Finding Ruby
Richard Rothman
Whitefox Publishing Ltd. (2024)
ISBN: 978-1916797628
Reviewed by Elizabeth Upshur for Reader Views (2025)
“Finding Ruby: The Bright and Dark Sides of a Family’s Fervent Idealism” by Richard Rothman is a carefully meditated and introspective biography of the author’s biological grandfather Rubin “Ruby” Schechter who volunteered to fight in Spain against fascism. The story is a complex one spanning Communist Party manuals, government documents, and family interviews in an attempt to recreate and interrogate the man behind the family myth.
What I appreciate about this collection is how Rothman seeks to balance these primary documents with his own memory, his own queries on human behavior, and the understandable bittersweet reckoning of what is lost to time when we seek to go back and recapture our ancestors in the zenith of their own youth.
Richard Rothman, with his background in law and skills as an interviewer, goes about confronting family lore, inter party factions, and research with aplomb. He succeeded to arrive at this snapshot of Ruby and the men and women closest to him, such as Ruby’s wife and fellow activist Rose, and his comrade Harry Nobel.
For some readers, the Communist Party might be just a mention heard here and there in a Hollywood biography, sensationalized in the recent television show The Americans, or in the recent biopic Oppenheimer. However, Rothman’s family saga traces back several decades to a Communist Party whose ideas of equality, reform, and racial rights would not be out of line with the basic human rights Gen Z champions. Rothman’s judgment on his family heroes who fought against fascism and lent their skills to champion the Scottsboro Boys offers both compassion and criticism of the party that they knew and the party that outlived them. It became something they would likely have become disillusioned by in the next few decades.
Richard Rothman attempts to make meaning out of a tragically short life, hunting for clues that would perfectly illuminate why a man would leave behind a wife and young daughter to fight what seems ostensibly to be another man’s war. In doing so, the audience is taken on a journey to see these young men and women of the Communist Party as idealistic and dedicated, but at the cost of their own artistic ambitions, family, and even their lives. Rothman excels at parsing through family lore and cross-examining his growing body of evidence, demonstrating excellent storytelling as the narrative arc is pieced into a more cohesive whole.
Richard Rothman provides a frank look at the frenzy, fight, and fallout that can create ripple effects in a family. “Finding Ruby” is well researched, with several quotations from handwritten letters, black and white photographs, and the author’s stylistically verbose vocabulary to help set the scene. A good read for fellow travelers, family historians, and those interested in humanizing the Spanish Civil War from an American lens.