Reviews

I have always felt supremely loved by my parents. Working to build a better world for our children is a key component of my definition of parenting, which also includes instilling a sense of humanity and justice in our children…. Social activism should not be left to full-time professionals or be limited to those without children. I believe that the best chance of building a more humane and just society rests on the activism of ordinary citizens with family concerns. 

—Robert Meeropol, son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg

An Execution in the Family:
One Son’s Journey
Robert Meeropol, St. Martin’s Press, 2003

Reviewed by Laurel Dykstra

In 1953, at the height of the McCarthy era, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed for conspiracy to commit espionage. Their trial was characterized by government manipulation, manufactured evidence, and perjury. Their sentences were far out of proportion to the crimes of which they were accused and to punishments in similar cases. Fifty years later, their son Robert Meeropol has produced a political memoir charting his coming to terms with his parents’ wrongful deaths, against the backdrop of the American left. 

The Rosenbergs’ sons, Robert and Michael, were six and ten years old at the time of their parents’ execution. As predicted in the Rosenbergs’ prison letters, friends and supporters carried on their political work and the work of their family. Robert and his brother were raised by the Old Left and members of the Communist Party, but they came of age in the sixties’ New Left. 

Meeropol was active with Students for a Democratic Society, protested the Vietnam War, took part in the civil rights movement, feminism, and Latin American solidarity. He reflects on his experience as an activist and on the recent explosion of youth activism typified by WTO. He grapples honestly with the questions of his parents’ involvement in espionage, and reflects critically on the mainstream media’s depiction of him and recent evaluations of his parents case.

In 1990 Meeropol began work on his lifelong dream, The Rosenberg Fund for Children. The Fund supports children of injured, harassed, or imprisoned activists, as well as targeted youth-activists. They provide things like counseling, music lessons, tuition, and summer camp for young people who have felt the horror of political imprisonment and persecution in their families. The Rosenberg Fund has helped kids including Judy Bari’s daughter and Mumia Abu Jamal’s son.  It is the only organization of its kind dedicated to protecting the voices and actions of families in the political realm.

An Execution in the Family: One Son’s Journey is fascinating and incisive. It is an unflaggingly earnest personal history of fifty years of activism in America.

The Rosenberg Fund's Newsletter tells the stories of  activist families they support.  RFC grants help fund kids' activities like: camp; art/music lessons; school tuition; daycare; therapy; travel to visit incarcerated family; etc.

For more information contact :  www.rfc.org, or call: 413-529-0063
 
 

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