book of Daniel...
...His new book brings to life the tragedy of a generation that wasted its idealism on a delusion...
...David Greenglass confessed to providing his brother-inlaw with sketches and notes on several occasions...
...Nason, or rather Nason's Ethel, says that they would write "about party things...
...He had nothing to gain by confirming David's story...
...This is the atom bomb that we dropped on Nagasaki.'" Julius shows little interest in it...
...Elderly Leninists talked to him about the affair, Lerner admits, "because they felt I was on their side...
...Manny Bloch proposed an analogous scenario in court...
...Nason's case is simply fabricated...
...I made notes of my conversations with them for the FBI, but my heart wasn't in it...
...Solly," says a minor narrator, FBI agent Goldberg, "was a wimp...
...In January 1945, while David was home on furlough in New York, Julius cut an empty Jell-O box in two, gave his in-laws a piece, and told them that a courier bearing the other half would meet them in New Mexico...
...Nason's Ethel, for what it is worth, claims to hate Jell-O and denies keeping it at home...
...Of course, the true reason is that the real evidence points to the Rosenbergs' guilt...
...But the general air of charity does not extend to the Rubells...
...For eight years, Lerner says, he moved in Leftist circles, interviewing hundreds of subjects, and always dreading exposure...
...In many instances, Evanier implies, the men and women of this milieu were guilty only of castastrophically wishful thinking...
...Still, we can't assume that Evanier shares Gerald Lerner's views, for they so often appear to be ironic...
...So does another narrator, an informer who attends "party functions, nibbling at the home-cooked delicacies, like knishes and latkes, that the little old Jewish women" made for him...
...It is not that Evanier has no case, but rather that he seems to feel the use of fiction has absolved him of the need to present one...
...For example, there are the letters David and Ruth Greenglass sent one another in 1943-44 before she moved to New Mexico, where he was a machinist at the secret atom bomb development facility in Los Alamos...
...He disliked "Party bureaucrats who spoke very, very carefully, afraid they might be expelled at any moment for a deviation (at one point, looking Negroes in the eye was a deviation, at another, not looking was one...
...Without question, the Rosenbergs could have saved their lives by confessing—very much the government's preference, since little was known about their collaborators in the spy operation...
...Although he never loses sight of the evils Communism let loose, he never encourages us to suppose that good and bad people are those, respectively, with good and bad opinions...
...However, Bloch's strategy was to accept all of Harry Gold's testimony—since Gold, despite his insistence that his Soviet controller had told him to use the password "I come from Julius" on arrival at the Greenglass home in New Mexico, did not claim to have seen Julius...
...And why does Nason buy David's confession and not that of Harry Gold...
...like there might be some potential members in his company and that he was subtly talking it up...
...I doubt it...
...These people never read anything that contradicted their world view.' Lerner's Odyssey through what remains of the Rosenbergs' generation, not the fate of the two principals, is the real story of RedLove...
...She [his wife] led his whole life...
...There really was such a foolish and indiscreet correspondence...
...it is the literary equivalent of a wildly speculative television "docudrama...
...indiscreet...
...Perhaps fiction isn't an appropriate vehicle for making controversial speculations about controversial events...
...Certainly Evanier's attitude toward what his characters do and say is, quite consciously, rather less than fully apparent...
...NASON IDENTIFIES WHOLEHEARTEDLY with Ethel, her sole narrative voice...
...David Evanier chooses to hide behind a number of masks...
...Ethel insists that David take it when he leaves...
...It is most unlikely that she ran an industrial spy ring consisting mainly of her husband's engineering school cronies...
...You might call the author's use of this evidence disingenuous...
...The jury, though, believed them, not Bloch's clients...
...Nonetheless, I am not at all sure that I would have been as fair to the Rosenbergs' world as David Evanier has managed to be...
...Delicious food, anyway, a job, open arms...
...I hadn't meant any harm in putting myself forward [as an informer], and yet now I realized that innocent people were losing their jobs or even going to jail...
...But to avoid incriminating their cohorts, and to hasten the coming of a "Soviet America," Julius and Ethel chose to die in the electric chair...
...They loved to see a young person among them again...
...Two other novelists have recently followed him into the same waters...
...But my fears were usually unjustified...
...Yet the Communists "offered a love-starved boy the world, or at least the trappings of it...
...The defense counsel also accepted the self-incriminating part of David's testimony...
...Thenovelisessentiallyaseriesofvignettes...
...Greenglass testified that upon returning to New York in September 1945 he went to the Rosenberg apartment and gave Julius additional material, which Ethel typed on the spot...
...He then implicates the Rosenbergs out of anger at Julius, who owed him $2,000...
...This was the most serious accusation against her at the trial, so Nason concocts her own version of the visit...
Vol. 74 • May 1991 • No. 7
