Writing a Family History: Challenges and Surprises
By Richard Rothman • • 23 min read
I recently published ‘Finding Ruby’, a book about the bright and dark sides of my family’s history as they participated in some of the epic events of the twentieth century. When I first set out to explore and tell this story I was focused only on the bright side; I didn’t know there was a dark one. It was only after I had plowed my way through a trove of personal documents that had been missing for fifty years and began researching the history surrounding the events in which my family took part—including the Spanish Civil War and their long involvement in the US Communist Party—that the dark side of my forebears’ passionate idealism reared its head, and, ultimately, assumed its place as a major part of the book.
I’ll try here to chronicle the stages in which my work progressed and the challenges I encountered along the way as the book evolved into a collage of biography, history, and memoir. I’ve been asked about this process by various readers, and I’m hoping my experience may be of some benefit to other would-be authors embarking on a similar kind of journey.
At the Beginning
It was in 2018 that I set out to discover the force that had been so powerful as to impel my successive maternal grandfathers, Rubin (“Ruby”) Schechter and Harry Nobel, to volunteer to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, leaving their homes in New York City in March of 1937 to fight in the Spanish Civil War against Generalissimo Francisco Franco and his fascist allies, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, who were seeking to overthrow Spain’s democratically elected government. Prior to deciding to risk their lives in the quest to stem the growing tide of fascism, neither Ruby nor Harry had any connection with Spain, and President Franklin Roosevelt had prohibited Americans from participating in the foreign civil war. Ruby, who left behind a wife and five-year-old daughter (my mother), was killed in Spain. Harry, who I’d understood to have been Ruby’s best friend, survived the war and later married Ruby’s widow, my Grandma Rose. He was the grandfather I knew and loved.
The material I relied on to write ‘Finding Ruby’ came to me at first serendipitously and then in bits and pieces over a period of six years. The motivation to write a story about my grandfathers—and eventually to make that story into a book—also came to me in fits and starts. I had always been proud that two of my grandfathers had volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War as part of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which seemed to impress people who’d heard of it. Rather remarkably, although I was a history major in college, I’d never bothered to read about the war and knew only that it was remembered for the Western governments’ appeasement of Adolf Hitler in Spain, which gave him what amounted to a green light to invade Czechoslovakia and then the rest of Europe beginning in 1939.
I had a vague memory of my mother telling me that Ruby had been shot in the hand; that it had been a fluke because the Spanish Civil War wasn’t much of a war; and that Ruby had somehow died from the wound—presumably due to an infection. Although I can’t be sure when this brief discussion took place, my guess is that it occurred in the 1970s, when I found a briefcase stuffed with my grandfather’s papers in the basement closet of my parents’ Connecticut home. I briefly perused some of the papers, but the only one that captured my attention at the time was a poem—the most obscene piece of writing I’d ever read—pasted into a notebook of poems contained in the briefcase. I didn’t bother to read any of the many handwritten letters contained in the briefcase, and even after this brush with the life of the grandfather I’d never met, I made no effort to learn anything about the Spanish Civil War. As a young man I spent many hours talking with Harry about history and politics, but, inexplicably, I never asked him anything about his own experience: why he’d volunteered to fight in Spain, what the experience had been like, or what the nature of his relationship with Ruby had actually been. Thus, until 2018, I knew virtually nothing about Ruby, after whom I’m named, other than that he was bald and that he was a communist.
A Glimpse of Reality
The first crack in my dome of ignorance came in 2018, when a cousin recommended that I read a book written by Adam Hochschild entitled ‘Spain in our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939.’ The book opened my eyes to the fact that the Spanish Civil War was a bloody conflict in which the casualties among the approximately 3,000 Americans in the Lincoln Brigade were massive. Ruby’s getting shot was anything but a fluke. As Hochschild chronicled, the Lincoln Brigade vets had had to hike over the freezing Pyrenees at night just to get to Spain, where they were relegated to using antiquated Russian weapons, and lacked trained leaders and even such basic tools as shovels, forcing them to dig trenches with their helmets as the Nazis bombed them from above and mowed them down with the latest artillery and machine guns. The war in Spain had been a testing ground for the weapons and soldiers the Nazis would shortly unleash in WWII. Hochschild’s book also pointed me to the online archives of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which contained a brief profile of each member of the Brigade, including Ruby and Harry.
Hochschild’s book ignited the burning question that launched me on a twisted path of unlikely discoveries that would culminate with the publication of ‘Finding Ruby’ six years later. Namely: what force was so powerful as to drive my grandfathers to abandon their families and their own comfortable lives in New York City to risk everything in a foreign civil war in defiance of their own government? Nevertheless, I had no intention of writing a book at that point.
The First Signs of Ruby
The second event to unlock key pieces of the puzzle occurred during the summer of 2018, when I happened to mention to my cousin Carl that I’d been reading about the Spanish Civil War and trying to imagine the horrors that Ruby and Harry had experienced. Carl’s deceased mother had been Ruby’s sister, and Carl told me that somewhere in her papers (which he had inherited) there was a letter that Ruby had written to his wife, Rose, from Spain. He said he’d look for it.
Carl called a few days later and said he’d found not one but two of Ruby’s letters, both written after he’d been wounded, and a short biography of Ruby that had been published a few months after he died in August 1937. The letters were extraordinary. Having been shot in the right arm (not the hand, as my mother had reported), Ruby wrote both multi-page letters with his left hand. He assured Rose in the first letter that she had nothing to worry about because “the bullet went clean through the upper fleshy portion of the arm and did not touch the bone, which means quick healing and I ought to be back with the battalion within 15 days.”
Ruby’s next letter, written three weeks later, was less optimistic, as Ruby reported that “wounds are tricky things.” Still writing with his opposite hand, Ruby proceeded to recount exactly how he’d come to be wounded—all on account of a donkey—and, but for the fact that he soon died of the wound, and even despite that, I found the letter [1] hilarious. Ruby’s letters and his short biography gave me a glimpse of my grandfather’s personality, including the passionate idealism and altruism that had led him to Spain and ultimately to his death. As the biography recounted:
[H]e sensed the dangers of Fascism and … thought of the danger and ensuing results should Hitler and Mussolini ever be able to convince the world to adopt Fascism as a form of government. Rubin’s very sensitive soul was unable to understand why others did not grasp the significance of the war.
After reading Hochschild’s book and lucking into Ruby’s letters and biography I was eager to track down the last known piece of the puzzle: the black briefcase containing Ruby’s papers that I’d briefly scanned in my parents’ house fifty years earlier. But the briefcase had vanished. My mother swore she didn’t have it, and we assumed the briefcase had been thrown out when my parents sold their house in Connecticut decades earlier. I went on to write about twenty pages of reflections about my grandfathers, but soon found myself at a dead end, still with no thought of writing a book. And that’s where things sat for close to three years until several months after my mother died at the end of 2020. As my wife, Melissa, neared the end of her thankless task of cleaning out my mother’s apartment, she found the briefcase buried in the back of the top shelf of a closet. The project took off from there and proceeded in waves, with new challenges at every stage, as I gradually admitted to myself and then others that I was writing a book.
Digging Into the Family Documents
The first challenge I faced was making sense of the mass of paper in the briefcase. There were three notebooks, two of which contained Ruby’s handwritten poems; scores of letters in no discernable order, most handwritten on brown, flaky, fragile paper—including several that appeared to have been written in Hebrew; and a bunch of old newspaper articles. After sizing up the mess, I procrastinated for six months before reopening the briefcase and tentatively deciding to wade into the documents.
When I finally got to work, I began by trying to make sense of the two notebooks of poetry—searching for clues as to Ruby’s personality and the force that impelled him to risk his life to fight in a foreign civil war. I also perused the third notebook—a small looseleaf binder—containing what appeared to be Ruby’s notes relating to his work as a Communist Party leader. Most of the notes made no sense to me at that point.
I turned next to the mass of letters in the briefcase, which were often hard to decipher. Most were written by Ruby himself, though some were written to him and returned after he died with the word “MORT” scrawled on the envelopes; some were written by others about Ruby. In order to get my arms around the project, I selected the letters that seemed most interesting, put them in chronological order, and, because they were fragile, put them in plastic sheaths so I could work with them. I took detailed notes on what struck me as the important passages of the letters I’d selected.
The picture that came into view as I tried to reconstruct the grandfather I’d never met using the fragments in the briefcase was gratifying. Ruby emerged from the morass of paper as an ebullient optimist; a passionate idealist fully committed to battling not only fascism abroad but racism in this country; a brave soldier foolishly confident of victory in Spain, who other soldiers looked up to; a gifted writer with an impressive sense of humor; an exacting, self-critical leader; and, not least important, a hopeless romantic who was deeply in love with Rose, who, rather than being an abandoned wife appeared to have been a full partner in Ruby’s Spanish escapade. When I’d finished working through all the documents I could read, there was no dark side to my grandfather’s passionate idealism that I acknowledged, even though it was evident in the letters I’d read that my mother had been largely abandoned when Ruby went to Spain and Rose was consumed by her own work for the Communist Party. The little I’d read about the Communist Party at that point had revealed that the communists were in the forefront of the opposition to fascism, racism, and poverty, and that many intelligent young people were flocking to the party in the 1930s. I thought to myself, and wrote, that had I been alive then I would have joined them.
Having read and digested all the English language documents contained in the briefcase, I paid to get translations of the handful of documents that I’d thought had been written in Hebrew on the off chance that they contained something important. It turned out they were actually in Yiddish. What I came to view as the “Yiddish Surprise” revealed a fiery, disconcerting side of Ruby as a radical communist committed to dismantling capitalism, which had not been in evidence in his romantic letters to Rose or in those written by others championing his commitment to the preservation of democracy.
The Historical Research
The next phase of my work then began in earnest as I dug into the historical research that put what I’d read about Ruby into context, and also gave me a new understanding of Harry and Rose and the choices they must have been faced with as they lived on long after Ruby’s death. Most notably, the darker side of my family’s passionate idealism came into view.
I began what proved to be a long, surprising trail of research with Fraser Ottanelli’s ‘The Communist Party of the United States: From the Depression to World War II.’ Ottanelli’s book shed a new light on the movement to which Ruby, Rose, and Harry had been committed. It revealed that the Communist Party of the United States had at all times been controlled by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. It chronicled that membership in the Party was a full-time commitment that left little time for such activities as raising children, which helped explain why my five-year-old mother had been placed in a boarding home run by anarchists when Ruby went to Spain. And, perhaps most striking, it provided the first semblance of an answer to the question I’d been chasing since 2018. Ottanelli’s book revealed that in the fall of 1936, the Soviet-controlled Communist Party summoned communists around the world to join the fight against fascism in Spain, and that the Party then ran and financed the recruitment process. Even though I found this information depressing, at that stage of my research I was still able to comfort myself with the notion that although controlled by the Soviets, the US Communist Party was pursuing causes I considered very worthwhile on a human level.
The biggest surprise in Ottanelli’s book came when I got to the introductory quote at the beginning of Chapter 5, which startled me because it was attributed to a man named George Charney. I recognized the name because one of Ruby’s letters to Rose had been sent to her c/o George Charney, who had also written one of the letters in the briefcase to Ruby. Also, a poem in one of Ruby’s notebooks had been entitled “Sonnet to George.” So it was apparent that Charney had been a close friend of Ruby’s. A footnote to the introductory quote revealed that Charney had written a book entitled ‘A Long Journey.’ It was out of print, but I was able to get a used copy on eBay.
Charney’s book was an autobiography that contained moving passages about Ruby and Rose which gave me new insight into both of them and brought me to tears. It disclosed that Ruby and Rose had introduced him to communism, and then it went on to track Charney’s life in the decades after Ruby’s death as he rose in the ranks to become one of the senior leaders of the US Communist Party. Charney remained in the fold until after the Party imploded in 1956, when Nikita Khruschev exposed Stalin to have been a mass murderer and the Soviet utopia to have been a fraudulent mirage. Charney’s autobiography was a searing, self-critical account that sought to make sense of how he and so many other intelligent people (like Harry and Rose) had been blind to reality for two decades as they sacrificed their lives to the Stalin-dominated Communist Party. As I read Charney’s book he became a stand-in for Ruby as I sought to imagine what my grandfather would have done had he survived and returned from Spain. At the same time, Charney’s frank portrayal of his own deluded beliefs and the choices he’d made over the decades following the Spanish Civil War gave me new insight into Harry and Rose, the grandparents I had grown up knowing and admiring—especially for their great minds. After digesting Charney’s thoughtful self-criticism, I could no longer avoid confronting what I came to view as the dark side of my family’s passionate idealism.
The unlikely discoveries continued to flow over the transom as I pursued dubious leads and delved deeper into researching the US Communist Party to which Harry and Rose had dedicated their lives, and with which my parents and other relatives had at the very least flirted. Among the most surprising and impactful of those discoveries was the Manual of the US Communist Party, which I stumbled upon on the internet. Published in 1935, I’d recalled seeing no reference to it in any of the books I’d read in the course of my research. The Manual was like an army field manual that laid out, in excruciating detail, the radical mission of the Communist Party to bring about “the establishment of a Soviet Socialist Republic in the United States.” The Manual provided answers to questions I’d had about Ruby’s role in the Communist Party and explanations for notes I’d been unable to understand in his Communist Party leader’s notebook. The Manual also shed light on my mother’s bizarre upbringing and why Harry, a brilliant scholar, had spent his long career on a shop floor as a furrier sewing together rabbit fur pelts. It was all because of the Party. And as my feelings about the Party morphed from respect to anger, I was left wondering again about myself—and what I would have done had I lived in that era.
The People
As my project expanded and I delved further into my research, several additional people surfaced who would have an important impact on the book. One of them, my cousin Donald, had videotaped interviews of Ruby’s widow, my Grandma Rose, and her two sisters forty years earlier, back in 1980. Although I’d been given copies of these tapes years before, I hadn’t bothered to watch them. Donald had been interested in learning about our family’s history but found Rose’s interview to be a waste of time, as she mostly pontificated about art and herself. For my purposes, however, the video proved to be a goldmine. It brought Rose back to life, as she mused winsomely about how she must have been “senile” to disbelieve and mock her renowned art professor years earlier when he had tried to warn her that she was crazy to give up painting in order to work for the Communist Party given that Stalin was murdering people in the Soviet Union. Moreover, Rose dropped a bomb when, contrary to my understanding that Ruby had died of natural causes, she told Donald that Ruby had been murdered by Trotskyites while on the operating table.
New leads, and people, kept entering the picture, and changing my understanding and feelings about what I was writing, even as the book was going to print. One of the last was perhaps the most stunning. Dale Graden, a college friend I had not seen since we graduated in Boston almost fifty years earlier is a history professor who had taught courses on the Spanish Civil War at the University of Idaho. After happening upon and reading one of my blog posts that referenced my grandfathers and the Lincoln Brigade, Dale began referring me to important sources of which I’d been unaware. He also introduced me to Sebastiaan Faber, a professor of Hispanic Studies who was also Chair of the Board of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives. That introduction proved invaluable.
When I thought I had finished writing the book and was merely cite checking the final page proofs, I noticed that there was a source cited in the Lincoln Brigade Archives’ profile of Ruby that I had never bothered to look into because it consisted of an acronym that was unintelligible to me. I took the liberty of emailing Professor Faber to ask if he could shed light on the acronym. He, in turn, referred me to Chris Brooks, who Faber referred to as the archivist for the Lincoln Brigade Archives. Brooks generously went to work, uncovering documents buried in the Archives that revealed that some of what I’d written about Ruby’s death was wrong. Even more importantly, one document he found transformed my understanding of Harry. Until receiving the information from Brooks I’d been unable to picture Harry, who I had known to be a brilliant intellectual, as a soldier who’d fought in three of the bloodiest battles of the Spanish Civil War, the last of which entailed brutal hand-to-hand street fighting with bayonets. A document Brooks unearthed—originally from the Soviet archives—was an evaluation of Harry, which recorded that he’d been a brave soldier who thrived under the stress of intense battlefield conditions. With apologies, I told my team leader at Whitefox that despite the late date, I needed to make changes to the page proofs to reflect what I’d belatedly learned.
The Challenge in Writing a Family History
The biggest challenge I experienced writing ‘Finding Ruby’ stemmed from the fundamental question: Who was the audience for the book? Was this going to be a book for friends and family, or was I aiming to write a book that could satisfy a broader audience of people who didn’t know me? I was doubtful that my book would have significant commercial appeal because all the big-selling books in the personal memoir camp that I was aware of seemed to have been written by famous people (e.g., Anthony Fauci) or by people who had extraordinary stories to tell (e.g., Tara Westover’s ‘Educated’). My book was neither, and, accordingly, I had no illusions of reaping huge profits from my writing labors. Rather, once I acknowledged that I was actually going to devote the time and energy that would be required to write a book, I decided pretty quickly that my goal was to just write what I, and hopefully others, would conclude was a “good” book. And that led quickly to the fundamental question—impossible for me to answer on my own: what in my family’s story, and the documents I had to tell it with, would be of interest to those who didn’t know or care about me?
I was deeply enamored with the material in Ruby’s briefcase. I was intrigued by his poetry, and I loved his letters—all of them. The first drafts of the book essentially chronicled his poems, twenty-three of them, and marched chronologically through even more of his letters. I worked hard to polish draft after draft, and thought the product was good. It took a few trusted friends, and then an editor, to convince me otherwise.
One of the lessons I learned while writing the book, or perhaps, more accurately, re-learned in spades, is that getting honest feedback from friends is difficult and tricky. Over the course of the four years that I worked intensively on Ruby I had several trusted friends, as well as Melissa, read various drafts. Not surprisingly, what I found was that friends and loved ones want to give you positive feedback and make you feel good about your work. No matter how much you stress that you want their “candid” feedback, and that your feelings won’t be hurt if they criticize your writing, they won’t believe you—and for good reason: your feelings probably will be hurt. Accordingly, while I found the praise I was getting gratifying, I tried to take it with a huge grain of salt, probing for the tiniest grains of constructive criticism. And where my readers were forthcoming, I listened—in almost every case accepting their advice and making recommended changes, some very substantial.
Perhaps the most important advice I received was to slash the number of poems—which went from twenty-three to excerpts of five in the published book. I also said goodbye to numerous of my beloved letters. The message I took away was that I should use only the best letters that were needed to tell the story, so that the book would not just be what amounted to a digest of the letters. With the encouragement of the excellent structural editor engaged by Whitefox, this also prompted a reorganization of a major part of the book. Perhaps most drastic, upon the advice of one astute friend who read a near final version of the book, then in page proofs, I deleted the last section of the book, which I had worked tirelessly on for weeks. (I should note that Melissa had disliked that section all along). And looking back, I’m glad I cut it. In fact, to the extent that my book is any good, it is in no small part because I listened carefully to the constructive criticism I was able to encourage and ferret out from amidst the praise.
The bottom line is that, particularly with respect to the jugular issue of determining what will be of interest to those beyond your own orbit, you need to find and encourage truthtellers; you need to listen to them carefully, especially between the lines; and you need to be prepared to kill some of the babies you’ve worked hard on and have come to love.
Researching and writing this type of history is akin to serving as an amateur sleuth, with the hardly objective author constantly sniffing out and running down leads and clues—most of which won’t pan out but a few of which will be gems. Trying to reconstruct what long-deceased people were thinking and feeling a century ago—and why they acted as they did—based on surviving fragments of the kind contained in Ruby’s briefcase is a precarious enterprise. But that’s the nature of the beast. One thing that struck me was how close I’d come to missing things that became critically important. Another was how my understanding and feelings about my forebears’ motivations and actions changed with each unlikely discovery I stumbled upon. As I wrote in the Reflections section towards the end of my book, it was like looking at my grandparents’ lives through a constantly rotating kaleidoscope. I marveled at how much my understanding and feelings, and thus the book, were the product of chance conversations and unlikely discoveries. And I shuddered to think about how many potentially game-changing facts I’d probably overlooked or failed to uncover. A cautionary reminder of how subjective what purports to be historical “nonfiction” can be, particularly in the hands of an amateur like me. Be that as it may, the journey was well worthwhile.
Interested in ‘Finding Ruby’ by Richard Rothman? Get your copy here.
[1] This type written version of the letter Ruby had handwritten with his opposite hand was probably typed by his widow, Rose.
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