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Stealing Fire: Memoir of a Boyhood in the Shadow of Atomic Espionage
"Boria Sax is both biographer and son. And, as both, he has produced a brilliant, scholarly history of a society nearly paralyzed by an unrelenting fear of Russia and The Bomb; at the same time, he writes a poignant memoir of a dysfunctional immigrant family whose head, Boria’s father, passed atomic secrets to America’s enemy. What is most amazing about Stealing Fire is the author’s ability to balance the objectivity demanded of the biographer and the sensitivity and compassion required of the son.
Saville (Savy) Sax and his close friend and former Harvard classmate, physicist Ted Hall, entered the shadowy world of Cold War espionage together, with Savy encouraging Ted to share with Russia his work on the atomic bomb, and then serving as his courier. Whether Klaus Fuch’s treachery or that of Hall and Savy was of greater value to the Russians matters little. All three were responsible for delivering to America’s ultimate enemy at the time what was believed to be the key to Doomsday. The reasons for their treachery were those shared by many young Americans at the time, when communism seemed an answer to fascism, poverty, injustice, and an America where Blacks were treated as inferior beings. Boria, through the magnified lens of a son, sees Savy’s motivation as something “even grander than communism, a belief in the nearly unlimited powers of humankind.” Boria notes as well that the former college chums were 'infatuated with their own cleverness,' a failing common to spies.
That both Hall and Savy escaped the fate of the Rosenbergs’ was a defining factor not only in their lives but also in the life of Savy’s son. Boria finds himself 'fortunate that my father was never charged with espionage,' speculating that he might never have recovered from the trauma of seeing his father behind bars. However, the reader is left to wonder whether Boria, or any child of a spy, completely recovers from the trauma of having a parent who was a traitor. Indeed, in expressing his feelings toward his father, he delivers to the reader a hefty measure of unresolved hatred and, in the end, of love and longing for a life that never was and never could be. It seems clear that Savy, a Promethean character in this drama, was haunted by his own 'good fortune' after theft of the great atomic fire, despite unsuccessful efforts to live a normal life.
There are lessons to be learned in this excellent work, mainly about the greater and lesser possibilities of human existence. Boria Sax delivers those lessons masterfully."
—Marcia Mitchell, author, The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War
Saville (Savy) Sax and his close friend and former Harvard classmate, physicist Ted Hall, entered the shadowy world of Cold War espionage together, with Savy encouraging Ted to share with Russia his work on the atomic bomb, and then serving as his courier. Whether Klaus Fuch’s treachery or that of Hall and Savy was of greater value to the Russians matters little. All three were responsible for delivering to America’s ultimate enemy at the time what was believed to be the key to Doomsday. The reasons for their treachery were those shared by many young Americans at the time, when communism seemed an answer to fascism, poverty, injustice, and an America where Blacks were treated as inferior beings. Boria, through the magnified lens of a son, sees Savy’s motivation as something “even grander than communism, a belief in the nearly unlimited powers of humankind.” Boria notes as well that the former college chums were 'infatuated with their own cleverness,' a failing common to spies.
That both Hall and Savy escaped the fate of the Rosenbergs’ was a defining factor not only in their lives but also in the life of Savy’s son. Boria finds himself 'fortunate that my father was never charged with espionage,' speculating that he might never have recovered from the trauma of seeing his father behind bars. However, the reader is left to wonder whether Boria, or any child of a spy, completely recovers from the trauma of having a parent who was a traitor. Indeed, in expressing his feelings toward his father, he delivers to the reader a hefty measure of unresolved hatred and, in the end, of love and longing for a life that never was and never could be. It seems clear that Savy, a Promethean character in this drama, was haunted by his own 'good fortune' after theft of the great atomic fire, despite unsuccessful efforts to live a normal life.
There are lessons to be learned in this excellent work, mainly about the greater and lesser possibilities of human existence. Boria Sax delivers those lessons masterfully."
—Marcia Mitchell, author, The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War
- GenresHistory
137 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2014
21 people want to read
About the author
Boria Sax
36 books80 followersI first became interested in the literature of animals around the end of the 1980's, not terribly long after I had obtained my PhD in German and intellectual history. I was feeling frustrated in my search for an academic job and even study of literature. By accident, I came across an encyclopedia of animals that had been written in the early nineteenth century. There, without any self-consciousness, was a new world of romance and adventure, filled with turkeys that spoke Arabic, beavers that build like architects, and dogs that solve murders. Within a few months, I had junked my previous research and devoted my studies to these texts.
Today, I shudder how nervy the switch was for a destitute young scholar, who, despite one book and several articles, had not managed to obtain any steady job except mopping floors. But soon I had managed to publish two books on animals in literature, The Frog King (1990) and The Parliament of Animals (1992). Around 1995, I founded Nature in Legend and Story (NILAS, Inc.), an organization that combines storytelling and scholarship. It was initially, a sort of rag-tag band of intellectual adventurers who loved literature but could not find a niche in the scholarly world. We put together a few conferences, which generated a lot of excitement among the few who attended, but little notice in academia or in what they sometimes call "the real world."
From fables and anecdotes, I moved to mythology, and published The Serpent and the Swan (1997), a study of animal bride tales from around the world. This was followed by many further publications including an examination of the darker side of animal studies, Animals in the Third Reich (2000), and a sort of compendium, The Mythical Zoo (2002), and a cultural history of corvids entitled Crow (2003). My most recent book is City of Ravens: London, its Tower and its Famous Ravens (2011), and Imaginary Animals will be published soon by Reaktion Books in London.
When I embarked on the study of animals in myth and literature, even graduate students did not have to mention a few dozen books just to show that they had read them. In barely more than a couple decades, the literature on human-animal relations has grown enormously in both quantity and sophistication. NILAS, I am proud to say, has become a well established organization, which has sponsored two highly successful conferences together with ISAZ.
But as the study of animals, what I like to call "totemic literature," becomes more of a standard feature of academic programs, I fear that something may be lost. It is now just a little too easy to discourse about the "social construction" and the "transgression" of "boundaries" between animals and human beings. Even as I admire the subtlety of such analysis, I sometimes find myself thinking, "So what?"
Having been there close to the beginning, part of my role is now to preserve some the sensuous immediacy, with that filled the study of animals in literature when it was still a novelty. That sort of "poetry" is not simply a luxury in our intellectual pursuits. With such developments as cloning, genetic engineering, and the massive destruction of natural habitats, we face crises so unprecedented that traditional philosophies, from utilitarianism to deep ecology, can offer us precious little guidance. The possibilities are so overwhelming, that we hardly even know what questions to ask. But neither, I am sure, did the fugitive who once encountered a mermaid in the middle of the woods.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 21, 2015
Boria Sax' father gave (or sold) atomic secrets to the Russians but was never legally punished for his crime. His family, however, may say that he punished himself mentally. They, in turn, suffered their own private cold war. In his historical/autobiographical book "Stealing Fire: Memoir of a Boyhood in the Shadow of Atomic Espionage" Boria Sax briefly details the history of the Manhattan Project and those who shared its secrets with the enemy. His personal family history is then set against that backdrop to help us understand Communism in America in the 1940s and 1950s and what is was like to grow up in a household full of secrets, tension and paranoia.
I felt that the history portion of the book was too superficial and presented in an almost textbook manner. Sidebars give us short-cut biographical sketches of the players not related to the author instead of working them in to the narrative. Either the author assumes a deeper knowledge on the part of the reader or he didn't want to distract from the family's story with more historical background than absolutely necessary. Much more successful are his personal tales and later insights about why his childhood was so different from that of regular Americans. The running Prometheus metaphor is a bit strained but helps the author put his father in the sort of mythological terms with which he probably deluded himself as justification for his acts.
I felt that the history portion of the book was too superficial and presented in an almost textbook manner. Sidebars give us short-cut biographical sketches of the players not related to the author instead of working them in to the narrative. Either the author assumes a deeper knowledge on the part of the reader or he didn't want to distract from the family's story with more historical background than absolutely necessary. Much more successful are his personal tales and later insights about why his childhood was so different from that of regular Americans. The running Prometheus metaphor is a bit strained but helps the author put his father in the sort of mythological terms with which he probably deluded himself as justification for his acts.
September 4, 2015
His One of a Kind Cold War Coming of Age
Boria Sax, Stealing Fire, Decalogue Books, 2014
------------------------- title completely provisional/arbitrary
Boria Sax, known for his work on the historical culture of animals, among other things, has crafted in Stealing Fire, an uncommonly compelling coming of age memoir that defies easy categorization. Partly an account of growing up in a left wing, properly eccentric Chicago family in the post-World War II decades, Sax grapples with a unique secret: what role did his father, Saville Sax, an “atomic” courier-spy working with Manhattan Project scientist and Soviet collaborator Theodore Hall, play in the espionage drama, and how did the after-effects of that drama, and the senior Sax’s mercurial personality color the family’s domestic life?
Sax’s compact, lucid, unadorned writing results in a work that stands out for at least three reasons (I did not want to put it down): 1. for me, an international relations and American history scholar, a new, very personal account is wrapped around the events and personalities (Fuchs, the Rosenbergs, McCarthy, et al.) but in an anecdotal, non- linear way, 2. this is because so much of the heart of the book ties these background events to Sax’s struggle with the interplay of his father’s past and complex personality with the evolving perspective of ‘boy becoming youth becoming adult’ (much colorful family history and entertaining “normal household craziness” is revealed), and 3. the ingenious use of photographs and historical “insets”—not just captions—adds to the book’s pacing even as the reader is pulled into digressions on as different portraits as the Greenglass’, Earl Browder, “Grandmother” (Boria’s influential one, Bluma).
It is a difficult feat to give the reader the flavor of an extended but focused period (spying over more than two decades) and at the same time provide intimate, sometimes poignant self-revelation about his own developing personality and relation to family members—living and dead—and their stories of immigration, coping and being caught up, as most of us are, in the events and vagaries of their times. Sax’s understated, never too “I’ve got this all figured out style,” moves from “weighty questions” to funny, telling vignettes and one-liners:
Nevertheless our family was a bit like the typical American family of situation comedies such as Father Knows Best in which the father was prone to crazy enthusiasms that the mother had to keep in check.
Stealing Fire, with its Promethean title, is further enlivened by wonderful quotations to open well-named (and sometimes cryptically so) chapters, like “Fire and Ice” or “Questions and more Questions”. The use of snippets from the Old Testament, or, say, Hesiod, add a certain gravitas to his story without being pretentious.
The reader is thus both oddly and powerfully “gifted” with at least three interlaced stories in one: 1. musings on the motivations and consequences of having gotten caught up in the strange new world of atomic spying, 2. the bringing home—literally “into the home”—of one player Saville “Savy” Sax and his well-drawn family—particularly his son, and finally, 3. the writer’s invitation into the head and feelings of a boy proceeding through life and constantly re-figuring what to make of all of the above and how the pieces fit and re-fit. Because all of us are in some way trying to make some sense of our childhoods, we identify with diverse aspects of our heritages as we move through life.
Two questions occur to me ─ admiring Sax’s work as the kind of project I, the reader, himself might like to undertake ─ that are not fully answered in Stealing Fire: 1. Why did a “big-league” carrier of atomic secrets (and what kinds of “secrets?”) escape more than mere surveillance by the FBI—speculation is provided, but more probing might help here, and 2. What robustness in human nature allows some semblance of cohesion and then forgiveness in a family, and a boy developing into a man? Perhaps the grip of the book lies precisely in the unanswerability of these and other conundrums. In any case, our author has achieved one of the most enviable feats for any writer: giving us modern History with the capital “h,” stories of an unconventional early life in often non-white, non-comprehending neighborhoods and school milieus, and the compelling, going “deep inside” of himself, that combine in a work that defies easy categorization or “audience.” That being the case, I say, treat yourself ─ Read It.
Frederick L. Shiels
Prof. History and Political
Mercy College
Boria Sax, Stealing Fire, Decalogue Books, 2014
------------------------- title completely provisional/arbitrary
Boria Sax, known for his work on the historical culture of animals, among other things, has crafted in Stealing Fire, an uncommonly compelling coming of age memoir that defies easy categorization. Partly an account of growing up in a left wing, properly eccentric Chicago family in the post-World War II decades, Sax grapples with a unique secret: what role did his father, Saville Sax, an “atomic” courier-spy working with Manhattan Project scientist and Soviet collaborator Theodore Hall, play in the espionage drama, and how did the after-effects of that drama, and the senior Sax’s mercurial personality color the family’s domestic life?
Sax’s compact, lucid, unadorned writing results in a work that stands out for at least three reasons (I did not want to put it down): 1. for me, an international relations and American history scholar, a new, very personal account is wrapped around the events and personalities (Fuchs, the Rosenbergs, McCarthy, et al.) but in an anecdotal, non- linear way, 2. this is because so much of the heart of the book ties these background events to Sax’s struggle with the interplay of his father’s past and complex personality with the evolving perspective of ‘boy becoming youth becoming adult’ (much colorful family history and entertaining “normal household craziness” is revealed), and 3. the ingenious use of photographs and historical “insets”—not just captions—adds to the book’s pacing even as the reader is pulled into digressions on as different portraits as the Greenglass’, Earl Browder, “Grandmother” (Boria’s influential one, Bluma).
It is a difficult feat to give the reader the flavor of an extended but focused period (spying over more than two decades) and at the same time provide intimate, sometimes poignant self-revelation about his own developing personality and relation to family members—living and dead—and their stories of immigration, coping and being caught up, as most of us are, in the events and vagaries of their times. Sax’s understated, never too “I’ve got this all figured out style,” moves from “weighty questions” to funny, telling vignettes and one-liners:
Nevertheless our family was a bit like the typical American family of situation comedies such as Father Knows Best in which the father was prone to crazy enthusiasms that the mother had to keep in check.
Stealing Fire, with its Promethean title, is further enlivened by wonderful quotations to open well-named (and sometimes cryptically so) chapters, like “Fire and Ice” or “Questions and more Questions”. The use of snippets from the Old Testament, or, say, Hesiod, add a certain gravitas to his story without being pretentious.
The reader is thus both oddly and powerfully “gifted” with at least three interlaced stories in one: 1. musings on the motivations and consequences of having gotten caught up in the strange new world of atomic spying, 2. the bringing home—literally “into the home”—of one player Saville “Savy” Sax and his well-drawn family—particularly his son, and finally, 3. the writer’s invitation into the head and feelings of a boy proceeding through life and constantly re-figuring what to make of all of the above and how the pieces fit and re-fit. Because all of us are in some way trying to make some sense of our childhoods, we identify with diverse aspects of our heritages as we move through life.
Two questions occur to me ─ admiring Sax’s work as the kind of project I, the reader, himself might like to undertake ─ that are not fully answered in Stealing Fire: 1. Why did a “big-league” carrier of atomic secrets (and what kinds of “secrets?”) escape more than mere surveillance by the FBI—speculation is provided, but more probing might help here, and 2. What robustness in human nature allows some semblance of cohesion and then forgiveness in a family, and a boy developing into a man? Perhaps the grip of the book lies precisely in the unanswerability of these and other conundrums. In any case, our author has achieved one of the most enviable feats for any writer: giving us modern History with the capital “h,” stories of an unconventional early life in often non-white, non-comprehending neighborhoods and school milieus, and the compelling, going “deep inside” of himself, that combine in a work that defies easy categorization or “audience.” That being the case, I say, treat yourself ─ Read It.
Frederick L. Shiels
Prof. History and Political
Mercy College
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews