Heir to an Execution: A Granddaughter's Story

I have always been fascinated by the Rosenbergs and was eager to see this film, but came away disappointed. It's a good thing I knew all about the Rosenbergs beforehand, because otherwise I would have been very confused. The film didn't give any back story on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Who were they? What did they (allegedly) do? How were they discovered? Why were they chosen to symbolize the witchhunt era? Why were they executed, when hundreds of other convicted spies were not? What evidence suggests they were guilty, and what evidence suggests they were not? A documentary should elucidate the viewer and make them feel more knowledgeable on a subject than before. Ivy did practically no historical research when making this film, which betrays the entire purpose of a documentary. She interviewed family members and tracked down old people who knew her grandparents, but otherwise provided no context. Someone who is not American, or unfamiliar with the McCarthyism era, would be baffled by this film, because it assumes that everyone already knows the story.

It is clear that Ivy put her whole heart into this project, and the result is a very sincere attempt to humanize the grandparents she never met. However, I wanted to understand what truly happened, and my questions were not answered.

The best thing about this film was Michael Meeropol, Ivy's father. He is a passionate, articulate activist who knows more about the subject than his daughter. The scenes in which he speaks were the smartest in the film. I began to wish that he had directed this documentary, and not his daughter. Ivy, despite her good intentions, is ditzy and a weak interviewer. She has the very annoying habit of trailing off questions halfway, and leaving her subjects to figure out what she is asking. Her interviews were unstructured and the narration was rickety.

Furthermore, the biases and shoddy journalism are apparent. Ivy and her brother are naively insistent that their grandparents were "innocent" (a word that gets thrown around repeatedly) despite admitting that they never examined the evidence or studied the story beyond hearing it from their father. The Rosenberg records were unsealed by the government in 1995, and yet Ivy didn't bother looking at them until she made this film.

Everyone has the right to know where they come from. While the Meeropol family's efforts to define their legacy are admirable, the result was a very amateurish film. It is too bad that another family member with better documentarian abilities didn't take the helm.

If you're looking for a good, even-handed overview of the Rosenberg case, this isn't it, but it is nevertheless not without interest.

It's not a good overview for two reasons. First, the movie spends little time looking at the actual facts of the case, focusing instead mostly on the effects on the family left behind. This can be excused, since it wasn't the intent of the filmmaker to cover the case itself. Second, and less excusable, the movie seems essentially uninformed by much of the evidence that has come out in the last decade (e.g. from Soviet intelligence archives) which provides unambiguous answers as to what the Rosenbergs actually did.

For instance, you won't hear here that documents in the Soviet archives explicitly describe Ethel Rosenberg helping to recruit David Greenglass to pass on atomic bomb construction details from Los Alamos. Ethel may not have deserved the death penalty for what she did, but it's hard to put much weight on any opinions this movie expresses on the subject, given its reliance on the pro-Rosenberg side for its view of the case.

That one-sidedness, however, is what is responsible for one of the film's two real accomplishments: giving the viewer a clear view of the mind-set of the American left in the 30's and 40's, one in which spying for a foreign power for ideological reasons was not merely acceptable, but laudable, and one in which the bald-faced claims of the complete innocence of the Rosenbergs were credulously accepted. The interviews with the aging members of the American left alone are worth the time of a serious student of the era.

The other interesting aspect of the movie is its clear documentation of the havoc the Rosenbergs' wreaked on their family. As a number of reviewers have pointed out, this is not a polished film, but the lack of polish contributes to the effectiveness of this portrayal. The Rosenbergs' willingness to put their family through this is perhaps the best measure of the depth of their devotion to the socialist cause, and helps us understand how they could have helped pass some of their country's deepest secrets to a foreign power.

The names Julius and Ethel Rosenberg bring on a sweeping sensation of treason. They have become the poster-children for anti-American hatred and fear of foreign ideology. But to some, the names mean mother and father; grandmother and grandfather.

I must admit, before I saw this film I didn't even know the Rosenbergs had children. This is left out of history lessons since, after all, what did that have to do with anything? Heir to an Execution, a sensitive and thoughtful documentary from Rosenberg granddaughter Ivy Meeropol, sheds light into a shadowy area of communist spies and family tightness.

Meeropol's film begins questioning the famed Rosenberg's death sentences by interviewing old friends and socialist peers. A door is opened into their world in a way I had never seen. Hated so fiercely by the rest of America, these revolutionaries have found their way from prisons to retirement homes.

What is far more interesting, however, is what comes next. As Meeropol tracks her grandparents' lives to the electric chair the question of her father and uncle arise. What exactly did happen to them during the chaos? And more importantly, what was to be done with them after the inevitable? Political documentaries are sometimes dry and are often as subtle as a man with a stick pointing at an easel. Heir to an Execution is different. Meeropol raises doubts to at least part of the Rosenberg trial, if not all of it, while at the same time documenting the life of a wonderful man, her father. In the end we don't know which is more important, the Rosenberg injustice or the chronicle of a distinguished life whose path you would not expect winding up here. **** out of ****

The entire film is based on a fallacy and therefore makes it difficult to watch. Ivy basis the documentary on the misleading notion that her grandparents are not guilty of being traitors. The facts are that her grandparents were spies. Later, her father Michael says, Julius might have helped the Soviets, but Julius did not do what the government accused him of. Then another person says Ethel was only being a loyal wife.

The film is a sophomoric effort to understand the dark stain on her family. The camera work, editing, and narration are all weak.

Ivy should have created a documentary on what caused the executions. It wasn't 'red scare', or 'communist witch-hunts'. It was because Julius and Ethel were spies for the Soviets. They are both guilty of betraying their country.

The historical record currently indicates that Julius Rosenberg probably gave the Soviet Union information, and that loyal wife Ethel was a bargaining chip used by brother David Greenglass to avoid prosecution. That's about as much background as one needs to appreciate and enjoy this deeply personal and very moving film about the aftereffects of the Rosenberg executions, and the worn out 'did they/didn't they' arguments are of only peripheral importance. Filled with fascinating interviews with the Rosenberg's children and a surprising number of elderly compatriots as well as some timely and frightening 1950s footage of anti-Communist hysteria, Heir to An Execution is an emotional attempt by director Ivy Meeropol (granddaughter of the convicted 'spies') to come to terms with a dark chapter in her family history. Strongly recommended.