Jillian Cantor: The Hours Count

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Today I'm delighted  to introduce Jillian Cantor, author of THE HOURS COUNT, a telling of the story of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, through the eyes of their (fictional) Lower East Side neighbor. I was lucky enough to read the book in galleys and fell in love. It's in many ways a quiet novel, but so powerful. Brava, Jillian! 

(And isn't the cover amazing? Not that I judge a book by it, of course, but I think the netting of the gloves echoes the fencing in the Rosenberg pictures perfectly....)

And — here's Jillian!

JILLIAN CANTOR: On June 19, 1953 Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, an American Jewish couple, were executed for conspiring to commit espionage. On the day they died, they wrote a letter to their two young sons, imploring their boys to always remember that they were innocent. 

I first came across that letter in an anthology of women’s letters, just after I’d finished writing my last novel, Margot. And it led me to start researching the Rosenbergs’ case. I wanted to know – were they innocent? I learned that even though she was executed, there was never any real evidence against Ethel Rosenberg. Only testimony from her brother who said she’d typed up notes.

And years later, in the 90s, her brother admitted this was a lie, that he’d perjured himself to save his own wife. In fact, everything I read about Ethel’s life led me to picture her as a devoted mother, who wanted to put caring for her family above everything else. As a mother to two young boys myself, I could not comprehend the horror of what had happened to Ethel and her children in the early 1950s. And that’s where I first got the inspiration for my new novel, The Hours Count.

In read that in real life, on the day Ethel was first arrested, she left her sons in the care of a neighbor. I invented a fictional neighbor, Millie Stein, and in my novel, I reimagined the years leading up to Ethel’s arrest and execution from Millie’s point of view. Millie is a young Jewish wife, struggling with her own troubled son and marriage, and she forges a connection with her neighbor Ethel over their joys and problems of motherhood.



Though the novel is set against the backdrop of the true historical events surrounding the Rosenbergs’ case, it blends fact and fiction. Ultimately, I wanted to tell a story about female friendship and motherhood in the 1940s and 1950s. And I wanted to picture Ethel the way I really imagined her to be – not as a dangerous spy who deserved to be executed, but as the loving mother of two young boys whom she was forced to leave orphaned in 1953.




SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Jillian, thank you so much for coming by Jungle Reds. I know I have a lot of questions to ask you about your research, female friendship, motherhood, THE HOURS COUNT and the Rosenbergs. Reds and lovely readers, please join us with questions and comments!

Jillian Cantor has a BA in English from Penn State University and an MFA from The University of Arizona. She is the author of award-winning novels for teens and adults including the critically acclaimed MARGOT, which was a Library Reads pick for September 2013 and also featured in O the Oprah Magazine, People, Ladies Home Journal, and Time.com. Her most recent book for teens, SEARCHING FOR SKY, was nominated for the 2015 Carnegie Medal in the UK. Jillian’s next historical novel for adults, THE HOURS COUNT, will be out 10/20/15 from Riverhead/Penguin. Born and raised in a suburb of Philadelphia, Jillian currently lives in Arizona with her husband and two sons.