'An Execution in the Family'
How a Rosenberg son survived the 1950s
By Deirdre Griswold
"An Execution in the Family,"
by Robert Meeropol. St. Martin's Press, New York, 2003.
$25.95, cloth.
Robert Meeropol, the younger son of Julius and
Ethel Rosenberg, has written a book about what it was like
growing up with the secret knowledge that his biological
parents had been executed by the U.S. government, allegedly for
conspiring to pass atomic secrets to the Soviet Union.
The book is timely, not only because June 19 is the 50th
anniversary of this brutal injustice, but also because there is
great apprehension among many in the progressive movement over
the repressive measures being taken by the Bush administration,
and comparisons are being made to the McCarthy period.
Meeropol was only three years old when his parents were
arrested, and six when they were executed as thousands of
progressives held a vigil at the Supreme Court in Washington,
D.C. His earliest memories are of being sent back and forth
between frightened, reluctant relatives and state
institutions--until kind people in the left movement arranged
for him and his brother, Michael, to be adopted by a warm and
loving couple, Abel and Anne Meeropol. Abel Meeropol was a
writer of song lyrics--including the haunting anti-lynching
ballad "Strange Fruit," popularized by Billie Holliday.
The book is a thoughtful and personally revealing antidote
to the deliberate misconceptions that pervade this society
about what it means to be a communist. Meeropol is concerned
with setting the record straight in many ways, large and small.
He mentions, for instance, that in a Para mount Pictures' film
version of a book by E.L. Doctorow, "The Book of Daniel," the
children of a couple supposed to be the Rosenbergs are
exploited at a large rally, passed hand over hand over the
heads of a tightly packed crowd to the stage as the crowd
chants, "The children, the children!" Nothing remotely like
that ever happened to the boys, says Meeropol. The film was
sheer Hollywood.
"The people who sheltered us did everything in their power
to protect us," he writes. "They would ultimately become my
heroes and role models for how I wanted to live my life."
Until he was in his mid-twenties, and was already a very
active militant in SDS and the rising anti-war movement,
Meeropol always had the dilemma of whether or not to tell his
friends who he really was. His adoptive parents had changed the
boys' last name to Meeropol to protect them from the frenzied
anti-communism of those days. He grew up knowing that "they"--
the FBI, HUAC, the commercial media--were hound ing people out
of their jobs and even sending them to jail because they fought
for a better society. He learned early on not to let anyone
know. When he finally told his wife-to-be, he was relieved to
find out that she had actually known who he was for some
time.
Meeropol has an engaging writing style, very honest about
himself, quite the opposite of the closed and cautious young
boy he describes in the first part of the book.
This book is about a journey from the fragmented images a
young child has of what is going on around him to a growing
curiosity and awareness of social struggles, impelled partly by
the need to understand what happened to his parents, but also
in response to the winds of struggle that began with the civil
rights movement and took on hurricane force with the horrors of
the Vietnam War.
A section toward the end deals with the author's attempts to
understand his parents' great loyalty to the Soviet Union,
which had defeated the Nazi fascists in World War II while the
"democratic" imperialists were dragging their feet, allowing
Hitler to inflict enormous damage on the USSR.
This is not a scary book. Quite the opposite. The children
take strength from the wonderful people who come to their aid,
just as the children of the South African struggle did. Robert
Meeropol overcomes the worst thing that could happen to a small
child--the state murder of his parents--and develops into a
feisty 1960s radical with all the energy of that period,
channeled by his basic anti-capitalist outlook.
Meeropol today runs the Rosenberg Fund for Children, which,
as the book jacket explains, provides for "the education and
emotional needs of both targeted activist youth and children in
this country whose parents have been harassed, injured, jailed,
lost jobs, or died in the course of their progressive
activities."
On June 19, at New York's City Center, the fund will
commemorate the 50th anniversary of the execution of the
Rosenbergs with Celebrate the Children of Resistance, a program
of dramatic reading, music and song.
Reprinted from the June 26, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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