The story of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg will not go away even now, some sixty years after their execution for the purported crime of ‘stealing atomic secrets’ for the benefit of the Soviet Union. Journalists, historians, and a wide range of writers who evade any easy classification have been reconstructing the events ever since.

The release of Moscow archival documents and the candid revelations of a brother in-law coming out of prison seemed to sum up one side of the case. But Anne Sebba’s new book Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy shows that there was more, much more, to be understood – above all the real-life story of the victim who, it is widely conceded, was guilty of nothing more than being a Jewish-American Communist and remaining loyal to Julius, the love of her life.

Early efforts of biography, sympathetic or otherwise, have depicted her as victim or victimised co-conspirator, almost to the exclusion of the real Ethel. Here we find her whole, in real life, the only American woman ever executed for a crime without a murder rap.

The daughter of refugee from Minsk, now the capital of Belarus and then a conflict-ridden city in the Jewish Pale, Esther Ethel Greenglass grew up within a Jewish ghetto as intense as any in the US. The Greenglass family lived in the rear of a building with the small family-owned machine shop facing the street, and suffered the usual indignities of no hot running water inside, sewage stench in streets outside.

Ethel was bright and her teachers sought to advance her rapidly, while at home, her mother heavily favoured the boys of the family. New York City’s commitment to public education offered a road upward. She could have counted among her classmates future actors Zero Mostel, Walter Matthau, and Bernie Schwartz (A.K.A. Tony Curtis). She urgently wanted to sing and act as a career. Instead, she left school to help her mother, took a secretarial course, and threw herself into the theatrics of a neighbourhood settlement house.

The reviewer begs the reader’s indulgence for a personal anecdote. My mother, a Lower East Side social worker in the same 1930s, explained birth control to immigrant mothers in the tenements while their husbands were at work. The settlement houses did a world of good. There, in the Clark Street Settlement House, Ethel could join amateur theatre, sing, and play the piano. She even won $2 in a talent contest at the famed Delancy Theatre. Within a year or so, was singing in a chorus at Carnegie Hall.

On the other hand, she helped to lead a strike on behalf of the fledgling Shipping Clerks Union. Fired, seeing around her a capitalism in severe depression, she joined the Communist Party, by no means an unusual move in the poorer neighbourhoods of Jewish New York. A near-neighbour and fellow youthful Communist struck up a conversation with her in December, 1936. Much of her life, up until her arrest, had been established.

The better known parts of the story begin at this moment, with Julius, her marriage, and her children. But the fuller story has only now been told in An American Tragedy, because Sebba makes a point of understanding sympathetically Ethel’s familiar and particular problems as a mother.

Amidst the turmoil of the early 1940s, with Julius off in the US Army Signal Corps, she gave birth to Michael Allen Rosenberg, a notably precocious but insecure and difficult child from his first months onward. Ethel urgently sought advice and help from books and friends, but received none from her relatives, especially her mother. As an amateur actress and singer married to an engineer, she experienced more envy than support within the pocket-sized, largely Jewish neighbourhood known as Knickerbocker Village.

By 1945, Julius’ two-year efforts to help the Soviet Union, so much discussed by scholars and others, had come to a two-year hiatus. He found himself in a frustrating and frustrated career, a salesman for a struggling family hardware business.

Perhaps, the author suggests in her own effort at psychologising, Ethel’s insecurity passed to her son Michael, or went back and forth in a troubling loop. He could not be soothed. In the post-war era, when advice for mothering boomed in the bookshops, mirroring the news columns and the radio, blame for childhood insecurities and later psychological problems of almost any kind fell upon ‘Mother’.

Countless books and articles, with differing and often contrary advice, flowed in and out of her hands. As usual in these cases, nothing worked. Ethel appealed the Jewish Board of Guardians for a child therapist and even took classes in mothering. Meanwhile, the Rosenbergs had another son, Robby.

At this fateful 1949 moment, after Julius snagged a job at the Arma Engineering Factory in Brooklyn, his brother-in-law pressed him for money lost in the machine shop business – money nowhere to be found. Unbeknownst to Ethel, Julius had learned that evidence had been gathered by the FBI and a government case against the two men was impending. If this situation needed more drama, David Greenglass’s pregnant wife Ruth, burned badly in an apartment fire, had to be transfused, with an appeal on radio for donors with her rare blood type.

As the relatives recovered, the arrests around them began. The Cold War had kicked up to high gear with the onset of the Korean conflict. President Harry Truman wrote in his diary, ‘It looks like World War III is here,’ and newspaper headlines screamed that the American way of life was under threat.

Much of what follows in An American Tragedy tackles the case itself, with the legal fine points, the issues of innocence and guilt, and above all the heavily biased character of the trial re-examined. Much is fresh here, but nothing so new as the treatment of Ethel’s personal struggles.

The press pursued her but she also invited them to her small Knickerbocker Village apartment, assuring them that she was struggling to live as an ordinary housewife, and utterly confused by the charges levelled at her brother and husband. Guilty of nothing in particular, perhaps she could escape prosecution? J. Edgar Hoover wrote in a memorandum to the Attorney General, ‘Proceeding against the wife might serve as a lever in the matter.’

The ‘lever strategy’ sets the pace for most of the rest of the book. Arrested on 11 August 1950, she spent her days in a dreary, noisy, unsanitary cell. Other prisoners soon learned of her singing abilities and asked her to render versions of their favourite melodies. Deprived of seeing her sons, she found consolation in her son Michael’s psychologist, Elizabeth Phillips, and in her certainty of her constitutional rights.

Those rights naturally meant nothing. Any thoughts about separating her from Julius’ activities would have proved fruitless, because Judge Irving Kaufman made sure she could not escape. Together spiritually while in separate holding cells, Julius intoned ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ while Ethel offered Puccini’s aria from Madame Butterfly. A prison guard reportedly quipped to Julius, ‘you’re the luckiest man in the world, because no man ever had a woman who loved him that much.’

The Communist Party, beset by intensifying repression, backed away from any specific claims for the Rosenbergs’ innocence during the trial itself. A new weekly tabloid, the National Guardian, jumped in with vigour. (I worked there for a summer, fifteen years later, and it seemed like the execution had never left anyone’s thoughts.)

The global campaign to save them or at least Ethel was lost from the beginning. Albert Einstein appealed for clemency in a letter to the New York Times. Meanwhile, noted liberal theologian Reinhold Niebuhr energetically supported the execution, while Presidents Truman and Eisenhower refused, as did the Supreme Court justices, even to stay her death sentence.

The author calls her final chapter ‘Redemption’. Ten thousand New Yorkers filled the streets around the funeral home to mourn her. It was said that police in the South Bronx fled from an enraged, advancing crowd of bereaved left-wing proletarians. Gallimard raced into print with a French edition of the couple’s death house letters, much to the approval of Simone de Beauvoir, while her lover Jean Paul Sartre wrote in Liberation, ‘You, who claim to be masters of the world… gave in to your criminal folly…’

No guilt on her part would ever be proven. David Greenglass, released from prison in 2001, confessed that he had no personal knowledge about Ethel typing up any ‘spy’ notes for Julius, but had been happy enough to have saved himself at the expense of his sister.

The close of the book, like the case itself, offers no real ending at all. Every heightening of tensions between the US and Russia is today somehow linked to the exiled Edward Snowden and his revelations of other American secrets: more hostages to a history that goes on and on.