Interview with Dave Schechter

It can be hard to remember in the twenty-first century, but in the 1920s, 1930s, and even 1940s, socialism and even communism appealed to more than a few people in the United States. It’s hard, though, to imagine a more dedicated follower than Amy Schechter, a historical figure whose life is at the center of her grandnephew Dave Schechter’s novel, A Life of the Party. Read on to find out more about Amy and her times through the interview that follows.

This book, although historical fiction, portrays the life of your great-aunt, Amy Schechter. What inspired you to write her story?

When I was a boy, I asked my father: Did your father have any siblings? My father was 11 when his father died and he rarely talked about him. He answered my question: Two sisters. One went to South Africa and the other was a Socialist arrested at a strike in North Carolina. For many years that’s all I knew. In 1999 a professor at Emory University, an expert in Soviet activities in the United States, sent my father a letter, asking about a man with whom Amy apparently had a relationship. Along with the letter came three heavily redacted pages from an FBI report about Amy. I was hooked. I wanted to know more about my great-aunt, whom I never met. What had she done to merit the FBI’s attention? The rest, as they might have said, was history, with a dose of fiction. 

You have been a journalist for most of your career. How did that training influence your approach to Amy’s story?

My mother says that my journalism career began as a 4-year-old tracing newspaper headlines. I wrote for my junior high school, high school, community, and college newspapers, and earned a masters degree in journalism, before “turning pro” in 1978, if that gives you an idea how long I've been committing acts of journalism. That experience benefits when doing research. (I enjoyed going down rabbit holes.)  On the other hand, in professional journalism, if you make things up, you (should) lose your job. So, writing the fictional parts initially was a challenge. Truth is, I came to enjoy it.

We meet Amy at the midpoint of her active life as a communist, on trial for her involvement with the workers’ strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1929. Why start there, and what should readers of this blog know about that strike and that trial?

That opening scene, with Amy being on the witness stand, survived several attempts at replacement. It seemed a strong way to convey drama and set the stage for the narrative that followed. Amy's testy exchange with the prosecutor was drawn from a trial transcript. The first and second trials were national news. In my search for references to Amy, I found reports in newspapers from across the country. The trial became a cause célèbre for Communists and other radicals of the time. The strike made headlines because of the “Reds” involved and because of the violence, including the shooting deaths of the police chief and a woman known as the “songbird” of the strike.

You then move back in time to Amy’s arrival in the United States in 1902. How do her early life experiences propel her toward communism?

As I wrote, Amy was raised in a home observant of Jewish law. As a child, she would have been taught the concept of “tzedekah,” charity. She also would have learned about “tikkun olam,” popular these days, words that come from a Jewish prayer and refer to recovering and restoring shards of shattered divine light. A pivotal moment is Amy’s encounter with a woman begging on a cold December day on the sidewalk of a crowded street on Manhattan’s upper west side. Amy removes and gives the woman the warm coat that her mother had recently purchased. I was told this story by an elderly cousin of my father, who discounted the woman’s memory. Nonetheless, I found value in it for use in this work of historical fiction. Similarly, I imagined an encounter between Amy and the very real Juliet Poyntz as guiding Amy toward radical politics.

She visits the Soviet Union twice—once five years after the revolution and again in 1930. What does she take away from those visits?

As Amy left no letters or journal, I am left to hypothesize. I imagine her eager to contribute to the Soviet enterprise, even in an environment where she surely was less than comfortable, that being the Kuzbas Colony in Siberia. I assume that she understood her assignment to the Lenin International School to be a reward for her labors and that this experience, in the heart of the movement, would have informed her on the inner workings of the Party and sent her home with renewed dedication.

What should readers know about her family—her parents; her older sister, Ruth; and her brother, Frank, who was your grandfather?

My great-grandfather, Solomon Schechter, was a prominent figure in the Jewish world—a scholar of Jewish law, the “father” of the Conservative movement, the discoverer of ancient documents in a Cairo repository, and someone who sought to bridge the orthodox religious observance and the realities of modern life. My great-grandmother, Mathilde, was an intellectual force in her own right, making major contributions to the Conservative movement, while (in New York, as she had in England) managing a Jewish household and her seemingly indefatigable husband. As for their children, Ruth’s life is worthy of its own book. She married and moved to South Africa where she underwent her own transformation and moved toward radical politics. Frank, my grandfather, died when my father was 11, and he rarely talked about him. Frank dealt with the high expectations of his parents. He served as an intelligence officer in the American Expeditionary Force in Europe during World War I, and as a lawyer authored a treatise that forms the basis of our trademark laws. And then, of course, there was Amy.

Amy defies gender stereotypes even more than political ones, since in the 1920s and 1930s many intellectuals embraced socialism and communism. What should we know about that element of her story?

She was a college graduate at a time when relatively few women were, an educated woman who rejected the traditional path of becoming a teacher, a Jewish woman who joined a movement that eschewed religion and the political mainstream, and a woman who, quite literally, put her body on the line in support of the labor rights of working men and women.

Do you expect to write or are you already working on another novel? If so, on what topic? And if not, why?

A Life of the Party took 25 years from start to finish (full-time work and family were the priorities). Somewhere during all of this, during my 20 years as a soccer parent, I would drop one of my sons to practice and go to a nearby Starbucks. I opened a notebook one day and by hand wrote a story, a work of fiction that, in some ways, reflects the early days of my professional career. I transcribed it to my computer and there it sat, until about a year ago. Now I'm playing with it again. The basics of a good story are there, but it needs more bite, more tension, and more length.

Thank you for answering my questions!

Dave Schechter has spent a life in journalism. He began his career as a newspaper reporter and local television news editor in the Midwest. Just months after marrying, he and his wife left for the Mideast. Dave left a study program in Israel and, by fortuitous circumstance, became the producer in CNN's Jerusalem bureau. After returning to the United States, he worked for more than 26 years in various roles on CNN's national news desk. For the past 11 years, he has written freelance, primarily for Jewish publications. He lives in Atlanta with his wife, Audrey Galex, herself a journalist, author, and storyteller. They are the parents of three adult children and cater to two grand-dogs. When not writing, Dave watches more soccer than perhaps he should, listens to jazz, and tends to a garden.