Blending History and Fiction

The box arrived earlier this month.

My wife recorded video on her phone as I sliced it open. Inside were the first copies of my book, the culmination of a project that began 25 years ago.

One of my sons said that just writing the manuscript was an achievement. That’s true, but there was a special feeling when I held the 200-page paperback.

Then came the buzz of seeing the book listed for sale online; out in the world, available for purchase, to be read and judged.

This is my first book, self-published because, at a certain point in life, there is only so much rejection that you can take. I wrote it to satisfy myself, rather than with grandiose thoughts about the audience (though my chief advisor thinks the story would make a splendid film).

So, what is this book about? Thank you for asking. [Cue the shameless self-promotion.]

“A Life of the Party” is a work of historical fiction about my great-aunt, Amy, who devoted four decades to the struggles of working men and women, as a card-carrying member of the Communist Party.

Raised in a religious household, she would have been familiar from a young age with the concept of tikkun olam, that the world is a shattered vessel and that each of us must strive to bring the scattered shards back together. Communism became her way to repair the world.

My great-aunt’s work, as a journalist and organizer, took her across the United States, from textile mills and coal fields to shipyards and docks, and to Russia, to a remote Siberian colony and to the center of Soviet communism.

I wrote in the introduction: “History may not be kind to the Communists, to the authoritarian regimes whose cruelty is well-documented, and to those Americans whose loyalty caused them to turn a blind eye to these horrors.”

That said, in her time “the Communists often were at the forefront in calling attention to economic and social inequities in the United States and in organizing people for change.”

She was among the defendants in a celebrated trial during the 1929 Loray Mill strike in Gastonia, N.C. She was arrested several times during protests, including in Chattanooga, where a judge threatened her with a charge of public lunacy if she did not leave town.

This project began with a letter to my father from a professor at Emory University, who asked about a man with whom my great-aunt had a relationship that apparently went beyond shared ideological beliefs.

As a good apparatchik, my great-aunt left no diary, journal, or letters. I read numerous articles she wrote for Party and other sympathetic publications. The Federal Bureau of Investigation tracked her activities, and, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, I was able to access a few hundred pages from those files.

The research revealed a great deal more about her life than what I was told growing up. I was aware throughout of the sensitivity of filling in the gaps with elements of what might have been. Out of respect for my father, I would not have been comfortable publishing this book while he was alive.

Having spent my career in a business where, if you make things up, you lose your job, blending fact and fiction was a challenge.

There were periods of intense activity on the book and longer intervals of dormancy, during the many years that I worked for CNN and the past decade writing freelance, frequently in these pages. A heart attack and bypass surgery provided motivation to pick up the pace.

The first copies are going to people who encouraged me along the way or whose guidance was invaluable during the research, writing, and editing of the book. They and my family are the village that brought this book to life. I am grateful to each for their contribution, while absolving them of any responsibility for my deficiencies.

In my first job, I would go down to the press room late at night, just to grab off the conveyor belt a copy of the next morning’s paper with my byline atop an article on the front page.

I got a similar kick out of cutting open that box and seeing my name on the front cover and spine of a book 25 years in the making.

A Jewish columnist called Amy “one of the few genuinely idealistic Communists; she lives up to ideals in her private life, sharing what she was with others less fortunate.” It may not have been the traditional way to repair the world, the politically popular way, or the socially acceptable way, but it was her way and that’s the story I set out to tell.