The Book of Daniel

In 1953, a working-class Jewish couple from Brooklyn was executed for allegedly selling nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Their two young children were orphaned. E. L. Doctorow’s novel about the Rosenbergs is an excruciating examination of these events from the fictionalized perspective of one of those children. Daniel’s point of view—naïve, angry, traumatized—brilliantly illustrates the absurdity and cruelty of American culture when it turns against those who, for reasons of class, race, or religion, have never been fully included in it. I’ve read it a dozen times and still find myself sobbing at the realization of how… show more.

Although it’s fiction, this book dives deep into left-wing politics, boomeranging from 1967 to the ’40s and ’50s. With references to the Bible’s “Book of Daniel” and a story drawn from the lives of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (here, Paul and Rochelle Isaacson), this is the wrenching tale of the Isaacsons’ son Daniel trying to make sense of his parents’ deaths—he is writing his PhD dissertation on American politics to, as he puts it, “empty my heart.” I read this book in grad school and was slow to warm to it; then the story grabbed me hard and I finished… show more.

The great novelist E.L. Doctorow authored this 1971 fictional account of the Rosenberg case through the eyes of Daniel Isaacson, the oldest son of a couple executed by its own government for supposed spying. The book is fiction: the actual Rosenbergs are not mentioned; Daniel’s sibling is female; Daniel is a graduate student writing a dissertation on the American Old Left and dealing with the place of his late parents within that history. But as with the Schneirs and the Meeropols, Doctorow, a New York liberal, is unabashedly sympathetic to the Rosenbergs (AKA the Isaacsons).

Although this viewpoint eventually proved… show more.