I tried not to think about the sin I was half committing as I half pretended to come from a family that was nothing like my family, from a place far from Coney Island. It was not only pointless but wrong-a sin against the six million dead-to deny one’s heritage…. They will always find us, whoever the next they would be. “But in Coney Island, it’s a regular fun Friday night.” Horrified, he still goes out to ride the amusement park’s Cyclone.“The Holocaust had taught us: No matter what you believed or didn’t, the Nazis knew who was Jewish.

“Thousands are weeping in Union Square, in San Francisco, London, and Paris,” Simon observes. Quickly for Julius, but slowly for Ethel. A rabbi arrives, then an electrician, and then it’s over.

one of the kindest, sweetest, gentlest human beings I ever met.” The two Rosenberg children, shepherded by a lawyer, are filmed entering the prison. President Eisenhower, in a letter read by a reporter, declares that, “the abominable act of treason committed by these Communist traitors has immeasurably increased the chances of nuclear annihilation.” The Death House matron, briefly interviewed, says, on the other hand, that “Ethel was. Soon Julius and Ethel Rosenberg will die in the electric chair. “It’s like New Year’s Eve in Time Square: the countdown to the ball drop.” “Networks have been interrupting the regular programming with news of the execution, which, without a miracle, will happen tonight at Sing Sing,” Simon explains.

He and his mother have been watching all day and now his father has joined the vigil. “The only signs of life squawk and jitter inside the massive console TV,” Simon Putnam reports. On a summer evening in 1953, in a small apartment on Coney Island, the Putnam family sits anxiously in front of a flickering black-and-white screen. Photo: Bettmann Archive/Corbis/Getty Images Demonstrators preparing for a protest of the death sentence for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, 1953.

The vixen novel