Ask the Author: Sharon Potts
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Sharon Potts
THE OTHER TRAITOR goes back to a past belonging to my parents. When I was a child, I had been mesmerized by the stories my mother told me about her growing up during the Great Depression in Brooklyn. How her father died when she was seven, and how her mother, penniless and illiterate, went to extraordinary measures to survive with three small children (my mom was the oldest!) Despite the adversity in her life, my mother went on to graduate from college and lived a happy and rewarding life, but her memories of being a ‘red-diaper baby’, influenced by socialism and later communism, often seemed to take her to another place. The mention of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been executed as atomic-bomb spies in 1953 would bring tears to my mother’s eyes. The Rosenbergs were a young married couple with two small children. They had lived in the same Lower East Side neighborhood as my family and my oldest brother had gone to elementary school with one of their sons. Had they deserved to die? It was a question that haunted me.
The idea to merge my mother’s early years with the story of the execution of an atomic-bomb spy seemed inevitable. But I distanced myself by telling the story through the eyes of Annette Revoir, a French-American journalist. Annette is determined to prove the innocence of her grandfather, who she believes was wrongfully executed as an atomic-bomb spy in the 1950s. Annette’s quest for the truth takes her to the Lower East Side of Manhattan where she meets Mariasha Lowe, a former friend of her disgraced grandfather, and Mariasha’s grandson, Julian Sandman. The old woman reminisces about a youth inflamed by love and revolutionary ideals, but holds onto her deepest secrets until Annette and Julian finally pry them out, never imagining the impact her revelations will have on all their lives.
The idea to merge my mother’s early years with the story of the execution of an atomic-bomb spy seemed inevitable. But I distanced myself by telling the story through the eyes of Annette Revoir, a French-American journalist. Annette is determined to prove the innocence of her grandfather, who she believes was wrongfully executed as an atomic-bomb spy in the 1950s. Annette’s quest for the truth takes her to the Lower East Side of Manhattan where she meets Mariasha Lowe, a former friend of her disgraced grandfather, and Mariasha’s grandson, Julian Sandman. The old woman reminisces about a youth inflamed by love and revolutionary ideals, but holds onto her deepest secrets until Annette and Julian finally pry them out, never imagining the impact her revelations will have on all their lives.
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