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PARTISAN REVIEW
"I was more of a hippie. Also politics for him seemed to be an in–
tellectual, letter-writing, party-building affair, for me a series of
confrontations." This difference is dramatized in the novel by
Danny's uneasiness at the march on the Pentagon in 1967 and by
his sister Susan\ involvement with a counter-culture radical
much like Abbie Hoffman. The change of his sibling's sex is to
justify the biblical allusion to Susanna, who risked her life to
preserve her incorruptibility, just as the novel's Susan sawall
compromise, moral and political, as complicity and was forced
to realize that her parents were seen by New Left radicals as
being complicit with the system for relying in court on the Fifth
Amendment's protection against self-incrimination.
In
the 1950s two literary critics, Leslie Fiedler and Robert
Warshow, complained that the Rosenbergs were "crass and hy–
pocritical" in calling on their Jewish faith to arouse sympathy
for themselves, in hiding their political commitments behind the
Fifth Amendment, and in expressing no thoughts or feelings ex–
cept those demanded by propaganda about their political role.
Doctorow explicitly counters this criticism by providing human
explanations for the behavior of his Isaacson family. He takes
seriously the idea that "the perfectionist dream of heaven on
earth" can be a substitute religion for those who otherwise have
given up their Jewish heritage, and he shows how this Jewish
yearning entered into three generations of Isaacsons. The Com–
munism of the parents, formed during the Popular Front, is
presented as an illusory form of an ancient and thwarted Jewish
impulse of "looking for paradise on earth," and the story exhib–
its the changing forms of this passion in the delirious memories
of the immigrant grandmother, the Communist idealism of the
ordinary parents, poor in wealth and self-esteem, and the an–
guished attempts of the victimized children to carryon the fam–
ily tradition by their own troubled connections with New Left
politics in the 1960s.
Doctorow casts a brilliant shaft of light on two features of
the public record. Ethel Rosenberg was arrested a month after
her husband was, and official investigators were never convinced
of her guilt; instead they hoped to use her to make her husband
talk about others. The second oddity is that Julius Rosenberg in
his prison letters persistently retains a confidence that American
law and public opinion will exonerate him, while his wife takes
