A spellbinding historical novel about a woman who befriends Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and is drawn into their world of intrigue, from the author of Margot and The Lost Letter On June 19, 1953, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed for conspiring to commit espionage. The day Ethel was first arrested in 1950, she left her two young sons with a neighbor, and she never came home to them again. Brilliantly melding fact and fiction, Jillian Cantor reimagines the life of that neighbor, and the life of Ethel and Julius, an ordinary-seeming Jewish couple who became the only Americans put to death for spying during the Cold War. A few years earlier, in 1947, Millie Stein moves with her husband, Ed, and their toddler son, David, into an apartment on the eleventh floor in Knickerbocker Village on New York’s Lower East Side. Her new neighbors are the Rosenbergs. Struggling to care for David, who doesn’t speak, and isolated from other “normal” families, Millie meets Jake, a psychologist who says he can help David, and befriends Ethel, also a young mother. Millie and Ethel’s lives as friends, wives, mothers, and neighbors entwine, even as chaos begins to swirl around the Rosenbergs and the FBI closes in. Millie begins to question her own husband’s political loyalty and her marriage, and whether she can trust Jake and the deep connection they have forged as they secretly work with David. Caught between these two men, both of whom have their own agendas, and desperate to help her friends, Millie will find herself drawn into the dramatic course of history. As Millie—trusting and naive—is thrown into a world of lies, intrigue, spies and counterspies, she realizes she must fight for what she believes, who she loves, and what is right.
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I guess I just don't care for Cantor's modus operandi - taking a tragic piece of Jewish history, speculating “what if?” and adding a touch of romance to sweeten the story. Her previous book asked “what if Anne Frank's sister Margot had survived the concentration camps and was living under an assumed name in America?” Her new novel is based on the true story of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the only American citizens executed for espionage, but makes the nameless neighbor who watched their children when they were arrested into the main character, Millie Stein. Cantor complicates Millie's life by adding an autistic son, a cold and selfish Russian-born husband, and a mysterious protector. Millie befriends Ethel Rosenberg and has a sideline view of the activities that lead to the Rosenbergs' arrest and eventual execution, but unfortunately she doesn't make a very compelling narrator because she doesn't have a clue about what is really going on, and her understanding of the issues is very simplistic - her insistence that Ethel can't be a spy is based entirely on the fact that she's a good mother.
Millie finds comfort and perhaps more with Jake, a psychologist whom Millie meets at a party in Ethel and Julius' apartment. He offers to help treat Millie's autistic son, charges her nothing, and lives in a sparsely furnished apartment, and yet she thinks nothing of the fact that he asks her lots of questions and always seems to be there right when she needs him. Her naivete is more annoying than sympathetic.
The period details about Jewish life in late 1940s/early 1950s New York City are interesting, and the prevailing attitudes towards Millie's autistic son are heartbreakingly accurate (her doctor says it's her fault because she doesn't love him enough; her husband and mother think he should be institutionalized). But I think I'd rather read a real account of the Rosenberg case than this fictionalized and romanticized lightweight version of a sad chapter in American history.
