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Ruth Ross |
Ruth Ross on “Red Scare”
by Alan Wieder
Origins
Well, I had taken a pause. I had just done a body of work based upon the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. And I was in sort of pause mode. And I happened to come across a book, a biography about Ethel Rosenberg. I didn't know it had been written, or published. And I downloaded it and was absolutely fascinated by it. And as I read it, I was remembering, a lot of memories were flooding back to me.
I probably had acquired some consciousness of this when I was nine, or ten, which would have been 1952, or 1953. All I knew from that time we were still living in Brooklyn was that my father and mother went to an awful lot of meetings at night and never told us where they were going. And, they were also very protective and very kind. So they didn't do anything to jeopardize or worry us. But when I was reading that story of Ethel Rosenberg, it brought back a lot of the sense of camaraderie that my parents must have felt. And you know, the good fight. The good fight.
I thought let me think about this a little bit more. And let me read about it a little bit more. My brother lives in Canada. And I had told my brother about the project, but he was a little ambivalent about it, because he's very private person. But he said, “Oh, by the way, I have some letters from dad's best friend Abraham Schwartz that he sent dad after he went to Spain to fight the fascists and where he sadly died at age 22.” So my brother Abe, he's named after him. My brother Abe said, “I have these letters, you know, would you like to look at them.” And that was another door that opened because all of a sudden in reading those letters, I was able to see more how the idealism that led them all together. I mean, I'm sort of simplifying things. The letters were fabulous. And they were full of very loving thoughts that were shared, you know, our comrades back home. I hope the Bolsheviks in Brooklyn are behaving themselves. They were very best friends. My father did not go. Whatever else my father knew, I'll never know. I mean, that's really the irony: we'll never know. They're all gone. Everybody who knows anything about anything is gone. So it was left to me to retell the story how I wanted to tell it.
Threads: Memory & Craft
I want to tell people about this work but I don't know what's fact and what I made up. I do know that I I knew the Meeripol boys who were the Rosenberg's children. And I've been in touch a little bit. Every now and then a sort of email goes out about something or other and his name is on it. So there are all kinds of strange little woven connections that I didn't even know were there.
It wasn't easy. I started collecting and noticing and finding imagery. I wanted to avoid the horror show aspect. Like, I mean, for example, the symbol of the electric chair would have been a very easy like, oh, boy, here we are, you know. I don't know how to tell you this. I mean, I started putting things together. I knew that some were the wrong direction, and some were the right direction. And when I had the images of my parents and enough images of the Rosenberg’s, I started to think about how I could link them. I didn't know if they knew each other. And I never will. I never will. Now my brother insists that my father wasn’t a spy. Although my father claimed to his dying day, he claimed that the FBI kept calling him in Puerto Rico and saying, “We're looking for Dr. Eli Ross.” And my father claimed he said to them, “Oh, he died a long time ago.”
But in terms of finding the link from the Rosenberg’s to the Ross's in my mind, I even started looking at maps of Brooklyn. My parents lived in Flatbush and the Rosenberg’s lived in lower Manhattan in Stuyvesant Town. So I was trying to find a very concrete link and I struggled with it because I certainly had no literal links. And then one day, it was like, “Oh, my God, they're Jews.” There it is, you know. And the Rosenberg’s were probably the same kind of Jews that my parents were which was secular and idealistic. The only thing we really ever observed was my brother's Bar Mitzvah, you know, so there wasn't a lot of heavy orthodox or orthodoxy with it. And so some of those symbols, I mean, the Jewish star. I use the Kaddish cup on one of my images.
So just the Judaism is somewhat of a connector. It was a powerful connector because culturally I understood their family and I understood my family in a way that I could see how they would have mingled, whether physically or literally or metaphysically. I could see how there would have been overlap. And I've grappled with my own sense of how Jewish or not Jewish I feel in my life. And essentially I'm an atheist, I can say that. Right. But there are still symbols.
So anyway, I was able to start to introduce some of those elements. And that helped me, it helped me create the connection between the Rosenberg’s and the Ross's. At least in my own head, in my own mind.
I don't remember when we packed up our home in Brooklyn to go. I do remember the plane we were on, which took like eight hours in those days. The whole thing about my mother telling me not to tell anybody. My brother has no memory of that whatsoever. You see? But I remember: my mother was very prone to being protective of me and sharing secrets. In fact, after we were in Puerto Rico and living there for a year or so, and it was the height of anti-communism. And I was saying something to my mother. And she said, “Well, I'm going to tell you something. But you promise never to tell anybody ever. Daddy and I didn't think communism was so bad. But don't tell anybody that we said that.” So I held that with me forever and ever. But she, she wanted me to be all right. She wanted me to come out landing on my feet. And so that was all a part of, you know, my mother and our closeness and our secrets and so forth. Yeah, yeah. And I never did, by the way, tell anybody about that until I was well, probably into my 30s 40s or 50s.
My parents never spoke about it. And I don't know that even if I had prompted them they would have. Occasionally, my father would joke about the FBI, but my father would joke about anything. So that was his personality. You know, I wish I wish I wish. I would love to know more on one level. But I'm glad I don't because I don't know if I could have made this work. It would have been different.
Hopes
Oh, I would love to get more exposure for it. I don't quite know how to do that. I also am thinking about that in reference to my Hiroshima work. But I would love to get it seen by as many people as possible, because it makes me feel good. I'm an artist. And I'm keeping it all intact. I'm not selling any part of it. It's just how I feel, you know. First of all, it's like, who's going buy a cyanotype of Ethel Rosenberg? In other words, I can't imagine who would? I guess that I want to keep it intact, because I want it to be able to float around and be seen by more people. Okay. And sadly, it'll probably end up in my storage with everything else that my dear son is going to have to deal with. I don't have any illusions, but I just want more people to be able to see it.
I feel there's one word that comes to mind about this particular body of work, I feel very tender towards it. I mean, I feel like it's my parents’ lives and the Rosenberg’s lives and the lives of many other people at that time. And that every stitch I took, and it was all hand stitched, I don't even have a machine, was an act of tenderness. And honoring these people. And I guess that's what I want people to sense when they visit the exhibit. A sense of tenderness at what they're looking at. They were idealists and they made mistakes, and you know, people suffered, their children suffered, the Rosenberg’s children suffered. I think that comes out in the art. I'm so glad that comes out. It's not like I consciously set out to do it, but I figured if it came from in here (heart) it's got to come out somehow, you know. Yeah,
by Alan Wieder
Origins
Well, I had taken a pause. I had just done a body of work based upon the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. And I was in sort of pause mode. And I happened to come across a book, a biography about Ethel Rosenberg. I didn't know it had been written, or published. And I downloaded it and was absolutely fascinated by it. And as I read it, I was remembering, a lot of memories were flooding back to me.
I probably had acquired some consciousness of this when I was nine, or ten, which would have been 1952, or 1953. All I knew from that time we were still living in Brooklyn was that my father and mother went to an awful lot of meetings at night and never told us where they were going. And, they were also very protective and very kind. So they didn't do anything to jeopardize or worry us. But when I was reading that story of Ethel Rosenberg, it brought back a lot of the sense of camaraderie that my parents must have felt. And you know, the good fight. The good fight.
I thought let me think about this a little bit more. And let me read about it a little bit more. My brother lives in Canada. And I had told my brother about the project, but he was a little ambivalent about it, because he's very private person. But he said, “Oh, by the way, I have some letters from dad's best friend Abraham Schwartz that he sent dad after he went to Spain to fight the fascists and where he sadly died at age 22.” So my brother Abe, he's named after him. My brother Abe said, “I have these letters, you know, would you like to look at them.” And that was another door that opened because all of a sudden in reading those letters, I was able to see more how the idealism that led them all together. I mean, I'm sort of simplifying things. The letters were fabulous. And they were full of very loving thoughts that were shared, you know, our comrades back home. I hope the Bolsheviks in Brooklyn are behaving themselves. They were very best friends. My father did not go. Whatever else my father knew, I'll never know. I mean, that's really the irony: we'll never know. They're all gone. Everybody who knows anything about anything is gone. So it was left to me to retell the story how I wanted to tell it.
Threads: Memory & Craft
I want to tell people about this work but I don't know what's fact and what I made up. I do know that I I knew the Meeripol boys who were the Rosenberg's children. And I've been in touch a little bit. Every now and then a sort of email goes out about something or other and his name is on it. So there are all kinds of strange little woven connections that I didn't even know were there.
It wasn't easy. I started collecting and noticing and finding imagery. I wanted to avoid the horror show aspect. Like, I mean, for example, the symbol of the electric chair would have been a very easy like, oh, boy, here we are, you know. I don't know how to tell you this. I mean, I started putting things together. I knew that some were the wrong direction, and some were the right direction. And when I had the images of my parents and enough images of the Rosenberg’s, I started to think about how I could link them. I didn't know if they knew each other. And I never will. I never will. Now my brother insists that my father wasn’t a spy. Although my father claimed to his dying day, he claimed that the FBI kept calling him in Puerto Rico and saying, “We're looking for Dr. Eli Ross.” And my father claimed he said to them, “Oh, he died a long time ago.”
But in terms of finding the link from the Rosenberg’s to the Ross's in my mind, I even started looking at maps of Brooklyn. My parents lived in Flatbush and the Rosenberg’s lived in lower Manhattan in Stuyvesant Town. So I was trying to find a very concrete link and I struggled with it because I certainly had no literal links. And then one day, it was like, “Oh, my God, they're Jews.” There it is, you know. And the Rosenberg’s were probably the same kind of Jews that my parents were which was secular and idealistic. The only thing we really ever observed was my brother's Bar Mitzvah, you know, so there wasn't a lot of heavy orthodox or orthodoxy with it. And so some of those symbols, I mean, the Jewish star. I use the Kaddish cup on one of my images.
So just the Judaism is somewhat of a connector. It was a powerful connector because culturally I understood their family and I understood my family in a way that I could see how they would have mingled, whether physically or literally or metaphysically. I could see how there would have been overlap. And I've grappled with my own sense of how Jewish or not Jewish I feel in my life. And essentially I'm an atheist, I can say that. Right. But there are still symbols.
So anyway, I was able to start to introduce some of those elements. And that helped me, it helped me create the connection between the Rosenberg’s and the Ross's. At least in my own head, in my own mind.
I don't remember when we packed up our home in Brooklyn to go. I do remember the plane we were on, which took like eight hours in those days. The whole thing about my mother telling me not to tell anybody. My brother has no memory of that whatsoever. You see? But I remember: my mother was very prone to being protective of me and sharing secrets. In fact, after we were in Puerto Rico and living there for a year or so, and it was the height of anti-communism. And I was saying something to my mother. And she said, “Well, I'm going to tell you something. But you promise never to tell anybody ever. Daddy and I didn't think communism was so bad. But don't tell anybody that we said that.” So I held that with me forever and ever. But she, she wanted me to be all right. She wanted me to come out landing on my feet. And so that was all a part of, you know, my mother and our closeness and our secrets and so forth. Yeah, yeah. And I never did, by the way, tell anybody about that until I was well, probably into my 30s 40s or 50s.
My parents never spoke about it. And I don't know that even if I had prompted them they would have. Occasionally, my father would joke about the FBI, but my father would joke about anything. So that was his personality. You know, I wish I wish I wish. I would love to know more on one level. But I'm glad I don't because I don't know if I could have made this work. It would have been different.
Hopes
Oh, I would love to get more exposure for it. I don't quite know how to do that. I also am thinking about that in reference to my Hiroshima work. But I would love to get it seen by as many people as possible, because it makes me feel good. I'm an artist. And I'm keeping it all intact. I'm not selling any part of it. It's just how I feel, you know. First of all, it's like, who's going buy a cyanotype of Ethel Rosenberg? In other words, I can't imagine who would? I guess that I want to keep it intact, because I want it to be able to float around and be seen by more people. Okay. And sadly, it'll probably end up in my storage with everything else that my dear son is going to have to deal with. I don't have any illusions, but I just want more people to be able to see it.
I feel there's one word that comes to mind about this particular body of work, I feel very tender towards it. I mean, I feel like it's my parents’ lives and the Rosenberg’s lives and the lives of many other people at that time. And that every stitch I took, and it was all hand stitched, I don't even have a machine, was an act of tenderness. And honoring these people. And I guess that's what I want people to sense when they visit the exhibit. A sense of tenderness at what they're looking at. They were idealists and they made mistakes, and you know, people suffered, their children suffered, the Rosenberg’s children suffered. I think that comes out in the art. I'm so glad that comes out. It's not like I consciously set out to do it, but I figured if it came from in here (heart) it's got to come out somehow, you know. Yeah,