The Hours Count

Jillian Cantor, has written another fabulous novel based on a real event in history but telling the story from a completely different viewpoint.  Her last novel, Margot, is the story of Anne Frank, and what could have happened had they lived, taken from the sister's point of view.  In this new book, The Hours Count, Cantor has written a plot that tells the story of the Cold War from the American perspective, and the paranoid fears Americans had toward Russian American citizens.  This story is told by Millie Stein, a fictionalized neighbor that could have lived in the apartment building with the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

World War Two has ended and Americans have come home, but their celebration is short lived.  Now there is the threat of Russia developing the atomic bomb and attacking America.  Senator Joe McCarthy creates an atmosphere of paranoia that has citizens unable to trust their neighbors.  He starts the House Un-American Activities Committee, holding hearings that accuse 200 US government employees of being members of the American Communist Party.  There are trials where friends accuse friends and relatives turn in their relatives as communists.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were the only two Americans to be executed for espionage related to sharing information with the Russians, during the Cold War.  To this day there is a question as to whether Ethel was really involved and to what extent Julius was involved.  This novel uses the facts of the case and the descriptions known about Julius and Ethel and expands on those facts to create a story of what might have happened.  Based on the premise that Ethel left her two young sons with a neighbor when she went to testify in court about her involvement with her husband, who had been arrested days before, Cantor develops her neighbor into Millie Stein and creates a back story that builds a tentative but friendly relationship between the two women.

The lonely housewife Millie is home with a son, who today would be diagnosed autistic, is trying to  figure out how to take care of him and make friends with the other mothers in her apartment building.  She is married to a Russian immigrant, older and uncommunicative.  Millie realizes that she is stuck in an unhappy marriage while her new friends, Ethel and Julius seem to be so in love.
So many issues of the day are presented in this wonderful novel.  Along with the Cold War and who you could trust are the ideas of marriage and divorce, birth control and abortion.

Though the lines can seem blurred between what really happened historically between 1947 and 1953 there are many actual references that are woven into the story.  The Rosenbergs really did live on the 11th floor of a building in Knickerbocker Village, on the Lower East Side of New York.  Also accurate are the references to the smallpox outbreak, the killer fog, the Dodgers vs Yankees World Series of 1949.  Other references to Ethel making a voice recording for her son and participating in psychoanalysis along with the tensions between Julius and her brother David in their business are also factual.

This is a wonderful story of the Rosenbergs and whether you know the history or not you will enjoy this novel.  Jillian Cantor gives the reader a very sympathetic side to the story of the Rosenberg family.