Although the New York Times once referred to Amy Schechter as “one of the most ardent among the New York radicals,” you’d not likely encounter a review of Dave Schechter’s novelized biography of his great aunt in its sacred “fit to print” pages. First, on account of his loving, tender evaluation of her four-plus decades as a Communist devoted to struggles for the working class, and second, because the Times, like almost all of the mass media, doesn’t review self-published books (because how else could he have released this story to the world?)
Today’s readers will be grateful that for a quarter of a century, the notion of a book about Amy possessed the author, who followed every lead to anyone who might have known her or had information about her—his own family relations, of course, but also her FBI files obtained courtesy of the Freedom of Information Act, colleagues at CNN’s bureau in Moscow who were able to uncover a document Amy submitted as her application to the Lenin School in the early 1930s, to historians of the famous 1929 Gastonia textile workers’ strike where Amy made significant contributions, to former Communists Dorothy Healey and Lillian Carlson who knew her.
In addition, Dave gathered copies of all the articles Amy ever wrote, in the CPUSA’s Daily Worker, New Masses and other Party-affiliated papers and journals, and beyond. Notably, she left no personal journals. By the time she died, worn out at the age of 69 in 1962, only the old guard of the Party remembered her remarkable achievements and career. Her epitaph was a small ad in the April 15, 1962, edition of the Party paper signed by “A Group of Friends.” The National Guardian also published a three-paragraph obit. Dave took a leap of faith by sending a copy of his book, A Life of the Party, for possible review in People’s World.
Amy Schechter, one of three children, came from distinguished parentage. She was born in England to a Jewish family that had immigrated there from Moldavia (now independent Moldova). Her father Solomon Schechter (1847-1915) had been teaching rabbinics at Cambridge University when he was recruited to come to New York to head up the Jewish Theological Seminary, the preeminent institution for preparing Conservative rabbis. After he died unexpectedly, the Conservative movement named its network of Jewish day schools after him, and these still exist. Amy’s brother Frank became a corporate lawyer, and her sister Ruth married a South African Jew and moved away. Later that couple committed itself to the anti-apartheid movement, and Ruth admitted to Amy, on a rare occasion when they met again later in life, that she had also become a Communist.
Early experiences, on board the steamship carrying the family over to America, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911 (for some reason Dave omits “Shirt” from the name), and dealings with the Socialists, primed her for a life of activism. When she found the Communists, she found a lifelong political home, and she gradually rose from the ranks into positions of vital leadership. She joined the Kuzbas Colony of Americans in the new Soviet state way off in southwest Siberia, near the city of Shcheglovsk, in an attempt to introduce scientific American industrial practices to help build the Soviet economy. There she met Harry Kweit, who would become her sometimes romantic partner for the next several years.
They settled briefly in Chicago in 1925, where Amy taught labor history at the Chicago Workers School, and helped start a Party bookstore. Back in New York, she started writing for The Daily Worker and threw herself into the Passaic, N.J., textile workers’ movement. That led to support for the miners of central Pennsylvania, and in surely the most dramatic chapter of her life, to the Party-founded Workers International Relief efforts to keep food on the tables of textile workers in a prolonged 1929 strike in Gastonia, N.C.
Dave devotes several chapters to Gastonia, basing his riveting story on what contemporary journalism and historians recorded, interpolating a necessarily fictionalized Amy into the action. The story of Ella May Wiggins, a mill worker and song writer who was gunned down at the age of 28, is told effectively. In a raid of sheriffs and vigilantes on the headquarters of the relief project, guns were fired, and Police Chief Orville Frank Aderholt was killed. The city’s mill owners, the bought press and the civic establishment all conspired to accuse the union workers of murder, and Amy was rounded up as an accomplice. A dramatic trial ensued which captured the attention of the national press, and for a time the name of Amy Schechter was well known to millions of readers. Only the occasional visit by a Party representative, such as Si Gerson or Juliet Poyntz, national secretary of the International Labor Defense (ILD), comforted her in jail. Her brother Frank unexpectedly paid her a visit to confer with her lawyers during the trial. Dave has them conversing:
“I think it is good that you are here, Frank. You can see and hear firsthand how mill owners treat their workers, how they are abused.”
“Amy, I do legal work for a company associated with another mill, and I do not want to quarrel with you about the issues of mill owners and workers.”
It was a frosty sibling relationship at best.
Though we cannot enter Amy’s mind, we can reasonably surmise much about this unusual young woman from a religious home who runs away, following her heart, to devote herself to a fringe movement that rejected capitalism, racism, and oligarchy. In later life, she continued her work with the Party through World War II, did not falter before the terror of McCarthyism, and was inclined to slide past the 1956 revelations of Stalin’s crimes and still support the socialist ideal. Through thick and thin, she would never leave the Communist Party. Perhaps she was somewhat depressive, perhaps unfulfilled in her personal life, perhaps she would have felt unmoored anywhere else, but she held her political work on the loftiest plane and sacrificed a great deal for her beloved working class.
Inspired by this fictionalized account, who knows? Some scholar might want to gather her writings into a book and recover her life and work from oblivion.
In A Life of the Party, Dave bases his narrative on the meticulously researched historical record—occasionally with too much detail, indicating that he might have lifted his eyes from the documentation more often to ask if the reader truly needed to know everything he learned (Amy’s Party card numbers, or all the addresses where she lived even for a few months, for example). But overall, in the absence of more intimate knowledge of his great-aunt, he creates believable dialogue and situations that ring true to life. In some ways—and I don’t say this pejoratively—it reads like a biography written for the young adult reader, but not off-putting to a more mature reader either. Both these demographics should get hold of this book and read it! It’s biography packed with the exciting Sturm und Drang of its pivotal time.
Dave makes a few missteps in his otherwise fluid, accessible writing. Apart from the odd typo, one flaw, I cannot refrain from pointing out, is his reference, several times, to “Shabbat,” the Jewish Sabbath, which is the modern Sephardic Israeli pronunciation that the Schechter family, nor any of the Jews Amy knew, certainly would not have used. They would have said “Shabbes.”
Dave Schechter
A Life of the Party
Fulton Books, 2024, 212 pp.
Paperback edition ISBN: 979-8-88982-244-8
Kindle edition ISBN: 979-8-88982-245-5
Ordering information here.
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