In The Book of Daniel, the Isaacsons have two young children, Daniel and his younger sister Susan. The Rosenbergs had two sons, Michael and Robert, who were ten and six years old, respectively, when their parents were executed. Like Julius and Ethel, Paul and Rochelle Isaacson were first-generation Jewish immigrants who came of age during the Great Depression and embraced Communism. There are obvious parallels between the Rosenbergs and the Isaacsons, the fictional couple in the novel. While events in the novel are driven by the anti-Communist zeal of the Cold War in the 1950s, protests against the Vietnam War also shape Daniel’s understanding of his parents. The Book of Daniel also is a political novel that explores the continuities and differences between the Old Left that became popular during the Great Depression and the New Left that emerged in the 1960s. Although Doctorow is writing a novel rather than history, he perceptively limns the issues raised by the trial. The author creates a family loosely based on the Rosenbergs-the Isaacsons-and tells their story through their now-adult son, Daniel, who is writing his Ph.D. It is an impressive work of historical fiction. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel, an extraordinary novel inspired by the case published a half century ago.ĭoctorow’s novel succeeds on two levels. If Sebba’s book has piqued your interest in the couple, then you absolutely should read E.L. Just this year, Anne Sebba’s biography of Ethel Rosenberg revived interest in the case. The Rosenbergs affair was a defining moment in the Cold War and still resonates today. Despite numerous legal appeals and a worldwide campaign for clemency, Rosenbergs were executed in 1953. Kaufman, sentenced the Rosenbergs to death. In the heat of the Cold War-the Korean War had begun the year before, in 1950-the judge who tried the case, Irving R. The United States charged the couple (and several other defendants) with passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Relatively few people are given to mathematics or physics, but narrative seems to be within everyone's grasp, perhaps because it comes of the nature of language itself.Seventy years ago, the jury in a federal criminal trial convicted Julius Rosenberg and his wife Ethel of conspiracy to commit espionage. I know now that everyone in the world tells stories. They must have been strong enough as presences in their own minds to trust that people would listen to them when they spoke. Of course, when you bring love to the person you are listening to, the story has to be interesting, and in one sense the task of a professional writer who publishes books is to overcome the terrible loss of not being someone the reader knows and loves.īut apart from that, the people whose stories I heard as a child must have had a very firm view of themselves in the world. The events they spoke of were of a daily, ordinary sort, but when narrated or acted out they took on great importance and excitement as I listened. When I was a boy everyone in my family was a good storyteller, my mother and father, my brother, my aunts and uncles and grandparents all of them were people to whom interesting things seemed to happen. Esquire Editors "Ultimate Discourse," by E.L. Here, in an exclusive excerpt from an essay that ran in a 1986 issue of Esquire, Doctorow, who died of lung cancer at 84 on Tuesday, explains why fiction matters, regardless of genre. Doctorow, a contemporary novelist whose critically-lauded works, such as Ragtime, cleverly manipulated popular genres and historical contexts to readers' delight. Perhaps no one knew this better than E.L. Literary fiction has never shied from debate, be it in discussions over its merit, its irrelevance, or how it's lost the book war to genre fiction.
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