Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy

Anne Sebba

Jun 2021 · Sold by St. Martin's Press

About this ebook

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 in 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.

Ratings and reviews

I received a free electronic ARC of this biography from Netscape, Anne Sebba, and St. Martin's Press. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me. I have read "Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy" of my own volition, and this review reflects my honest opinion of this work. I am pleased to recommend this biography to friends and family. The little we were taught of this true tragedy in school in the '50s and '60s left a lot to be desired. There is usually a right time and right place in history. Ethel was not blessed with either of those advantages. I am grateful to Anne Sebba for offering this biography of a hard-working, loving mother who faced this disaster of justice with courage and poise. I hope that never again in my lifetime are we faced with such a terrible miscarriage of justice. And that if we do, we are strong enough to stand up for what is right and true.

Opinion Not History The Introduction of this book sets it up to be a piece of political soapbox propaganda. It lambastes two Presidents and both major political parties for being anti-communist. It goes on to portray Ethel Rosenberg as a victim of her upbringing and blaming it for her innocent support of her Communist husband. The author then goes on to blame her fate on the social and cultural issues of the twentieth century but does not mention that all of those still exist today some seventy years later. The book does not fall far from the introduction. While there is plenty of untarnished evidence that Ethel was innocent, this author puts such a spin on the raw facts that this reader thinks she made the evidence fit her theory rather than letting the evidence prove the theory. She does, however, footnote her sources. I am unimpressed and I could not finish the book. I received this ARC book for free from Net Galley and this is my honest review.

About the author

ANNE SEBBA is a prize-winning biographer, lecturer, and former Reuters foreign correspondent who has written several books, including That Woman and Les Parisiennes. A former chair of Britain’s Society of Authors and now on the Council, Anne is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research. She lives in London.