Joseph McCarthy, the senator from Wisconsin, was still conducting investigations, accusing people of being Communists plotting to destroy our freedom. If he knew that his sister-in-law had been Ethel’s neighbor and classmate, he would never have said so. The only person who bridged the distant worlds of home and office was my uncle Madison Putnam, the distinguished literary critic and public intellectual, who had used his influence to arrange my job. No one at work knew about the family connection. My being assigned The Vixen was, I thought, pure coincidence. Perhaps my mother’s sympathy was unconsciously spiked by our natural human desire for proximity to the famous. They hadn’t been close, but history had turned Ethel, in my mother’s eyes, into a beloved friend, almost a family member, the victim of a state-sanctioned public murder. My mother grew up on the Lower East Side, in the same tenement building as Ethel-Ethel Greenglass then. It was strange that I, of all the young editors in New York, should have been chosen to work on that book.

Esther Rosenstein was a calculating seductress, an amoral Mata Hari who used her beauty and her irresistible sex appeal to dominate her impotent husband and lure a string of powerful men into putting the free world at risk of nuclear Armageddon. The Vixen, the Patriot, and the Fanatic, Anya Partridge’s debut novel, portrayed the Rosensteins as cold-blooded spies, masterminding a vast conspiracy to destroy the American way of life. Protestors took to the streets in sympathy for the sweet-faced housewife whose only crime may have been typing a document for her brother, David Greenglass.īut according to the manuscript that landed on my desk, the Rosenbergs (in the novel, the Rosensteins) were Communist traitors, guilty of espionage and treason, eager to soak their hands in the blood of the millions who would die because of their crime. The horror of the electric chair and the chance that the couple were innocent had ignited outrage in this country and abroad. The previous year, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed for allegedly selling atomic secrets to the Russians. In the winter of 1954, I was assigned to edit a novel, The Vixen, the Patriot, and the Fanatic, a steamy bodice-ripper based on the Rosenberg case.

The vixen novel