Sophie Shaver

From War over Lemuria: Richard Shaver, Ray Palmer and the Strangest Chapter of 1940s Science Fiction, by Richard Toronto

Sophie was of Russian-Jewish descent, born a subject of the czar in Mirgorod, a town in Russian Ukraine, on May 2, 1903. Her father was Benjamin Gurvitch, a coppersmith. The Gurvitches fled Russia when the czar’s reign of terror against the Jews became deadly pogroms. Ben Gurvitch knew enough to get out while the getting was good, and immigrated to the United States in 1904.

Once established in America, he sent for his wife Anna Mintz and their daughter Sophie. Anna purchased two steerage tickets on a steamship bound for America in 1905. They settled in Detroit, where Ben opened a hardware store, Star Hardware and Paints. They became naturalized citizens in 1911, and cheered the Communist takeover that brought a bloody end to Czarist Russia. Though they were now American citizens, Gurvitch family politics were rooted in the Russian Revolution.

Ben and Anna became first generation Communist Party members, and when Sophie was old enough, she joined the Young Communist League. This was not unusual in the teens and 20s, long before World War II and the Cold War. Many young American artists identified with worker rights and socialist ideals, and as the Depression deepened, it nourished the Communist credo.

Working Americans generally loathed the back room deals of Wall Street and the banks. The Gurvitches were proud of their Red heritage, according to Shaver’s daughter Evelyn Ann:

“Mother belonged to the John Reed Club… Right up until, and during, the Second World War, my Aunt Evelyn had people staying over that the U.S. Government was interested in. I think they were Communists. Aunt Evelyn complained bitterly that she had newly carpeted the apartment and [the Communists] put out their cigarettes on the floor. At that point, she dropped them. My grandmother was a Communist until Russia invaded, at which point she dropped them too. I understand that in the 1920s they had guests from Russia that were studying here.” [4]

Between 1931 and 1932, Sophie was living with her family above Star Hardware and Paints at 8715 East Forest Avenue. The entire block where the hardware store stood is gone now, according to Evelyn Ann. It fell victim to Detroit urban renewal, she said.

Ben saw to it that his children were well-educated. He sent them to the best schools he could afford. Sophie attended art school for a career as a commercial artist. Her younger sister Evelyn became a concert pianist and earned a living as a piano instructor. Sophie grew up as a free thinker, a feminist, and suffragette, and for a time lived in a commune called The Carriage House, with like-minded socialists and Bohemian artists. Her parents occasionally took the streetcar to visit her there, said Evelyn Ann. “It was a very different life than what they were accustomed,” she said.