Already immortalized in books, plays, movies and a lithograph by Picasso, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are now being depicted once more in New York — this time, as puppets.
The Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater is staging “The Very Sad Story of Ethel & Julius, Lovers and Spyes, and About Their Untymelie End While Sitting in a Small Room at the Correctional Facility in Ossining New York.” The production, which is being performed at the Theater for the New City through December 14, begins with puppet likenesses of the pair in side-by-side electric chairs, and revisits the history of perhaps the most famous Jewish couple of the last century — accused Soviet spies whose trial and 1953 execution fueled decades of ideological recriminations, as well as accusations of judicial deceit and antisemitism from protesters including Sartre and Einstein.
“I hope the audience will come away with two things: realizing that due process was not served… and the absurdity of the whole case,” said Vit Horejs, the show’s writer and director, in an interview with The Shmooze.
Played by regular actors for much of the 90-minute show, the Rosenbergs first entered Horejs’ political consciousness during his youth in Czechoslovakia. “I was not aware of them being Jewish,” he said. “I was aware of them being celebrated as martyrs by the communist regime.”
He gained a fuller sense of the couple’s identity following his immigration to the United States, rediscovering the pair as he did research for “Once There Was a Village,” an earlier CAMT show about radicals from Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
“As I was writing the scene [involving the Rosenbergs], it kept getting longer and longer, until I decided that this was a separate play,” he said. “I had to cut the scene to a shorter version for the ‘Village’ show, and right after we finished with that, I started writing this play.”
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What was so 'tragic'? Was Hitler's death 'tragic'? The Rosenbergs were Communist spies, and they met their end as spies so often do. I don't remember the Forverts ever having too much sympathy for the Rosenbergs when the original events went down. Leave the tea and sympathy for the Rosenbergs to the old Stalinists at the Workman's Circle.
The Rosenbergs were traitors to our country, even the Russians have confirmed it, and they went to their deaths lying to everybody, their own children included. Enough with the prevarications & lamentations, they don't deserve them.
The Rosenbergs forced their kids to waste their lives unwittingly defending a false claim of innocence, a phoney martyrdom. Ethel may not quite have deserved to fry (Julius sure did), but she should rot in Hell for the poisonous legacy she left her posterity, as well as for aiding and abetting the worst mass murderer in European history. This pair, part fiends and part klutzes, proved in death as well as life that no claim ranks higher on the loyalty of an ideological slave than the claim of Realpolitik. And that is truly un-American.
What does it mean, Mr. Nillson, to say that someone "may not QUITE [my capitals]have deserved to fry?" It doesn't matter if you are a fiend from hell if you are railroaded into the electric chair by the government. It is still wrong. Ethel Rosenberg was a minor participant at best in her husband's crimes. That she should have just fried a little bit? She was put on trial for her life by the prosecution in order to get her husband to admit his guilt, which he never did. She should have gotten a much lighter sentence, if any. The Rosenberg sons might not have spent so many fruitless years trying to prove their parents' innocence if their mother had lived to tell them they were guilty.
it is interesting that the rosenberg case surfaced shortly after our government sanitized the nazis, joining with these pathetic sadists in their war against bolsheviks. of course, we all know that communist and jew is synonymous. how could we make a hero of werner von braun, a nazi mass murderer. the rosenberg's were only one more chapter in the history of jew-baiting, anti-semitism, and deception. if one desires to know how amerika collapse it is very simple. we lost our s moral compass in 1947. we comprised our ethics, making us drunkards and addicts, dependent upon intolerance and the false promise of financial valhylla. well, we have bestowed upon ourselves the rosenberg case as another in our continued legacy of hypocrisy.
I saw the show. It wasn't that good.
I want Miranda Anne Gould to move to the moncton I love her too much her face full of scatches and sores and marks some one scratched her and pinch her and hit her
Up to the last minute, there was some sort of special cop waiting at the Rosenbergs' execution to call it off if they would just name some names. They refused. For that, the capitalist press and some of the people on this forum are still busy executing them, so many years later.
I saw this musical twice. There are many voices in it which describe communism as some sort of misguided idealism, but it also gives a tip of the hat to the extraordinary bravery of a man and his wife. There was a klezmer song about the trial itself that managed to be simultaneously offensive, funny and tragic.