The 24th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival runs July 22 through Aug. 9. Venues are the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, S.F.; Wheeler Auditorium, UC Berkeley, Berk.; Mountain View Century Cinema 16, 1500 N. Shoreline, Mountain View; and the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center, 1118 Fourth St., San Rafael. Tickets are available by calling (925) 275-9490 or going to www.sfjff.org.

Spy vs. spy
Heir to an Execution revisits the Rosenbergs.

By Susan Gerhard

USING AN ANCIENT electric chair so gruesomely ostentatious that it could double as a throne, prison lackeys of the U.S. government put Ethel and Julius Rosenberg to death June 19, 1953. Their coronation as America's Most Treasonous Couple didn't go as smoothly as expected. Julius went first – the prison's rabbi felt he was the more nervous of the two – but when Ethel took her turn in the chair clearly made with a "criminal" phenotype in mind, her petite body wasn't big enough to properly connect with the electrodes. After the first jolts, the complicated black straps that held her in place were removed; only then did the attendants realize she wasn't actually dead yet. So she was awkwardly re-strapped, and re-electrified, until a plume of smoke emerged from her head – and the breathless press could emerge from the chambers to recount the bloodthirsty culmination of J. Edgar Hoover's wet anticommunism dreams.

The Rosenberg execution scorched itself into the American consciousness as an X-ray image, a negative that's been open to interpretation. In investigations and reinvestigations, documentaries, memoirs, and art formats, two generations since have read it along political lines: it was either the murder of two citizens, innocent of passing to the Soviet Union the United States' "atomic secrets," which were never necessarily even as secret as the U.S. government wanted its opiated masses to believe, or it was the righteous killing of two communist traitors. But Ivy Meeropol, granddaughter of Ethel and Julius, tunnels into the archives to personalize the events that have been re-politicized so many times. We see just how strange the mission is in a hundred private moments that have very public resonance in her document of the trip, Heir to an Execution, screening at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival next week. In one such moment, she shows us a poignant childhood drawing of her grandma and grandpa, which is a dead-on imitation of the sketch Picasso made of her cause célèbre ancestors a couple of decades earlier. How can she get to know these grandparents whose story everyone else seems to think they own?

Meeropol opens the film with an encounter that plainly demonstrates that dilemma. When she makes a winter visit to the lonely graves of Ethel and Julius, the cemetery attendant won't give her an accurate map. She argues that these are her grandparents, but it's clearly going to be a tough climb out of the public domain. And this is not the traditional rescue: Meeropol is almost as open to the idea that her grandparents were spies who may have passed scientific secrets of some sort, if not atomic ones, to the Soviets (the government released its purportedly damning "Venona" documents in 1995) as she is to the five decades of research that point in the other direction. When asked directly for her opinion on their guilt or innocence, she jokes that she changes her mind nearly every week. Her questions are different from ours, focused more on her own family than on the U.S. government. Where were all the relatives when her father and her uncle were left in a foster home? Why did most of the family avoid the funeral? She recalls breaking down at seeing just how tiny Ethel's shoes were. Those shoes now belong to a relative who wouldn't even speak on record for the film.

It's almost comical when Meeropol has to take a trip to the National Archives to spend some time with family heirlooms. Among the bits of personal life that ended up as court documents: a picture of the end table Ethel and Julius rightly insisted was a purchase from Macy's, but which the prosecution claimed was a gift from the Soviets, supposedly equipped with special Get Smart-style spy features. She shows off the famous atomic bomb drawing, which looks like a second-grader's failed entry into a science fair, or maybe a rendering of a flower, but was an image supposedly passed to the Soviets to give them detailed engineering on the building of the bomb. And she shows us Roy Cohn's prosecutorial pièce de résistance: a box of Jell-O, Imitation Raspberry Flavor, cut in two. Each half was supposed to be used as part of the spy trade in nuclear secrets. The flavor choice was Cohn's, the box was prosecution-bought, a re-creation-demonstration model of the spy code used in exchanges between moles.

"I couldn't help wondering what it was like, being burned alive along all your nerves," Sylvia Plath wrote in The Bell Jar, reimagining the summer of the execution, a summer her autobiographical protagonist spends in a blistering, noxious New York. When the Meeropol family makes a summertime visit to the Lower East Side kitchen once inhabited by Ethel and Julius, they feel the same heavy heat in the kitchen space made famous by Ethel's "housewife" photo, dish towel in hand, intended to create sympathy for the couple as "normal" Americans. Meeropol's father, Michael, comes face to face with old ghosts in this space he grew up in. "I got a jolt," he says, explaining how it felt riding in the same elevator used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation agents who seized his father 50 years earlier. Unintentional though it may have been, the double entendre is apt. The voltage that was high enough to kill Ethel and Julius a half century ago still hasn't quite been grounded.

'Heir to an Execution' plays July 28, 6:30 p.m., Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, S.F.; Aug. 1, 6 p.m., Wheeler Auditorium, UC Berkeley, Berk.; Aug. 3, 6:30 p.m., Mountain View Century Cinema 16, 1500 N. Shoreline Blvd., Mountain View; Aug. 7, 4:15 p.m., Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center, 1118 Fourth St., San Rafael. $10-$11. (925) 275-9490, www.sfjff.org.