BOOK REVIEW : A Fuzzy Self-Portrait of Ethel Rosenberg : ETHEL: The Fictional Autobiography <i> by Tema Nason</i> , Delacorte, $18.95, 317 pages

This fall, 37 years after Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s controversial execution as spies, the recently published memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev allude to the couple’s significance to Soviet intelligence.

Without that coincidental revelation, Tema Nason’s “Ethel: The Fictional Autobiography” could be read simply as an exercise in imagination; but the fact that Khrushchev thought the Rosenbergs important enough to name casts an eerie light upon this effort.

When the novel begins in 1951, Ethel is already condemned and awaiting execution in Sing Sing. As therapy, her psychiatrist urges her to keep a journal, hoping that the discipline will not only calm her, but also clarify her thoughts; perhaps even help her to recall an incident that might be useful in framing an appeal.

There are long stretches of recollection broken by terse bulletins on the inexorable progress of the case. As re-created by Nason, Ethel Greenglass’ girlhood was an ordeal of emotional and material poverty, a decade of misery relieved only by her dreams of escape. The only daughter of a kind but timid sewing machine repairman and his crudely domineering wife, Ethel grew up convinced that her parents favored her brothers, particularly David, the youngest, who was spoiled and coddled.

Though Ethel apparently had a talent for acting and a sweet singing voice, her theatrical ambitions were scorned by her mother and thwarted by the dire need for money. After appearing in a few productions, Ethel worked as a shipping clerk, a demeaning existence which Nason describes effectively and sympathetically.

Eventually, she put her talents to use as a union organizer, earning the admiration of her co-workers and attracting the attention of Julius Rosenberg, then a solemn engineering student drawn to the left-wing causes so seductive to that Depression generation.

They marry and naively join the Communist Party, a decision mentioned here almost in passing. When Ethel’s brother David comes home on furlough from Army duty at Los Alamos, the atomic bomb research site, she and Julius eagerly question him about his secret work. In this novel, that curiosity is her fatal mistake, the only error she commits in an otherwise blameless life.

Months later, David is questioned by the FBI and, to save himself, accuses his sister and her husband of espionage. As Ethel tells her story, it seems almost inconceivable that anyone as lowly and inept as David Greenglass would have had access to crucial scientific information or that he would have been recruited as a Soviet agent, unless stupidity itself was a qualification for the job.

In her struggle to explain the inexplicable, Ethel decides that David is seeking revenge for a financial dispute with Julius, a rationalization that’s specious at best. Until that point, David’s worst crime has been cheating in school, hardly the precursor to sending his sister to her death.

We’re asked to believe that Ethel dies because she has absolutely nothing to reveal and is too honorable to dissemble, though an admission of complicity would save her life. The self-portrait here, however, is not one of an utter innocent, a virtual saint, or even of a passionate ideologue ready to die for her principles and leave her children orphans.

Instead, we have a pathetic victim whose incompetent lawyer makes a fatal error of judgment; a judge who overtly shows his loathing of the accused; a woman betrayed by her brother and abandoned by the political party that so shamelessly exploited her.

In Nason’s version of the case, Ethel Rosenberg is an utterly ordinary woman. She suffers, yearns, and pleads for our understanding without ever taking us into her confidence. At the end of her story, she remains the enigma she was when her ordeal began.

In her brief preface, Tema Nason defines the novelist’s job as an attempt “to enter the maze of the human personality, approach the elusive truth of another human being.” But that journey is just a detour; the approach to the “elusive truth of another human being” stops short outside Ethel’s cell.

Next: Carolyn See reviews “Breaking Ice,” edited by Terry McMillan (Viking).