Cementing family legacies

In fall 1982, Patricia Schechter ’86, who was then an eager first-year student at Mount Holyoke College, was enthralled with world history and excited to deepen her knowledge of the subject. At Orientation, she met Daniel Czitrom, who was then a second-year assistant professor of history at the College.

Over the next four years, they crossed paths frequently. Schechter was a student who wanted to make sense of American history, a subject that hadn’t often been a topic of conversation in her Spanish immigrant family.

“I came to the College confused about what America was. I didn’t know anything, but I was so excited to learn everything,” Schechter said. “I wanted to uncover these hidden histories about this country that my parents knew very little about.”

Czitrom was her professor. His job was to break down nineteenth- and twentieth-century American history. As a historian, he tried to help his students understand more than just the big moments that ultimately become the focus of Hollywood films. He sought to make history more palatable and relatable to his students and to show them they could find their own ways to make sense of the past and how it affects them, their grandparents and even ancestors they’d only heard of through family lore.

After Schechter graduated from Mount Holyoke, she and Czitrom fell out of touch until a cold call in 2022 brought them back together. By then, Schechter had become a history professor at Portland State University in Oregon and had just published “El Terrible: Life and Labor in Pueblonuevo, 1887-1939,” a study of the Spanish mining town in Andalusia where her maternal grandmother had lived. Czitrom was in his forty-first and final year at the College before his retirement. He had just written a manuscript about his family’s experiences during the same time period titled “Kitchen Table History: Wrestling With My Family’s Radical Past.” That book is forthcoming.

What was originally a call to get the word out about Schechter’s book ignited a friendship between two passionate historians. She and Czitrom began meeting on Zoom and unraveling their family histories. They were fascinated by the similarities and differences that had driven each of them to research, understand and share a portion of their relatives’ stories.

After months of Zoom calls, Schechter and Czitrom decided to create a podcast about their family histories.

“Neither one of us had ever done a podcast interview before, nor were we avid podcast listeners,” Schechter said. “We were both at sea trying to understand how to get our books out into the world. It was as if it was meant to happen. Recording these episodes didn’t feel forced at all, even though we hadn’t been in touch for decades.”

The podcast, called “Family Secrets of the Spanish Civil War,” was released in October 2024. Each of its six episodes is about an hour long. The historians devote much of their time during the episodes to humanizing their ancestors and attempting to describe their family members’ possible frames of mind amid war.

Each episode focuses on an aspect of their relatives’ stories — love, loss, war, secrets. The final episode brings in a guest, Michael Ugarte, professor emeritus of Spanish at the University of Missouri, who shares his own family secrets and his experiences as a Spanish immigrant.

Recounting stories from almost a century earlier, the hosts give listeners a peek into the family dynamics of past decades.

Schechter describes her family as assimilators. “They were refugees in the suburbs, not empowered in any community that would help them,” she said. “Still, I didn’t want their stories to be lost.”

Czitrom’s motivation for writing his book was similar, but as he recounts his relatives’ stories in each episode, it becomes clear that his and Schechter’s family members embraced two different ideologies.

Czitrom describes himself as a red diaper baby — meaning he was raised by parents and relatives who had long been active in the Communist Party. “My parents never hid their politics or who they were. There is a long history of radicals in my family,” he said. “And the Spanish Civil War was a critical event for them. When my [teaching] career was ending, it felt like a good time to dig into my family history.”

When Schechter set out to write her book, she was nervous about what she might learn of her family’s involvement in fascist movements during the Spanish Civil War. Nevertheless, she was determined to pay homage to her late mother, who had left everything and everyone she had known — including her own mother — in an attempt to escape the war in Spain by heading for America. While Schechter found excellent historical records, some completely untouched until she read them, the story she ultimately told was a prequel to her family’s experiences. It helped her better understand her mother’s decision to flee from Spain.

Czitrom’s book is an account of the stories he had often heard his relatives tell at the dinner table when he was growing up. He wanted to get beyond what they had shared over meals to add context to the decisions his family had made.

Czitrom, who is now Professor Emeritus of History on the Ford Foundation, used the Freedom of Information Act to access old FBI files and discovered his dad had been followed for decades. Czitrom traveled to parts of Spain and Ukraine to visit the places where his family members had lived and died and even found a book that included an eyewitness account of his uncle’s death — a story he’d heard of around the kitchen table but had been warned not to ask about.

“There is so much serendipity that is involved in writing history,” Czitrom said of what he uncovered while researching his memoir. “You’re digging around, and then you find something. History is messy. We were writing about the Spanish Civil War, which was largely motivated by ideology, but there were human lives behind [the] ideology. That’s the story I was trying to tell.”

Both his and Schechter’s books and their podcast leave readers and listeners with a lesson Czitrom spent his entire career trying to instill in his students — that history is about trying to create understanding, not about placing blame. He wrote his book to better understand his family’s stories and how history records those same moments. “History is not just about famous and powerful people,” Czitrom said in the first episode of the podcast. “I wanted to paint my family as full human beings, flaws and all.”

He brought this point of view to his classroom as well, especially toward the end of his time at Mount Holyoke, when he taught a research seminar that encouraged students to view history through the lens of the people who had raised them. The class, Kitchen Table Histories, showed students that even during historic moments, their families still had to find a way to survive day to day.

That’s the lesson both authors hope to impress on readers and listeners. For Schechter and Czitrom, history is just as much about the big moments that shift culture as it is about the estranged uncle who witnessed them all from the sidelines of war.

“Historians are people engaged in broken conversations about a series of broken conversations. We have to get comfortable with the way the past comes to us in pieces,” Schechter said. “The magic in the podcast is making the human connection across time, generation, countries. The most humanizing thing we can do is tell our stories.”