Marc Raboy’s new book, Looking for Alicia, chronicles his fascination with the life and death of a woman with whom he shared not just a last name but the beginnings of a life trajectory. Both he and his subject, Alicia Raboy, were young radicals in the urban West in the mid-twentieth century, both came from middle-class families, both were the descendants of recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, and both turned to journalism as a means to express and practice their radical politics. Yet where the author’s life led him to a professorship at McGill University in Quebec, the life of the book’s namesake ended in violence and torture, as she was murdered by police and paramilitaries in a sleepy provincial capital of Argentina in the 1970s.

Raboy’s curiosity and affinity for this woman, his impression that she was a kindred spirit and fellow traveler, whether or not they were relatives, runs through the book. His shock and fellow feeling for this person he never knew but shared so much with became a passion for understanding her life and her politics. This is a book for leftists who have read of past revolutionaries and felt that strange combination of solidarity and shame that their lives were so different.

A reader will feel Raboy’s earnest curiosity and care for the subject of his book, though he never knew her and came upon the idea of writing about her by chance. Raboy learned of her only after an incidental internet search for connections between his relatively unusual last name and Argentina in preparation for a postretirement vacation. He found stories of the death of Alicia Raboy, a desaparecida (disappeared person) from the time of the most recent Argentine military dictatorship, killed alongside her romantic partner for their involvement with the Montoneros, the largest and most active of the guerrilla organizations combating the military government that took control of Argentina in 1976.