Robert Meeropol

I can’t imagine that any of you knew when you were little children that your parents would die on a specific day, at a specific hour and minute, their lives brought to an agonizing end by the Zeus-like hand of an executioner wielding his lightening bolt of vengeance. Yet this is the story of Robert Meeropol, né Rosenberg, son of Julius and Ethel, both convicted of conspiracy to sell secrets to the Soviets. There’s more to him than that, of course, but the actions of his parents and the government define him in a unique way from which he cannot and apparently does not wish to escape. I spoke with him a couple of days after his appearance in Providence at the Jewish Community Center.

“I was raised surrounded by Jews,” he tells me. “But I was raised in the heart of Jewish culture, not religiously in the traditional sense, but in the Shalom Aleichem tradition.” Able Meeropol, his adoptive father, “used to write alternative bar/bat mitzvah services for Jews in the Mt. Vernon area.” To them, the bar mitzvah was all about a performance, so they wrote scripts and music based on Jewish history. It was in this sort of Jewish milieu that he grew up.

And yes, he had a bar mitzvah ceremony of his own, but as he tells it, the circumstances were very unusual. “After we started living with Able and Anne Meeropol we were seized by the police. The lawyer who had defended my parents died of a heart attack before he’d finished the adoption process. Other Jews wanted us removed from the Meeropol’s. Part of the eventual agreement that allowed our return was we had to be bar mitzvaed and attend synagogue.” So, he says, “I was brought up believing that I was bar mitzvaed by court order.” To this day he continues to feel most comfortable in a cultural Jewish setting.

He feels that “Jewish reaction to his parents was a sign of insecurity. People were terrified. They presumed my parents were guilty,” and that there would be a backlash. Thus the Rosenbergs were traitors to their people even more than to the United States. The odd thing is that Jews in America who had a dual loyalty, to Israel and to the US objected when the Rosenbergs’ dual loyalty was exposed. But to Meeropol his “parents dual loyalties, were of a different sort. In our country we are not steeped in class, but in national, religious etc. loyalty so when seeing my parents, people wondered if they were loyal to the US or to the USSR? They were loyal to the working class which a small portion of capitalists were exploiting. They saw themselves as helping workers by defeating the Nazis.”

His argument is that his parents, or at least his father, gave or sold information to our wartime allies against Nazi fascism, knowing that it was illegal to do so. After all, the government was shipping tons of material there in its Lend-Lease program, why not give them something else to help in the fight against Fascism. But spying for Stalin? True, the breadth and depth of his atrocities had not yet been revealed, but even by the war years his brutality should have been obvious even to casual observers, which the Rosenbergs were certainly not. And the secret to the Atom bomb? No, that information was way above Julius’ pay grade; he couldn’t have revealed what he did not know. In fact he was never formally charged with that crime, only with the more nebulous conspiracy to commit espionage. The case is still shrouded in mystery. In 2008, Morton Sobell who was tried with the Rosenbergs admitted he was a spy and confirmed Julius Rosenberg was “in a conspiracy that delivered to the Soviets classified military and industrial information and what the American government described as the secret to the atomic bomb.” But then in a letter to the New York Times he denied that he knew anything about Julius Rosenberg’s alleged atomic espionage.

In 1990 Meeropol, no doubt with his own experiences in mind, established a foundation called the Rosenberg Fund for Children, which according to its website “provides for the educational and emotional needs of both targeted activist youth and children in this country whose parents have been harassed, injured, jailed, lost jobs or died in the course of their progressive activities. In its 19-year history, the Fund has awarded more than $3 million in grants to benefit hundreds of children.”

Betrayed by WGBH

I suppose that an unstated rule of writing a column in a Jewish newspaper is to write a column on a Jewish theme. So, I’m trying to figure out how the following is Jewish and have decided that if a Jew writes it, it is Jewish. If beloved editor agrees you will read this. If she doesn’t there will be a gap in the paper, a void unfillable.

People of Rhode Island, join in my crusade. Here’s our challenge, inadvertently initiated when a nice lady from WGBH called me the other night asking for my annual pledge. GBH is the Boston based public radio station to which I became addicted when I moved to Rhode Island in 1969. Starting in 1971 Robert J. Lurtsema hosted a five hour a day, seven days a week classical music program.

Each morning at 7:00 my clock radio would as if by magic turn itself on and my wife and I would awaken to the sounds of birds singing, chirping, warbling, cooing, for several minutes, followed by the classical opening of the day. One morning it was always Respighi’s Ancient Airs and Dances Suite another the Entrance of the Queen of Sheba by Handel. If for some reason I couldn’t remember if I’d awakened on Tuesday or Thursday, I could always tell by which theme music lovingly nudged me awake.

And then there was Lurtsema’s rich, sonorous voice and the dead-air pauses he allowed himself, visualizing in his mind, he said, what his audience was thinking, because it was obvious he really, really cared about his audience (apparently unlike the current corporate Philistines who run the station today).

Especially on weekends he might play music featuring one part of the orchestra, the flute, one week, cellos the next or he’d play, in order of composition all the string quartets of a particular composer always at the same time of day. We counted on their being played, looked forward to the next installment as if to a reading of a 19th century novel by chapters and learned about each piece and composer. God, he was good, and then he got sick and shortly before dying he gave an on-air mesmerizing, not previously announced, valedictory statement discussing what he had done in life, and so ended Morning Pro Musica in 2000, nearly 30 years after he first came into our lives. We have a poster of a painting he did hanging in our dining room, a constant reminder of the pleasure of those mornings back then.

But now GBH has decided, except for some off hours jazz and Celtic music to go all news and talk all the time. Fine. But what of us classical music junkies? Ah, not to worry, the station bought the studio of the old WCRB in Lowell which broadcasts on the FM dial at 99.5. But you can’t get 99.5 in Rhode Island. Static, yes, hissing, yes, Mozart and Handel no.

So when the lady called asking for money I told her my complaint and she said I should buy a gizmo to improve reception. “What,” uttered I in undisguised astonishment, “you people read a demographics report, turn the world upside down, change format and I have to pay for the inconvenience imposed? And do those gizmos work in my 1992 Volvo?” “Well, no,” she admitted, really ruing by now having made the call, “but we’re thinking of increasing our signal strength. “When, you do,” I said as politely as I could, “call me back.” Argghh. I betcha Robert J. is rolling over in his grave.

I know that news is important, so is opinion, but we get most of the programs GBH is now saturating the airwaves with from our own local NPR station, WRNI 1290 AM, and in Boston proper, the same news shows are already being broadcast on WBUR 90.9FM. So this displacement was necessary because, why? So as not to be original any more, so that uniqueness could be placed on the shelf along with the old LPs? For shame, GBH, for shame!

So is that Jewish enough? I mentioned Philistines, traditional enemy of the Jews, and God, traditional Friend of the Jews. Gotta be.