The Rosenbergs are the only Americans put to death in peacetime for conspiracy to commit espionage, and Ethel the only American woman executed for a crime other than murder. No other convicted member of their spy ring received a death sentence. The subtitle of the book is A Cold War Tragedy and it is clear where Sebba’s sympathies lie. She feels that Ethel’s death was a huge miscarriage of justice and she became not just a pawn in a dysfunctional family situation but also a victim of the wider American propaganda war against the Soviet Union. The arrest in 1950 of Klaus Fuchs, a German physicist at Los Alamos, led to Ethel’s husband, Julius (codenamed ANTENNA and LIBERAL), and her brother, David Greengrass. Both men betrayed Ethel – Julius by refusing to confess his own guilt, thinking he could brazen it out on behalf of both of them, and Greengrass by testifying against Ethel in order to reduce his sentence and save his wife, Ruth. Sebba has skilfully taken a well-known spy case and breathed fresh life into it, not particularly with new material, but by examining it with 21st-century sensibilities. Her book is about the human cost of the Cold War, rescuing one of its victims and fleshing out the wider story of a young woman determined to better herself and improve the lot of others. It’s a book about fractured family relationships – Ethel’s mother supported her son over her daughter – and the misuse of power. The FBI admitted they had insufficient evidence to issue proceedings but, in what was called the ‘lever strategy’, hoped pressure on Ethel would force Julius to confess. The carefully picked jury – those against capital punishment were excused service – did not believe Ethel would be executed, even if found guilty, and that anyone testifying against their sister must be telling the truth. Sebba sees it partly also as a story about Jewish identity and prejudice – the judge, both prosecuting attorneys, the defence team and the Rosenbergs were Jewish. But one side, the ‘good’, assimilated, patriotic Jews, were pitted against the Lower East Side Jews, whose loyalties were more suspect. The execution of the Rosenbergs became a cause célèbre and many continued to believe that both had been unfairly executed. The publication of the hitherto unknown Venona decrypts – Soviet codes broken by the Americans – in 1995 confirmed that Julius had run a spy ring for almost a decade, but the
evidence against Ethel was limited to a text dated 27th November 1944: Your 5356. Information on LIBERAL’s wife. Surname that of her husband, first name ETHEL, 29 years old. Married five years. Finished secondary school. A FELLOWCOUNTRYMAN since 1938. Sufficiently well developed politically. Knows about her husband’s work and the role of METER and NIL. It is almost certain that the judge had been secretly apprised of the Venona evidence and that had shaped his judgment and the rejection of subsequent appeals. Sebba is persuasive about Ethel Rosenberg’s punishment being disproportionate, but her attempt to downplay her guilt will strain credulity in some quarters. The FBI opposed the death sentence. They hoped the Rosenbergs would co-operate with the government in order to receive a lesser punishment but, even after her husband was dead and Ethel was being led to her execution, she refused to save herself. Anne Sebba has written a powerful biography of a wife, mother and woman, caught by a system determined to make an example of her and betrayed by those she thought she could trust.
Those who can, teach KATE HUBBARD Re-educated: How I Changed My Job, My Home, My Husband and My Hair By Lucy Kellaway Ebury Press £16.99 The midlife crisis can take many forms, but it commonly begins with a feeling of ‘Is this it?’ And, if it is, is it enough? Do you just trundle along on the same path for another 30 years? Or could you throw it all in? Become an osteopath? Ditch the spouse? Move to the Hebrides? Few act on such fantasies. Lucy Kellaway is the exception. Kellaway, aged 57, was living in a solid, many-storeyed
‘Me? Raid your drinks cabinet, Dr Jekyll?!’
house in Highbury, with her husband and four children. For over 30 years, she had worked at the Financial Times, writing ‘sarky columns’ and amusing interviews. In the space of two years, she ‘tore it all down’. Circumstances played their part – her marriage collapsed, her children grew up, her parents died and her job no longer provided much satisfaction or excitement. What galvanised her, however, was moving house. Browsing the Modern House website, the ‘crack cocaine of property pornography’, she spied the Framehouse in Hackney and fell in love. Being a Modern House addict myself and having instantly googled the Framehouse – an airy, wood and glass triangle of a building – I saw this made perfect sense. Of course you’d want to live there! Kellaway took her share of the sale of the family home, sank all her savings, ignored the dire survey and moved in. It was a decision that ‘released’ her ‘from the force of habit’ that had defined her life. Just as the office had once provided ‘a different way of being’, so did living in a modern house. Emboldened, Kellaway went further and decided to leave the FT and become a maths teacher. Kellaway is clearly not a woman to do things by halves. Simultaneously she co-founded a charity, Now Teach, to recruit and train other middle-aged would-be teachers. There were 45 applicants in the first year, the eldest aged 73. Twelve dropped out. Dropouts are more often men, who seem less willing to unlearn long-held traits, such as self-importance. But the year of COVID has brought a record number of recruits. Most are motivated by a desire for change and to be useful. Kellaway can only feel grateful for the military levels of discipline at her Hackney academy. But her first weeks in the classroom, as she flaps and fumbles and grapples with technology, are every bit as humiliating and nerve-racking as you’d expect. ‘I’m not being funny, Miss. But I could learn this better from a video,’ says one pupil. She’s confounded at every turn. Being bad at something is an unfamiliar experience. Unthinkingly using the phrase ‘whiter than white’, as a roomful of non-white faces gaze up at her, she has to acknowledge that she’s ‘a bundle of unconscious biases’. Never having set much store by exam results (her own were poor), she comes to realise that an ‘exam stickler’ is exactly what her pupils need her to be. Teaching, she concludes, is ‘brutal and brilliant in equal measure’. The Oldie July 2021 51
