Stealing Fire: Memoir of a Boyhood in the Shadow of Atomic Espionage

by Boria Sax

"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

Genres: History

137 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2014

About the author

A person is not a list of accomplishments, and so I prefer not to introduce myself in that way. It is more accurate to say each of us is a collection of stories. Like others, I have more stories than I could ever tell or even know. I have been, among other things, a human rights activist, an impoverished poet, a manual worker, an expert on online education, and a pioneer in Animal Studies.

I was raised on Communism, the grandest of grand narratives. it sought to explain everything but didn’t explain anything very well. I have always missed its dramatic sweep. I wanted big answers for the big questions. I wouldn’t accept the little ones and kept getting in trouble with my teachers.

My father had been a Soviet spy, passing atomic secrets, and the initial years of my life were spent with my nearly destitute family trying to shake the FBI by moving many times a year. My father, a Russian Jew, was impulsive, brilliant, loving, abusive, and seriously mentally ill. My mother, coming from a rather puritanical British background, saw him as a romantic rebel. She was drawn to the Civil Rights movement and was a co-founder of CORE (the Congress on Racial Equality), but the difficulties of survival overwhelmed her idealism. She held our family together with a sort of everyday heroism, and my parents divorced after 18 tempestuous years.

Rather than focusing exclusively on any specialty, I like to draw analogies between domains that appear very far apart. In the 1980s, when I began to write about literature, I was disappointed to discover that I had to spend far more time sorting through commentaries than with poems and stories. The topic of animals in literature and folklore was, however, relatively new. Browsing in used bookshops, I came across eighteenth and nineteenth century encyclopedias of animals, which were an uncharted world of comedy and romance, filled with turkeys that speak Arabic, beavers that build like architects, and dogs that solve murders. They revealed every bit as much about human society as about birds and beasts.

I started writing mostly about human-animal relations and never stopped. Indulging my fondness for paradoxes, I addressed subjects like Nazi animal protection, the modernity of the ravens in the Tower of London, and the Thanksgiving turkey as a sacrificial offering. As for trees, I think of them as just a kind of animal. By now, I have published roughly twenty books, which have been translated into many languages. I often violate academic protocols, not only by addressing broad themes but also by inserting humor and lyricism into my texts. I teach in the college program of the Sing Sing Correctional Facility and the graduate literature program of Mercy University.

There have been two constants in my somewhat untidy life. One is the support of my wife Linda, who has been with me over half a century and whom I cannot thank enough. The other is my writing, which I have worked on continually but am unable to judge. Thanks, reader, for reading this, and I hope you are inspired to read more.

Reviews

[Bob Schnell · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Rick · Rating 5 out of 5]

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