Word: meeropol
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...YOUR SONS: THE LEGACY OF ETHEL AND JULIUS ROSENBERG by ROBERT and MICHAEL MEEROPOL 419 pages. Houghton Mifflin...
Shocking Facts. The Rosenbergs' two children, Michael, 10, and Robert, 6, were left to history. Now, under the name of the couple who adopted them (Anne and Abel Meeropol), Robert, 28, and Michael, 32, have come forward with a Rosenberg book of their own. It is anything but a literary experience. Half of the book consists of Ethel's and Julius' death-house letters. These are interspersed with the sons' rather sketchy autobiographies, plus a long revisionist analysis of the cold war by Michael, who holds a Ph.D. in economics...
...Meeropol boys offer no new evidence that might clear their parents' name. Many of the Rosenbergs' letters have been published before. Some were circulated to generate sympathy during the long appeal process. Tune has not been kind to Ethel's and Julius' prose, either. Embarrassingly personal passages about the torments of separation from each other and from their children bleed profusely into the strident hyperbole of 1930s left-wing rhetoric. An occasional sentence survives questions of guilt, innocence and politics. On a visit to Sing Sing, the older Michael vented his ten-year...
...have to make a real effort to call them my adoptive parents," says Robert, the younger Meeropol. "It feels like an unnatural act to me." He is talking about Songwriter Abel Meeropol and his wife Anne, who lost their own two children at birth and took the frightened Rosenberg boys to live with them six months after the execution. Anne, who died last year, and Abel, now living in Miami, were the best thing that could have happened to the orphans. Abel diverted the boys with stories, inventing characters like Rocky Head, Tomato Nose and a dog named Hungry Soup...
Robert and Michael Meeropol have been refused many documents, chiefly from the CIA and the FBI, that they believe would clear the names of their parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in 1953 as nuclear spies. Historian Allen Weinstein of Smith College, who has tried in vain for three years to open up the FBI files on the Rosenberg and Alger Hiss cases, complains: "The amendments haven't made any change as far as I can tell." Historian James MacGregor Burns agrees. After failing for two years to force the State Department to release thousands of pages...