The Book of Daniel

The Book of Daniel Plot Summary

Introduction

# Children of the Electric Chair: Legacy of American Martyrdom The phone call came on a rain-soaked Memorial Day in 1967, cutting through the Massachusetts darkness like a blade. Daniel Lewin gripped the hospital receiver, listening to words that would shatter what remained of his fractured family. His sister Susan lay dying in a psychiatric ward, her wrists bandaged from a suicide attempt that had painted a Howard Johnson's restroom crimson with despair. At twenty, she had become the final casualty of a tragedy that began fourteen years earlier when their parents, Paul and Rochelle Isaacson, walked into the electric chair as convicted atomic spies. The Isaacson children had inherited more than their parents' names. They carried the weight of America's most controversial espionage case, the burden of growing up as orphans of the Cold War. Daniel, now a Columbia graduate student, had spent years trying to escape the shadow of that legacy, while Susan embraced it with the fervor of a true believer. Their parents had died for their Communist convictions, executed by a nation terrified of nuclear secrets falling into Soviet hands. Now their children faced a different kind of death, the slow dissolution that comes from carrying history's heaviest burdens on shoulders too young to bear them.

Chapter 1: The Weight of Inherited Trauma: Susan's Breakdown and Daniel's Awakening

Daniel drove through the Massachusetts rain toward Worcester State Hospital, his wife Phyllis clutching their infant son in the passenger seat. Behind them, his adoptive parents Robert and Lise Lewin followed in their own car, all drawn by the terrible magnetism of family crisis. The windshield wipers beat a steady rhythm that matched the pounding in Daniel's chest as he approached the moment he had been dreading since childhood. Susan lay in the psychiatric ward like a broken doll, her brilliant mind finally shattered under pressures that had been building for two decades. The Radcliffe student who had once burned with revolutionary fire now stared at the ceiling with hollow eyes, her body so thin it barely disturbed the hospital sheets. When Daniel reached her bedside, she delivered her verdict with devastating clarity: "They're still fucking us. Goodbye, Daniel. You get the picture." The picture was painted in blood and institutional white, in the antiseptic smell of a place where damaged minds came to die. Susan had tried to end her life in a roadside bathroom, slashing her wrists with methodical precision before collapsing in her own gore. The state police found her there, another casualty of the Isaacson legacy, another life claimed by parents who had chosen ideology over their children's survival. Daniel sat beside his sister's bed and felt the weight of inherited trauma pressing down like the voltage that had stopped his parents' hearts. The foundation money sat in trust accounts, accumulated from donors who believed Paul and Rochelle Isaacson had died as martyrs to McCarthyist hysteria. Now Susan was slipping away, and with her would go the last witness to their shared nightmare. The rain continued to fall outside the hospital windows, washing nothing clean, changing nothing that mattered.

Chapter 2: Red Shadows: The Isaacson Family and the Price of Political Faith

The Isaacson family had once lived in a ramshackle house on Weeks Avenue in the Bronx, perched above a schoolyard like a ship riding uncertain seas. Paul Isaacson repaired radios in his failing shop while his wife Rochelle managed their modest household with grim efficiency, both burning with the fierce idealism of American Communists in the late 1940s. Their world was small but intense, populated by true believers who gathered in their kitchen to debate the coming revolution over glasses of tea and endless cigarettes. Young Daniel absorbed it all with the hyperaware senses of a child living at the center of what his parents believed was history itself. He watched his father's skinny frame bent over radio chassis, breathing heavily as he explained how the ruling class exploited workers, how newspapers lied, how everything connected to the great struggle between capitalism and socialism. Rochelle moved through their home like a general marshaling limited resources, her dark hair severe, her mouth set in permanent determination. Their friend Selig Mindish visited often, a clumsy dentist with continental pretensions who sat at their kitchen table arguing theory while eyeing Rochelle with barely concealed desire. The house also sheltered Daniel's mad grandmother, who would periodically explode into Yiddish curses and flee into the streets, and Williams, the black superintendent who lived in the basement like some angry god of the underworld. It was a household where every gesture carried ideological weight, where even a trip to the beach became a lesson in working-class dignity. When Paul took his family to the Peekskill concert where Paul Robeson was to sing, they walked into a trap. Mobs attacked the buses carrying the audience, windows shattering like crystalline explosions of hate. Paul Isaacson, that skinny intellectual with thick glasses, did something that surprised even his son. He calmly folded his spectacles, handed them to a friend, and tried to reason with police while rocks rained down around them. They beat him bloody for his trouble, but somehow his quixotic courage saved lives that day.

Chapter 3: Trials of Fire: From Arrest to Execution

The FBI came for Dr. Mindish first, in the gray dawn of November 1950. The news hit the Isaacson household like a physical blow, confirming Rochelle's darkest fears about American politics. Within days, the same agents appeared at their door, polite and persistent, asking questions that Paul answered with increasing defiance until his lawyer ordered him to stop talking altogether. The family's world contracted with each federal visit. Friends stopped calling. Customers avoided Paul's radio shop. The house grew cold as Williams let the furnace go unrepaired, his own protest against the scrutiny surrounding them. Daniel watched his parents transform under pressure, becoming more brittle and ideological, as if ideology were armor against fear that gnawed at them in dark hours before dawn. When they finally came for Paul, it was with overwhelming force. A dozen agents poured through the front door like an avalanche of authority, tearing the house apart with methodical thoroughness. They took books and papers and even Daniel's crystal radio, while Rochelle stood holding baby Susan and screamed at them to leave her family alone. Paul was handcuffed and led away, but not before he managed to shout one word over his shoulder: "Ascher!" The name of the lawyer who would try to save them. Three weeks later, they came for Rochelle too. The children watched their mother disappear into the same legal machinery that had swallowed their father. The house on Weeks Avenue was sold to pay legal bills, and Daniel and Susan found themselves truly orphaned, their parents alive but unreachable behind prison walls, awaiting a trial that would determine whether they lived or died. The trial became a national spectacle, with Paul and Rochelle cast as master spies who had stolen atomic secrets for Soviet gold. The evidence was thin, built more on association than action, but the political climate made conviction almost inevitable. When the jury returned its guilty verdict, the judge sentenced both to death in the electric chair. They would be the first civilians executed for espionage in American history.

Chapter 4: Orphaned by History: Institutional Life and Adopted Identity

The East Bronx Children's Shelter rose like a brick fortress against the sky, its windows embedded with wire mesh, its halls echoing with the sounds of institutionalized childhood. Daniel and Susan were processed like small refugees, assigned bed numbers and meal schedules, separated by gender into different wings of the same gray building where they would wait for their parents' appeals to run out. The other children were casualties of poverty, abandonment, and ordinary family disasters. But Daniel and Susan carried the additional burden of being famous. Their parents' faces appeared in newspapers, their case debated on television programs they weren't allowed to watch. The staff treated them with a mixture of pity and suspicion, as if treason might be contagious, passed from parent to child through some genetic defect. Susan, only six, began wetting the bed and speaking in whispers. She would walk the perimeter of any room she entered, trailing her fingers along walls like a blind person learning the dimensions of her prison. Daniel tried to maintain connection to their former life, telling her stories about their parents, describing the house they had lost. But memory became a luxury they couldn't afford when survival required all their attention. Robert and Lise Lewin arrived like characters from a different novel. Robert was a law professor at Boston University, a man who believed in justice with religious fervor. Lise was a social worker with gentle hands and infinite patience for damaged children. They offered Daniel and Susan not just a home, but new identities. The chance to become ordinary American children with ordinary problems. The house in Brookline was everything the Bronx apartment had not been. Spacious, quiet, filled with books and classical music and thoughtful conversation that assumed the world could be improved through proper understanding. Daniel and Susan were given their own rooms, new clothes, enrollment in good schools where teachers had been carefully briefed about their situation. They were to be known as the Lewin children now, their tragic past a secret shared only with those who needed to know. But identity was not something you could discard like an outgrown coat.

Chapter 5: Revolutionary Echoes: Daniel's Journey Through 1960s Radicalism

By 1967, Daniel had grown into a young man who carried his parents' intensity like a genetic inheritance. At Columbia University, he moved through the radical underground with the authority of someone whose credentials had been written in blood. The anti-war movement, the civil rights struggle, the general uprising against authority sweeping American campuses all felt like echoes of conversations he had overheard in his parents' kitchen twenty years earlier. He met Artie Sternlicht in a tenement on the Lower East Side, where new revolutionaries gathered to plan actions that would make the old Communist Party look like a debating society. Sternlicht was everything Paul Isaacson had not been. Theatrical, violent, contemptuous of theory and compromise. He lived in a room decorated with a mad collage of American images. Movie stars and presidents, advertisements and lynching photographs, all jumbled together in savage commentary on the culture that had produced them. "Your folks didn't know shit," Sternlicht told Daniel with characteristic bluntness. "They played by the system's rules, even when the system was killing them. They should have turned that courtroom into a circus, should have made the government look like the fascist pigs they really are." Daniel listened to this critique of his parents' martyrdom with the complicated emotions of someone who had spent his life trying to understand their choices. The foundation money that had accumulated from their supporters offered Daniel the chance to fund real revolution. Not the careful, theoretical communism of his parents' generation, but the immediate, violent action that Sternlicht and his followers advocated. Yet something held him back, some inherited caution that made him question whether revolution was just another form of performance, another way of playing roles written by history rather than choosing your own script. Susan threw herself into the antiwar movement with the same fierce commitment their parents had brought to their Communist faith. She spoke of creating the Paul and Rochelle Isaacson Foundation for Revolution, using the trust fund to support the new generation of activists. But Daniel remained skeptical, wounded by his parents' legacy and suspicious of all political enthusiasm. Their final confrontation came at Christmas 1966, where Susan accused her brother of betraying their parents' memory through his cynicism and withdrawal.

Chapter 6: Confronting the Betrayer: The Search for Truth in California

The trail led to California, where Selig Mindish had rebuilt his life under a new name in the anonymous suburbs of Orange County. Daniel flew west with foundation money in his pocket and a desperate need to understand the man whose testimony had sent his parents to the electric chair. The dentist who had once sat in their kitchen arguing politics had become the key witness in the government's case against them. Linda Mindish met him at the door of a pink stucco house that could have been anywhere in America. She had grown into a successful dentist herself, engaged to a lawyer, determined to bury the past beneath layers of middle-class respectability. Her father, she explained, was an old man now, his mind failing, his body worn down by years of guilt and fear. But Daniel had not traveled three thousand miles to be turned away by a daughter's protectiveness. When he finally confronted Mindish at Disneyland, the old man was riding children's attractions with the desperate enthusiasm of someone trying to recapture innocence. Mindish recognized him instantly, tears streaming down his weathered face as he reached out to touch the son of the friends he had condemned. The conversation that followed was less revelation than confirmation of what Daniel had already suspected. Mindish had been caught in the FBI's web, threatened with deportation, offered a choice between his own destruction and that of his friends. He had chosen survival, but survival had turned out to be its own form of death. The man who had once dreamed of revolutionary change had become a hollow shell, riding children's rides in an amusement park built on the mythology of an America that had never existed. Daniel left California with more questions than answers, but with a clearer understanding of the forces that had destroyed his family. The case against his parents had been built on the testimony of broken men like Mindish, people who had been given impossible choices and made the only decisions they could live with. The tragedy was not that they had betrayed their friends, but that the system had required such betrayals in the first place.

Chapter 7: The Starfish Dies: Susan's Final Choice and Daniel's Liberation

Back in Boston, Susan was dying with the same stubborn determination she had brought to everything else in her short life. Daniel sat beside her bed, finally understanding that some truths are too heavy for the human heart to carry, that some inheritances destroy the people who receive them. His parents had died believing they were martyrs to a cause greater than themselves. Their children had lived with the knowledge that martyrdom was just another word for abandonment. Susan had become what Daniel privately called a starfish, arms and legs spread wide, clinging to the hospital bed with desperate fingers and toes, staring at the ceiling with eyes that had retreated so far inward they seemed to reflect nothing but empty space. The doctors spoke in careful, clinical terms about her condition, but Daniel knew better. Susan was practicing the ancient art of disappearing while still breathing. The letter Susan had sent him after her suicide attempt was brief and devastating. She had concluded that Daniel believed their parents were guilty, and that this belief made him complicit in their execution. She wrote him out of her life with the finality of someone who had already decided to write herself out of existence. The poster of Paul and Rochelle Isaacson that she had tried to deliver to the radical collective became a symbol of her failed attempt to transform their parents' martyrdom into something meaningful for a new generation. As Susan's breathing grew shallower, Daniel found himself remembering not the trial or the execution or the years of exile, but smaller moments. His father's hands as he repaired a radio, his mother's voice singing while she cooked dinner, the sound of their laughter when they thought their children were asleep. These memories were his true inheritance, more valuable than any foundation money, more lasting than any political cause. Susan died as she had lived, on her own terms, refusing to be saved by people who meant well but could never understand the weight she carried. Daniel walked out of the hospital into the Boston morning, finally free to choose his own script, to write his own ending to a story that had begun before he was born.

Chapter 8: Surviving History: The Burden of Memory and the Choice to Live

The foundation money would go to other causes now, other revolutionaries who believed they could change the world through force of will and righteous anger. Daniel had learned what his parents never understood. Revolution was not something you could plan or organize, but something that happened when ordinary people finally decided they had nothing left to lose. His parents had lost everything but their faith in the future. Their children had inherited that loss without the compensating faith. Daniel's journey through the landscape of American radicalism had traced the evolution of dissent in a country that had always struggled to balance freedom with security. From his parents' earnest communism through Sternlicht's violent anarchism to his own hard-won skepticism, he had seen how each generation found new ways to destroy itself in the name of higher principles. The foundation money, accumulated from the donations of those who believed in the Isaacsons' innocence, had become a symbol of how even the most sincere gestures of solidarity could become corrupted by time and circumstance. His marriage to Phyllis, a flower child from Brooklyn who had married into a notorious family without fully understanding what that meant, became another casualty of the Isaacson legacy. His cruelty toward her was inexplicable even to himself, as if he were compelled to reenact the patterns of destruction that had claimed his parents and now threatened to claim his sister. The baby they had together seemed like a hostage to a future that might never arrive, another innocent caught in the machinery of historical forces that ground up individuals without regard for their guilt or innocence. The starfish, Daniel had learned, was not a symbol of death but of regeneration, capable of growing new limbs when the old ones were torn away. The true tragedy was not that Paul and Rochelle Isaacson died for their beliefs, but that their beliefs had demanded such a price. They had given their lives to a vision of justice that required them to abandon their children, to choose the abstract future over the immediate present.

Summary

In the end, the Isaacson case became what all great tragedies become: a mirror in which each generation sees its own fears and failures reflected back. Paul and Rochelle died believing they were victims of a system that valued conformity over conscience, security over justice. Their children lived with the knowledge that their parents had chosen ideology over family, principle over survival. Both perspectives contained their own terrible truths, and Daniel learned to carry them both without being crushed by either. The most radical act, Daniel discovered, might be simply to survive, to refuse to let history write your story for you, to insist on the right to be ordinary in a world that demanded you be either hero or villain, martyr or traitor, anything but simply, imperfectly human. The children of the electric chair had inherited more than their parents' names or their nation's guilt. They had inherited the burden of memory itself, and the choice of what to do with that inheritance. Susan chose to die with it. Daniel chose to live beyond it, carrying the weight but refusing to be buried beneath it, walking out of that Boston hospital into a morning that belonged to him alone.

About Author

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E.L. Doctorow

Doctorow interrogates the complexities of American identity and history through his distinctive blend of historical fiction and imaginative narrative. Known for integrating real historical figures with fictional characters, he provides readers with a profound exploration of societal and political themes. By situating his stories where mythology and history converge, Doctorow resists conventional labels, offering a fresh perspective on events such as the Rosenberg trial in "The Book of Daniel" and the American Civil War in "The March." His books often address crises, both personal and societal, employing richly textured prose to challenge readers' understanding of progress, memory, and myth.\n\nThe author’s work is marked by audacity and originality, employing diverse narrative styles to critique social and political landscapes. Doctorow’s early book "Welcome to Hard Times" offers a philosophical take on the Western genre, while "Ragtime" interweaves multiple narratives to illuminate the American experience of the early 20th century. His approach benefits readers interested in the intersection of history and fiction, encouraging them to question established narratives and consider the broader implications of historical events. This bio captures Doctorow's ability to engage audiences by challenging traditional storytelling methods and provoking thoughtful discourse on American culture.\n\nRecognized with numerous awards, including the National Book Award and multiple National Book Critics Circle Awards, Doctorow’s impact on literature is significant. His achievements underscore his position in the highest rank of American literature, having also been awarded the PEN Saul Bellow Award for his career's scale of achievement. His books, rich in narrative technique and historical engagement, continue to resonate with those who seek to understand the multifaceted nature of history and identity.

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