AJT Columnist Schechter Releases Debut Novel
“A Life of the Party” covers the fascinating life of Schechter’s great aunt, Amy Schechter.
What made the daughter of renowned Jewish scholar and founder of American Conservative Judaism, Solomon Schechter, leave her family and the comforts of her middle-class life behind to become a communist organizer amidst the labor strife of the 1920s?
Award-winning journalist Dave Schechter’s historical novel, “A Life of the Party,” delves into the fascinating life of his great aunt, Amy Schechter, a woman who defied the conventions of her time and found purpose far away from the religion and close-knit family of her youth.
Seamlessly blending fact and fiction, the story follows Amy across the country and beyond, from the textile mill towns in the south to the coal mining camps of Pennsylvania, to the shipyards and docks of San Francisco. In each place, she helped organize strikes and marches for workers who wanted better pay, safer conditions and less hours, also providing aid to their families and writing about it all for communist newspapers and magazines. There are even years spent in Russia, where she taught in an American colony in Siberia and attended a communist finishing school in Moscow.
Beaten by police during strikes and marches, arrested numerous times, even threatened with a charge of lunacy, the most notorious of Amy’s exploits nevertheless came when she was charged with murder. After a night of violence during the infamous Loray Mill Strike of 1929 in Gastonia, N.C., left a police chief dead, Amy and 15 other communists and strikers were apprehended and put on trial.
While there was no evidence against them, this was a time when the police sided with company bosses and where the protesting workers and those helping them were seen as the enemy. The trial garnered national headlines and Amy’s face was splashed across the pages of newspapers all over the country. When the charges against her were dismissed, she continued on with her life’s work, undeterred.
“This was a woman who defied the norms of her time. She didn’t become a teacher or other professions that women went into coming out of college in those years. She joined a political movement that existed outside the mainstream,” Dave Schechter said. “Her real concern was the working men and women that she met in the mills, mines, docks and that’s what motivated her year after year for 40-plus years of her life.”
The New York Times called Amy “one of the most ardent among the New York radicals.” And a columnist for a Jewish newspaper said she was “one of the few genuinely idealistic Communists; she lives up to her ideals in her private life, sharing what she has with others less fortunate.” She was someone whose entire life was lived in dedication to her cause.
But “A Life of the Party” is so much more than the tale of one person. It’s also an extraordinary look into a time of labor unrest in this country and the hard-scrabble, brutal life of industrial workers and their families. Men, women and even children often toiled in dangerous conditions for long hours and little pay and Communists were at the forefront in organizing them to fight for change. Often, the results were met with violence.
For Dave Schechter, this book itself has been a journey. Twenty-five years ago, his father handed him a mysterious letter. It was from an expert in Soviet activities in the United States who wanted information on someone his great aunt had a relationship with. He was also given a heavily-redacted FBI file about Amy, whom he’d never met and knew little about. From that moment, he says, he was hooked.
Decades later, after retiring from a successful career in journalism, filing hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests that garnered hundreds of pages of FBI reports, obtaining documents from Soviet Union archives, collecting dozens of articles written by Amy for Communist publications and conducting interviews with people Schechter tracked down who knew her, the remarkable story of Amy Schechter’s life is at last complete.
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