Marianne Langner Zeitlin: An Interview
Marianne Langner Zeitlin is the author of three novels, Mira’s Passage (Dell), Next of Kin(Zephyr Press, which won a City of Toronto Book Award, and the just published Motherless Child (June 2012, Zephyr Press). Recent stories have appeared in Passager, Aethlon, Scribblers on the Roof and Jewishfiction.net.
“The Desecration of the Sabbath” appears in Fiction Fix 11.
“The Desecration of the Sabbath” is set in New York and begins in the moments leading up the 1953 execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. When did you write the story? Can you tell us anything about its history?
I didn’t attempt to write the story for many years after the actual event. I had to digest it slowly over time. When I did so I wrote a number of drafts and discarded them before I finally finished it.
As a Jew, for my generation, the defining historical event was the Holocaust. I was very young when the facts about the extermination camps were revealed and the images were seared into my consciousness. Around sixty of my mother’s family wound up in Auschwitz. Eight years later, the Rosenbergs were executed and for me it was like a mini Holocaust, though the term “Holocaust” hadn’t yet been coined. I believe the night of their execution was a haunting and traumatic one, especially for Jews.
For starters, I’m against capital punishment. So whatever I felt about the Rosenbergs’ guilt, I would have thought the executions were a miscarriage of justice. Added to this is the fact it came during the height of the McCarthy era when all kinds of witch-hunts were in progress. Sinclair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen Here,” a cautionary tale about the rise of fascism in the United States, was still an active frame of reference at the time.
What made this trial particularly horrendous for me, however, was the fact that the main characters in this drama were all Jews. It was Roy Cohn who masterminded the trial, claiming in his autobiography that it was he who used his influence to appoint both a Jewish judge and Jewish prosecutor, and it was he who recommended the death penalty. By so doing he absolved J. Edgar Hoover, who called it “the trial of the century,” and Joseph McCarthy from the possible accusation of anti-Semitism.
Cohn manipulated David Greenglass, Ethel’s brother, to give testimony against his sister and brother-in-law in order to save his own neck. Greenglass recanted later, admitting that he’d testified that Ethel had typed the classified documents in order to protect himself and his wife, and that he’d been encouraged by the prosecution to do so.
At the time I thought there was some guilt involved as far as Julius was concerned, but also thought he and his cronies had been misguided idealists, unlike Aldrich Ames and other spies who did it for mercenary reasons. In the hysteria of those McCarthy days, people forgot the Soviet Union was our ally during the war. But at no time did I think Ethel was guilty of anything except being the wife of Julius. We know from later intercepts of Soviet intelligence that Ethel was never a spy and the material obtained from Julius was trivial. Far more damning was the material from Klaus Fuchs who was a physicist. Klaus Fuchs was tried in England and received a sentence of 13 years. Contrast this with the Rosenbergs’ sentence.
While the Rosenbergs never appear in the story, their pending execution is everywhere in it. The people around Sarah are either indifferent or viciously excited—“they should have torn them limb from limb.” She feels it all so acutely, almost crumpling under the weight of it. Why is she so afraid and vulnerable?
Because of the prevailing political atmosphere, Jews were easily frightened and intimidated. The blacklist reigned and many people denounced other people, particularly in the entertainment world. “Naming names” was the inevitable second demand by the House Un-American Activities Committee, the first being to give yourself up.
In Sarah’s memory of Hebrew School, she is the victim of Mr. Shkop’s summary judgment. He misinterprets her questions, sentences her, and executes that sentence. Her friends turn their backs on her. They are silent. Do you feel there is connection between silence and loneliness? Is loneliness part of her punishment?
Loneliness is the result of silence and abandonment. And yes, it is part of the punishment. There are parallels between Sarah and Ethel’s situations throughout the Hebrew School incident and others. She even has a brother called David who always gets her into trouble.
Sarah’s husband, Shlomo, is not there for her. He has sailed off in his “cell in theship’s womb” to perform in Europe. A musician’s chair on stage is elsewhere likened to an electric chair. Is he under some sort of sentence, too?
In Sarah’s mood of the moment, all of the characters in her life seem like victims,and even certain settings—the ship, the stage—have associations with what is happening to the Rosenbergs. She sees everything through the prism of that pending horror.
For Jews the Sabbath is sacred time. We are traditionally instructed to put a fence around it to set it apart from ordinary time. In the story, clocks and the machinery of the world tick off the moments as time runs out on the Rosenbergs at the front end of the Sabbath. Sarah struggles to fence the other side by holding off labor. Do you sympathize with her struggle?
Sarah is no longer religious when the story takes place. But Eisenhower’s ironic haste in carrying out the executions to avoid desecrating the Sabbath triggers all kinds of fear for Sarah in her drugged state. And in extremis—the highly emotionally charged state that childbirth elicits—she reverts to the prayers and beliefs of her childhood.
Ethel Rosenberg is a mother and Sarah is becoming one. Ethel’s execution is rushed to avoid desecration of the Sabbath, while Sarah hopes to stave off labor for the same reason. In the end, she can’t. The distance between execution and birth diminishes, and the desecration she was afraid of proves something else when she feels the “warm weight of the mitzvah in the crook of her arm.” Since Mitzvoth are the good deeds by which we mend a broken world, I wonder what you feel is mended here.
Tikkun Olam—repairing the world through social action—is a basic tenet of Judaism. The birth of the baby right after the execution absolutely connects Ethel and Sarah (she is now a mother too), as does the idea of which acts are desecrations and which are mitzvoth. Certainly, nothing can mend the execution. But the birth of a baby brings a sense of life and hope for Sarah, even in the midst of the tragedy that has just occurred.
“Motherless Child,” Marianne Langner Zeitlin’s newest novel, is set in the world of classical music, where a young woman searches for the truth about her family’s troubled past. A suspenseful page-turner, it has just been published by Zephyr Press and is available at www.zephyrpress.org and in bookstores.
