The Volunteer vol. 37 no. 4 (December 2020)

Vol. XXXVII, No.4

December 2020

FOUNDED IN 1937 BY THE VOLUNTEERS OF THE LINCOLN BRIGADE. PUBLISHED BY THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN BRIGADE ARCHIVES (ALBA) Robin Kelley

Robin D.G. Kelley on Fascism Then and Now

Isabel Allende on Immigration p7 Franco Family Loses Manor p11 Helen Graham on Historians’ Blind Spots p13

Founded by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade 239 W. 14th Street, Suite 2 New York, NY 10011 (212) 674-5398 www.alba-valb.org Editor Print Edition Peter N. Carroll Editor Online Edition www.albavolunteer.org Sebastiaan Faber Associate Editor Aaron B. Retish Book Review Editor Joshua Goode Graphic Design www.eyestormx.com Editorial Assistance Phil Kavanaugh Manuscripts, inquiries, and letters to the editor may be sent by email to info@alba-valb.org The editors reserve the right to modify texts for length and style.

Books for review may be sent to Joshua Goode Claremont Graduate University Blaisdell House, #5, 143 East 10th Street Claremont, CA 91711

www.albavolunteer.org The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) is an educational non-profit dedicated to promoting social activism and the defense of human rights. ALBA’s work is inspired by the American volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Drawing on the ALBA collections in New York University’s Tamiment Library, and working to expand such collections, ALBA works to preserve the legacy of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade as an inspiration for present and future generations.

IN THIS ISSUE p 3 p 3 p 3 p 4 p 7 p 9 p 11 p 13 p 15 p 18 p 20 p 21 p 23

ALBA News New at the Tamiment Spain’s New Memory Law Robin D.G. Kelley Isabel Allende Watt Awards Recovering Franco’s Real Estate Helen Graham on Historians The Lini Bunjes Story Hollywood & the Republican Cause Book Review Martha Graham Contributions

2 THE VOLUNTEER December 2020

Dear Friends, They did not pass.

As this issue goes to print, we are emerging from one of most intense election seasons the United States has ever lived through, following four years that have revealed the best and the worst faces of this country. On the one hand, we saw a rabid resurgence of racism, red-baiting, and vote suppression, along with willful attempts to undermine democracy.

On the other hand, we’ve seen grassroots activists combining old-fashioned forms of protest and organizing—from letter campaigns to putting bodies in the street—with creative and innovative ways to mobilize the vote and fight racial oppression.

While the election’s outcome gives reasons for optimism, it also makes clear how much work remains to be done. Central among the many areas that require our attention and support is education—at all levels, from elementary school students to adults. No one who has paid attention in the past four years can deny that the level of disinformation and ignorance in this country has reached dangerous levels.

At ALBA, we believe we have something to contribute here. We believe that learning about the past can serve as an inspiration. Not along the lines of “patriotic education” that some have called for, but in a critical, responsible, respectful way—exemplified in this issue by the young winners of the annual Watt award (p. 11) and Helen Graham’s timely critique of her colleagues (p. 13). Focusing on political struggles from the past, we believe, helps illuminate questions that urgently concern our political present. As Robin D.G. Kelley points out in his conversation with Aaron Retish (p. 4), what we’ve seen in recent years responds to all-too-familiar patterns: “Fascists consistently claim the mantle of civilization, the restoration of Law and Order, while attacking every manifestation of genuine social democracy.”

In one way or another, all the stories in this issue invite us to reflect on the enduring legacy of antifascism, from the photographer Lini Bunjes (p. 15) and dancer Martha Graham (p. 21) to Hollywood’s support for the Spanish Republic (p. 18) and Spain’s ongoing struggle against the legacies of Francoism (pp. 3 & 11).

The elections and pandemic have not stopped us—to the contrary. ALBA’s online events—from our movie screenings and panel discussions to our celebration of the newly restored Lincoln Brigade Monument in San Francisco, with Isabel Allende and others (p.

3)—have drawn thousands of people from around the world. Following our first successful online teacher workshop, we’re organizing a second four-week session early in the new year (p. 9).

Thank you so much for your ongoing support of our work. For organizations like ALBA, the end-of-year donation cycle is crucial. In this issue, you’ll find a donation envelope— but of course you can also give online, at alba-valb.org/donate or, even better, set up a monthly donation amount.

In the words of Angelo Herndon quoted by Kelley: “Fascism won’t stop anywhere–until we stop it.” ¡No pasarán!

Sebastiaan Faber & Peter N. Carroll, editors

News from ALBA ALBA ONLINE EVENTS DRAW THOUSANDS Forced online by the ongoing pandemic, ALBA’s events have been generating strong interest from around the world.

On September 12, ALBA’s Bay Area friends organized an 85-minute celebration of the newly restored national monument to the Lincoln Brigade in San Francisco. Hosted by Richard Bermack and featuring film footage by Vicente Franco, the program included appearances by the celebrated Chilean novelist Isabel Allende (whose speech you can read in this issue), labor activist Bill Fletcher, architect Walter Hood, poet Rafael Jesús González, and musical performances by Velina Brown and Dave Rovics. Linda Lustig and Martha Jarocki, members of the original monument committee, explained how the project came about, while Susan Schwartzenberg, Catherine Powell, and Brian McWilliams recalled

WHAT’S NEW AT THE TAMIMENT

By Michael Koncewicz

In the fall of 2019, Shannon O'Neill joined the Tamiment-Wagner team and NYU Special Collections as the Curator for the Tamiment-Wagner Collections. Prior to NYU, she served as the History Librarian and Director of Archives and Special Collections at Barnard College and as an archivist at the Los Angeles Public Library and the Atlantic City Free Public Library. She holds a BA from NYU and an MLIS from UCLA. Shannon's professional and scholarly interests include community-based archiving, underrepresented voices and marginalized histories in archives, and the use of primary resource materials in education. She recently celebrated her first anniversary and Tamiment and is eager to work with ALBA on continuing to promote our collections through classes, events, and educational outreach.

Earlier this year, Tamiment and our colleagues at the Library’s Archival Collections Management department published the public finding aid for the Mosess (Moe) Fishman Papers. Researchers can view the finding aid here: http://dlib.nyu.edu/ findingaids/html/tamwag/alba_224/scopecontent.html Due to new guidance from the University regarding the reopening of buildings on campus, we are not able to schedule any in-person appointments for external researchers at this time. For those who wanted limited access to our collections, our staff has recently returned to work onsite in a staggered schedule and we are now able to provide remote reference on your behalf. In order to begin assisting you, please create an Aeon account by visiting https://aeon.library.nyu.edu/logon.

Please reply to let us know when your account is created and then a member of the Special Collections team will contact you to begin processing your inquiry. Please note that there is a substantial backlog, but our colleagues are doing their best to work through all of the requests.

the rich history of Bay Area labor activism. Luis Osuna, an immigration activist from San Diego, spoke compellingly on behalf of No More Deaths/No Más Muertes, this year’s winner of the ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism.

The video of the event can be viewed on ALBA’s website and YouTube channel.

On August 30, ALBA presented another in its online series of film screenings, featuring The Internationale, an awardwinning documentary by ALBA board member and filmmaker Peter Miller. The event included a lively panel discussion and Q&A session with the filmmaker, scholar and ALBA honorary board member Robin D.G. Kelley, and musician Holly Near, moderated by ALBA’s Peter Glazer. (To view the panel discussion, go to ALBA’s YouTube channel.)

Next up in the ALBA film series are two documentaries: Into the Fire: American Women in the Spanish Civil War, by board member Julia Newman (November 15), and, in February, Invisible Heroes: African-Americans in the Spanish Civil War. Visit ALBA’s website at alba-valb.org for more details.

Feel free to email us at tamiment.wagner@nyu.edu if you have any questions about our collections or if you would like to schedule a virtual class for the 2020-2021 academic year.

Michael Koncewicz is the Michael Nash Research Scholar/ Archivist and Ewen Center Coordinator at NYU.

SPAIN’S CABINET APPROVES PROPOSAL FOR NEW MEMORY LAW

In September, the cabinet of Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s Socialist Prime Minister, approved the draft for a new Law of Democratic Memory that seeks to go farther than existing legislation, which dates from 2007, in settling the unfinished business of the transition to democracy. The new law would provide material and symbolic reparations for victims of state violence and theft; annul judicial sentences from sham courts designed to eliminate Franco’s political dissidents; reform the history curriculum in public education; limit freedom of speech for anti-democratic ideologies; and remove or prohibit public tributes to the dictatorship. (In October, the Spanish far-right Vox and center-right Partido Popular attempted to leverage the 2007 law in order to remove a plaque in Madrid dedicated to Francisco Largo Caballero, who served as Prime Minister of the Spanish Republic during the war.)

Although details remain vague, the consequences of the law could be far-reaching. In addition to acknowledging that the state is responsible for locating and exhuming the tens of thousands of mass graves dating from the civil war and the dictatorship—a task that, until now, has been undertaken by families and volunteers—the law calls for an inventory of illicit transfers of property and wealth during the years of the Franco regime. It also seeks to issue some reparation to the thousands of Spaniards whose paid “penitence” for their political “sins” in forced-labor camps. (SF) December 2020 THE VOLUNTEER 3

Robin Kelley in March 2019

Faces of ALBA: Robin D. G. Kelley

By Aaron B. Retish

Robin D.G. Kelley is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA. The author of many books, including a biography of Thelonious Monk, he co-edited "This Ain't Ethiopia, But It'll Do": African-Americans and the Spanish Civil War (1990) and currently serves on ALBA’s Honorary Board.

The meetings I attended were robust, exciting, and sometimes contentious. And the vets wanted to see every draft I wrote.

Do you recall a letter or an individual that jumped out at you in your research on Black volunteers of the Lincoln Brigade?

How quickly in your research did you see that Black volunteers were connecting the Spanish Civil War with the struggle for racial and economic justice in the United States?

First, I should give some background as to how I came to this research in the first place. Having written my first book on the Communist Party, I was familiar with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and the basics of Spanish Civil War history. But in 1990, I was summoned by ALBA and Danny Duncan Collum, who edited the book of documents on African Americans in the Spanish Civil War, to write a lengthy introduction. So I had immediate access to the archives and, especially, the documents selected for the book.

There were many more veterans alive back then and the meet4 THE VOLUNTEER December 2020

ings I attended were robust, exciting, and sometimes contentious.

And they wanted to see every draft I wrote. So I imagined trying to write by committee, with various people chiming in—not just in terms of factual accuracy but political tone. Both Bill Susman and Marc Crawford were exacting yet brilliant in their criticism and encyclopedic knowledge. Susman, in particular, hipped me to the fact that John Gerassi’s oral history of the veterans of the Lincoln Brigade was filled with errors and passages that he had invented. That sent me to all of the original transcribed interviews he conducted.

Those interviews proved to be the richest source, especially the interviews with Oscar Hunter and Admiral Kilpatrick. Kilpatrick was a former Wobblie from Oklahoma who had survived the Palmer raids in 1919. I loved his recollections of testifying before

What killed George Floyd or Michael Brown or Breonna Taylor requires a different kind of autopsy—an historical postmortem that lays bare the structural conditions responsible for premature death. the House Un-American Activities Committee: "I didn't take no Fifth Amendment. What the hell am I going to take the Fifth? They knew who I was, I didn't give a damn. . . . I've been trying to take the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendment all my damn life and got nowhere.” Oscar Hunter’s recollections were the first that made the explicit connection between Ethiopia and Spain (and his quote was the source of the title of the book and my Introduction).

Finally, there were things I received from people that ultimately ended in the archives that really struck me: Vaughn Love’s memoir (still unpublished), Joe Brandt’s self-published history of Black Spanish Civil War vets. I recall vividly visiting Joe at his house and him pulling out all of these clippings and photos.

Could you tell us about your current book project Black Bodies Swinging: An American Postmortem? Has your conception of state-sanctioned racialized violence and resistance to it changed since the spring of 2020? I think what I’m asking here is if you see a maturing crisis of racial capitalism in the last six months.

Before I try to describe the book, let me answer the last two questions first. No, my conception of state-sanctioned violence and resistance hasn’t changed much since the spring of 2020 largely because I see the events of this year as part of a much longer story and this is its latest manifestation. Racial capitalism experiences periodic crises that are not only the result of business cycles or relative overproduction, etc., but also generated by struggle, insurgencies especially around the legitimacy of the racial regime, which is always unstable and must constantly change and adapt.

This may be hard to believe, but throughout our history almost every moment of potential revolutionary transformation has centered on battles for racial justice.

At the same time, I do think there is something to say about an intensification of crisis, if not necessarily maturing, made visible by the spring 2020 protests and the global pandemic. Unlike previous rebellions, we are seeing millions taking to the streets behind a radical abolitionist banner. Calls to abolish police and prisons and to shift those resources to housing, universal healthcare, living wage jobs, universal basic income, green energy, and a system of restorative justice are not entirely new, but such proposals never gained popular support or were taken seriously. What we’re witnessing now is a paradigm shift. Demands that were once considered pipe dreams are now seen as viable and even necessary.

The idea of abolition has taken hold in ways that has disrupted, if not shattered, America’s liberal illusions.

How this happened, I argue, wasn’t simply the result of a convergence of COVID and another racist state-sanctioned murder caught on film. The kinds of political non-reformist demands we’re seeing are manifestations of three decades of organizing. While my book traces a longer history of state violence and collective resistance to it, I make a specific argument that the current movement, which we tend to date back to 2012 and the killing of Trayvon Martin, has its roots in 1990s, in the opposition to Bush and Clinton-era neoliberalism, the war on drugs, the war on terror, anti-Black and anti-immigrant racism, prison expansion, police brutality, gendered and racialized violence against women of color, queer and trans people, and the ongoing struggle for reproductive justice.

But I also argue that in order to fully understand what killed George Floyd or Michael Brown or Breonna Taylor requires a different kind of autopsy—an historical postmortem that lays bare the structural conditions responsible for premature death. Each chapter opens with a dead body, whose death and the life I reconstruct, along with the life and death of their neighborhoods, the city, the police, the generations who came before them. To truly understand the “cause of death” means going back decades, even centuries.

The title, Black Bodies Swinging, is inspired by the lyrics to “Strange Fruit” by Abel Meerpol, sung by Billie Holiday, which goes: Blood on the leaves Blood at the root Black body swinging in the southern breeze I trace the deaths and the lives of our most recent casualties to the “blood at the root”—the racial terror at the base of our system of exploitation and wealth accumulation. The blood at the root is “racial capitalism.” In other words, it is not only the effects of racist policing but the extraction of wealth from black people, displacement, predatory lending, regressive taxation, disproportionate ticketing and fines, disfranchisement, environmental catastrophe, and the long history of looting through terror and government policies that suppressed black wages, relieved us of property, excluded black people from better schools and public accommodations, suppressed black home values, and subsidized white wealth accumulation, dismantled the welfare state; privatized public schools, hospitals, and other public resources; and funded the massive growth of prisons. These policies have produced scarcity, poverty, illicit economies regulated through violence, and environmental and health hazards.

In light of the overwhelming backlash, the resurgence of white supremacist violence, the most recent political developments, the final chapter asks the question: “Where Do We Go from Here?

Abolition or Fascism?” We’re trying to answer that question right now.

How are you thinking about the recent rhetoric from President Trump and the right-wing media about the radical left and its Antifa mobs?

To be quite honest, I don’t think too much about it because we’ve seen it over and over again throughout the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. It’s from a very old playbook—and veterans of the Lincoln Brigade experienced it firsthand, as they were the original antifa in the U.S. But I worry about how Trump as a crazy person is exceptionalized. Yes, he and his entire regime are dangerous and must be voted out. No, Biden and Trump are not the same.

But if we believe the culprit is Donald J. Trump and his crew and that all we need is a return to the good old days of Clinton/ Obama/Biden, then we are treading dangerous waters. We have at least four decades of globalization, neoliberal attacks on the welfare state, public institutions, and the poor, covert wars, and political and cultural backlash against movements for racial and gender justice. White supremacy, rampant xenophobia, open misogyny and attacks on reproductive rights, a backlash against December 2020 THE VOLUNTEER 5

We focus our attention on dangerous white men on the fringe at the expense of thugs who have stripped Black people of a democratic voice and denied them power to stop the divestment of their communities. “diversity,” a terrifying spike in homicides of transgender people, did not begin with the Trump campaign. In 1979, even before Ronald Reagan officially took office, Klansmen and Nazi’s killed five labor organizers in Greensboro, North Carolina, in broad daylight—and the whole thing was captured on camera. Four victims were members of the Communist Workers Party. Their killers were not criminally convicted.

So you have to imagine what it means to Black and Brown observers of Trump’s flirtation with white supremacists when armed white militias can show up at public rallies and on the steps of state capitols, defying social distancing measures and demanding an immediate end to “stay at home” orders. After years of watching footage of unarmed Black people beaten and killed by police for walking, loitering, running, standing in front of their homes, showing insufficient deference, protecting their kids, being a kid, these scenes of white men brandishing AR-15s in the face of police and government officials and evading jail, injury or death, begs incredulity.

To underscore my point, Black people in the state of Michigan were already being terrorized by Republican legislators when they replaced elected local officials (city councils, school boards, mayors, etc.) with Governor-appointed emergency financial managers with the power to fire elected officials, abrogate labor contracts, sell off public assets and impose new taxes on residents—all without a single vote from anyone. Or in the case of Flint, force the privatization of water by shifting the city’s water source from the Detroit River to the polluted Flint River. And when the Secretary of State decided in the 2016 presidential election to throw out some 48,000 ballots in Detroit because the machine could not read them (Trump won Michigan by a little over 10,000 votes). So we focus our attention on dangerous white men on the fringe – which we must – but at the expense of thugs who have stripped Black people of a democratic voice and denied them power to stop the divestment of their communities. In 2016 in Michigan, about 49% of the African American population had no locally elected government and were under emergency managers, and yet Black people make up only make up 14% of the state’s population.

In your view, what are the lessons of the International Brigade in our current political and social crises? Are you teaching the Spanish Civil War any differently today than you were five or ten years ago?

The most important lessons are the importance of international solidarity and the urgency of fighting fascism wherever it rears its head. Internationalism seems like it is slowly disappearing from our political culture. (The recent Aaron Sorkin Netflix take on “The Trial of the Chicago 7” is a perfect example of turning anti-imperialist radicals into nationalist liberals by portraying an anti-war movement that is patriotic and cares only about Americans dying in Vietnam!) It also teaches us how Fascists consistently claim the mantle of civilization, the restoration of Law and Order, while attacking every manifestation of genuine social democracy.

I find myself reflecting more on the counterfactual—what would the world look like had the Spanish Republic and the world defeated Franco?

6 THE VOLUNTEER December 2020

I rarely have a chance to teach the Spanish Civil War anymore now. But I did recently write an essay about Angelo Herndon that ended with his brother, Milton Herndon, who died in Spain. It is for a book coming out with Random House in a few months edited

by Keisha N. Blain and Ibram X. Kendi, titled, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019.

I will use their words to make my point here. Angelo Herndon wrote in his 1937 memoir, Let Me Live: The Fascist racketeers were no fools. They understood the psychology of their starving victims. Their appeal to them was irresistible. It went something like this: “Run the niggers back to the country where they came from – Africa! They steal the jobs away from us white men because they lower wages. Our motto is therefore: America for Americans!”

Of course, for us in 2020, these words are familiar; the author, less so. Angelo Herndon was the very embodiment of antifa. In 1937, he was twenty-four-year-old with a sixth-grade education and had spent almost three years in a Georgia jail cell, about five years in Southern coal mines, and at least two years as a Communist organizer in the deep South. As American finance capital eagerly floated loans to Mussolini and Fortune Magazine, Saturday Evening Post, and the New Republic extolled Italian fascism, Black radicals like Herndon called out and resisted homegrown fascism in the form of lynch law, the suppression workers’ organizations and virtually all forms of dissent, and the denial of civil and democratic rights to black citizens. As this was the state of affairs in much of the United States long before Mussolini’s rise, Black radicals not only anticipated the rise of fascism, they resisted before it was considered a crisis. That, too, should sound familiar.

So even before Franco’s troops invaded Spain, Herndon and his comrades were calling on workers to fight Fascism at home. And Fascism meant the indiscriminate killing of Black people. In one of his speeches, he said, “Today, when the world is in danger of being pushed into another blood-bath, when Negroes are being shot down and lynched wholesale, when every sort of outrage it taking place against the masses of people—today is the time to act.” Black radicals heeded Herndon’s plea “to act,” mobilizing in defense of Ethiopia, resisting lynch law in the South, organizing a global anti-colonial movement, and defending Republican Spain from the Fascists. Angelo’s brother, Milton Herndon, died fighting Franco’s troops in the Spanish Civil War. He told his men why he was there. “Yesterday, Ethiopia. Today, Spain. Tomorrow, maybe America. Fascism won’t stop anywhere–until we stop it.” His words still ring true.

Aaron Retish teaches at Wayne State University.

Visit the online Volunteer at albavolunteer.org for a longer version of this interview.

Refugees from Aragón disembarking from the SS Winnipeg in Valparaíso, Chile. Biblioteca Nacional de Chile.

Human Rights Column

By Isabel Allende

A Dark Time

Isabel Allende, the Chilean author and philanthropist, spoke at ALBA’s Lincoln Brigade Monument Celebration on September 12, 2020. This is what she said.

W

elcome to this virtual gathering organized by ALBA, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade archives, in which we honor the Americans who went to Spain in 1936 to fight against fascism. We also celebrate the monument of the Lincoln Brigade in the Embarcadero in San Francisco. And we also recognize today No More Deaths, or No Más Muertes, which works to protect the lives of Central and South American refugees trying to find safety in the United States.

forces of the right, the Catholic Church and the military, led

by General Francisco Franco, rebelled against the government.

They were helped by Mussolini and Hitler. A brutal civil war ensued. The country was torn to pieces. Hundreds of thousands were killed in battle or executed after being conquered.

Franco’s fascist dictatorship would last 40 years. Many young men and women around the world saw the Spanish Civil War as an epic struggle between democracy and fascism, which had already triumphed in Germany and Italy.

First, some history. In 1936, a Democratic leftist government was elected in Spain, the Second Republic. Immediately, the

Between 35,000 and 40,000 volunteers went to fight for the Republic in the International Brigades. Among them were December 2020 THE VOLUNTEER 7

Isabel Allende. Photo Quim Rosés. CC-BY-SA 3.0.

The plight of displaced people is close to my heart.

I have been a foreigner all my life.

2,800 Americans who came to be known as the Lincoln Battalion or the Lincoln Brigade. In October 1938, when the Civil War was practically lost for the Republicans, the International Brigades were sent home. They had played a crucial role in major battles where they were used as shock troops and suffered devastating losses. In Barcelona, they received a hero’s goodbye from tens of thousands of grateful Spaniards, including the famous Dolores Ibárruri, whose voice had accompanied the Republican loss during those three terrible years.

Bidding farewell, she talked about how volunteers gave up everything, and they asked for nothing only for a post in battle and the honor of dying for Spain. How thousands remain shrouded in Spanish earth and would never be forgotten. She asked them to return in the future for Spain. They would find a homeland among those who remain shrouded in Spanish earth, where with one third of the American volunteers, they will never be forgotten. As the fascists conquered the last bastion of democracy, half a million people escaped in freezing January weather to the French border.

They were herded into improvised concentration camps in beaches surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by cruel Senegalese troops without shelter, water, food or medical help.

Thousands died, among them many children. At that time, the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda convinced the Chilean president to receive some Spanish refugees. He went to Europe, raised money, bought a cargo ship, conditioned it and selected 2,200 passengers. The ship arrived in Chile the same day the Second World War started in Europe.

At the port, masses of people had gathered to welcome the Spaniards, Chile received them with open arms. Those refugees and their descendants contributed immensely to the country that gave them a home, as most immigrants usually do. I told that story in my latest novel, A Long Petal of the Sea, because the plight of displaced people is close to my heart. I have been a foreigner all my life. I was a political refugee for 13 years and now I am an immigrant.

My foundation works helping refugees worldwide, especially at the Mexican border, where thousands and thousands of people seek asylum in the United States. The Trump administration has made sure that they get no help. I am therefore particularly moved by the extraordinary work of No More Deaths/No Más Muertes. Today, there are more refugees in the world than ever before, and the number keeps growing. They are escaping from war, crime and extreme poverty. They are desperate.

They risk their lives in dangerous journeys because anything is better than staying in their own land. This is a dark time, my friends. It’s a time of war in many places and potential war everywhere. A time of nationalism and populism, of racist cruelty, fear, violence, poverty and inequality. A time when the threat of fascism is present again. But this is also a time of hope for a new kind of life, for a better world, for a brighter future.

8 THE VOLUNTEER December 2020

Today, like 84 years ago in Spain, we need brave and idealistic young men and women like the volunteers of the Lincoln Brigade, willing to come forward in defense of the values and principles that sustain our civilization.

Isabel Allende, the world’s most widely-read Spanish-language novelist, is the author, most recently, of A Long Petal of the Sea. The Isabel Allende Foundation, created in 1996, is dedicated to investing in the power of women and girls to secure reproductive rights, economic independence, and freedom from violence. For a video of this speech, see ALBA’s website at alba-valb.org.

ONLINE WORKSHOP ALBA and the Collaborative for Educational Services are proud to announce an online workshop for teachers grades 4-12 (Social Studies, Spanish, English Language Arts, & other subjects):

America and World Fascism From the Spanish Civil War to Nuremberg and Beyond Offered in four synchronous online sessions, from 4-5:15 PM Eastern Time: • Wednesday January 27 • Wednesday February 3 • Wednesday February 17 (followed by a 1h15m session in Spanish) • Wednesday February 24 PDPs: 22.5 | Graduate Credits: 1

For more information, or to sign up, write to Dennis Meaney dmeaney@alba-valb.org

Students Shine During Pandemic-Era Watt Award

By Aaron B. Retish

Once again, the annual Watt Essay Award received a record number of submissions from around the world. The jury was especially impressed by the high quality of nearly all the submissions this year. Considering that these students produced this inspiring work during a pandemic as their schools or universities were moving to remote learning makes the group of students who submitted essays that much more outstanding.

T

here were three recipients at the pre-collegiate level.

Hugh Goffinet, of James I. O’Neill High School in Highland Falls, New York explored the fascinating life of the Algerian Rabah Oussidhoum, who joined the French Army, moved to France and then fought and died for the liberation of Spain from the Fascists in his essay. Goffinet argues that Oussidhoum saw his efforts in Spain as part of a larger fight of North Africans against colonial oppression. Michelle Jennings of Apex Friendship High School in North Carolina submitted a moving story, “The Blood of Madrid,” about a young soldier lost on the streets of Madrid during the siege.

A student at Marple Sixth Form College in Stockport, UK, James Mair produced an exceptional essay, “The Process of Radicalisation,” a study of the British Battalion of the International Brigade that draws on memoirs of the brigadiers and reveals the diverse political views within the Battalion.

convincingly shows how the press took a special interest in the Spanish Civil War and had a more conservative stance toward the Spanish Republic than Mexico and criticized the Mexican government for supporting the Republic. Carlos is a two-time winner of the award, having also received the Watt in 2015 as an undergraduate.

We have not seen such high numbers of submissions for the collegiate and graduate awards before. Emmaline Bennett, a student at Columbia University, wowed the jury with her exquisitely argued essay “Cities of Defeat: Spanish Civil War Refugees and the French Concentration Camps of 1939.”

Based on deep research in the Spanish archives, Bennet’s essay examines the lives of Spanish internees and how their experiences were tied to French politics of exclusion.

Pre-collegiate awards

The jury read chapters from fifteen exceptionally strong dissertations, a reminder that we are in the midst of a new wave of innovative scholarship on Spanish Civil War by a new generation of students that is highlighting the global significance of the conflict. Carlos Nava of Southern Methodist University received the award for his chapter “The MexicanAmerican Press and the Spanish Civil War,” which examines an overlooked Mexican-exile press in the United States. Nava

The jury for the Watt award was comprised of Angela Giral (Columbia University), Joshua Goode (Claremont Graduate University), Gina Herrmann (University of Oregon), Jo Labanyi (New York University) and Aaron Retish (Wayne State University). The George Watt Memorial Essay award honors the memory of Abraham Lincoln Brigade veteran George Watt (1914-1994), a social worker, writer, and lifelong activist central to the creation of ALBA.

Hugh Goffinet This essay covers the life and service of Rabah Oussidhoum, an Algerian battalion commander who was killed in action in Miraflores, Spain. He served in Spain to prove to the world that not all North Africans were serving the forces of Fascism (a nod to the Moroccan Regulares) and that many were ready, willing and able to fight back and defend Spanish Democracy. Not only was he a staunch anti-fascist, but he was also a staunch anti-imperialist. Oussidhoum was an early member of the Algerian Communist Party and a staunch believer in Algerian independence, even going as far as attempting to defect to the forces of Abd El-Krim as a young NCO in the French Army during the Rif War.

December 2020 THE VOLUNTEER 9

Bombed street in Madrid near the Puente de Toledo.

Refugees at Argelès, 1939. Photo Robert Capa © ICP /Magnum.

James Mair In this essay, I examine the political convictions and selfperceptions of International Brigade volunteers during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, exploring the transformative and occasionally revolutionary processes of political development that drove so many men to lay down their lives for the cause of anti-fascism. Whilst many previous histories have heavily emphasised the liberal democratic motivations of certain volunteers, here it is those volunteers that saw the conflict in terms of class struggle and social revolution that will be receive greatest attention. It was not just the Anarchists of the Aragon that were preoccupied with the establishment of a new social order; this essay examines the dozens of international communists that held visions of a better tomorrow when they departed for the sunny plains of Spain in January 1937.

Michelle Jennings Set during the Siege of Madrid, “The Blood of Madrid” follows a young soldier named Geraldo fighting for the Republicans against Franco’s army. Geraldo gets separated from his fellow soldiers after following what he believes to be an enemy soldier, only to discover he is chasing a phantom; upon realizing this, he retraces his steps back toward the trenches in the southern part of the city. He picks his way through the wartorn streets of his childhood, anticipating that he will be shot with every step, as the dusk gathers and the threat of night bombings looms. After an encounter with an enemy soldier, Geraldo hears shouting nearby, and he has no way of being certain whether the voices belong to friends or foes….

Undergraduate Award Emmaline Bennett This thesis examines the origins and functions of the concentration camps which were established by the Daladier government in 1939 to intern over 300,000 refugees from the Spanish Civil War. It situates this policy of mass internment within the context of an increasingly xenophobic, restrictionist policy on immigration which, over the course of the 1930s, steadily eroded France's status as a "nation of asylum" and as a defender of universal human rights. It also examines literary accounts and oral histories produced by former internees to show how the camps were portrayed as sites of nothingness, idleness, and death, and how these subjective experiences were a direct product of a strategy on the part of French government officials to strip refugees of their prior political identities and to exclude them from the realm of citizenship and national belonging. It argues that the concentration camps served as the lynchpin of an entire system of surveillance and repression which provided the infrastructure for the Vichy regime's own, far more elaborate system of concentration camps.

However, it also suggests that we should think of these camps not only as sites of repression, but also as fertile ground for the formation of new bonds of solidarity and belonging out of the ruins of exile and defeat.

The banner of the Tom Mann Centuria, 1938.

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L.A. daily La Opinión (August 3, 1936).

Mexico’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War. The circumstances surrounding this stark difference were a direct result of the Mexican Revolution of 1910.

Graduate Award Carlos Nava “The Mexican-American Press and the Spanish Civil War” is one chapter of a larger thesis that examines how the Spanish Civil War affected several diverse Hispanic communities in the United States. Utilizing a transnational approach, this essay explores the unique position of the Mexican exiled press in the American Southwest. Unlike their Spanish language counterparts in the Eastern United States who favored the Spanish Republic, the Mexican expatriated press overwhelmingly leaned in favor of the Spanish Nationalists and were critical of

Before the revolution, the Mexican expatriated press in the United States was a vastly liberal institution enmeshed in revolutionary ideas. During the regime of Mexican President Porfirio Díaz, the open border between the U.S. and Mexico allowed revolutionary writers to seek refuge in the United States. Between 1885 and 1910, several Mexican revolutionary publications relocated to the American Southwest. However, by the 1930s the conflict in Mexico was over and the Mexican revolutionary press in the Southwest had dwindled. Yet, the fall of the Diez regime did not mark the end of the Mexican origin press in the United States. Between 1900 and 1930, one million Mexicans crossed the border into the United States.

Many were refugees and political exiles, including Mexican conservative writers who resettled in the United States and established the Mexican exiled press. They represented the exiled conservative elite of Mexican society. Along with other conservative publications in Mexico, they repeatedly criticized the domestic and foreign policies of Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas, including his administration’s support for the Spanish Republic, and some regularly published pro-Nationalist editorials during the Spanish Civil War.

Visit our online edition at albavolunteer.org for the full-text versions of the winning essays.

Recovering Plundered Real Estate from the Franco Family

By Robert S. Coale

From 1939 to 1975 a manor located in the province of La Coruña, Galicia, was used as a summer residence and office by the dictator Generalissimo Francisco Franco. For the last fifteen years, a diverse group of activists has put the spotlight on the questionable claim of ownership by descendants of the dictator. In September, the regional judge Marta Canales ruled in favor of the State in a 370-page decision which now requires the grandchildren of Franco to relinquish the property called the “Pazo de Meirás.” Although legal representatives for the defendants have announced an appeal, the ruling is the first step towards putting an end to 82 years of Franco family presence in the manor.

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he manor or “pazo,” the Galician term for this type of structure, was built between 1893 and 1900 for one of the region’s most renowned writers, Emilia Bardo Bazán, (1851-1921), whose book collection is still housed in its library. The key point of contention concern-

ing ownership of the property dates to the Spanish Civil War. In early 1938, a group of business leaders from La Coruña proposed a residence for the new “Caudillo” as a way to ingratiate the regional capital once the war ended.

With his seasonal presence, the ensuing cabinet meetings

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Pazo Meirás. Photo Robert Coale.

and government activity would ensure an economic stimulus to the region. To this end a subscription was launched, but given the meager funds obtained, voluntary donations were rapidly replaced with mandatory participation by affluent and poor alike. The Pazo de Meiras was then purchased from the nephew of the celebrated Galician writer and offered to the Head of State. The first to visit the property was Carmen Polo, the wife of Franco. The formal donation was orchestrated December 1938 and the annual visits began in 1939 rapidly becoming a national event widely covered in the regime’s propaganda machine for the next 35 years.

The story could have ended there with a donation to the Head of State, but the plot thickened just two years later.

The plan the local movers and shakers put in place worked even better than they imagined because Franco’s interest in the property intensified. In 1941, despite that fact that the property had already been purchased by the group of local notables prior to its donation, new papers were drawn up between the Pardo Bazán family and the dictator. The only explanation for this second “purchase,” at a much lower price than paid just three years earlier, was to simulate a private purchase of the estate by Franco himself and in this way, to register the property in his name. During his long reign, the fraudulent purchase was a moot point, but at Franco’s death in 1975, it was the base for the Pazo de Meirás to pass in inheritance to Franco’s widow.

The illegal manner by which the property landed in the hands of the Franco family was an open secret in the region as many had been forced to donate for its original purchase as well as poor neighbors whose property was systematically plundered to enlarge the grounds had passed down their stories. The first public demonstration to question ownership of the estate was organized in 2005 by the local Committee for the Recovery of Historic Memory of La Coruña (CRMHC) with the slogan of “Return the People’s property to the People.” Thus began a series of local protests that kept the issue in the public sphere for some fifteen years, patiently but persistently paving the way for the landmark decision that has recently been issued. One of the keys to success was that the CRMHC toiled to forge a wide consensus with associations as well as local, regional and national institutions, which also meant working across traditional political party lines, no small feat in the habitually conservative region. Parallel to public demonstrations, serious documentation work was taken up to study the history of the property. This led to the publication of the work by Manuel Pérez Lorenzo and Carlos Babío: Meirás: Un pazo, un caudillo, un espolio (Meirás: Manor, Dictator,

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Plunder) and later to the creation of a Historic and Legal committee in the Provincial Government of La Coruña.

In a sign that the tables were turning, in 2017 the Franco family was fined by the authorities for failing to hold public tours of the estate. When the widely contested Francisco Franco Foundation offered to take over planning public visits for the family, the public outcry was enormous, a fact that breathed greater life into the resistance movement. That year the essential participation of the Provincial government of La Coruña in the process to recover the property began in earnest.

On the record, the Franco family was deaf to popular protests, but in February 2018 they put the property on sale for eight million euros and the government rapidly interceded to halt any sale. Several months later, on August 8 the family decided to celebrate the wedding of one of Franco’s great granddaughters on the disputed property, a step denounced as an outright provocation. Seizing the opportunity, the CRHMC answered by organizing a “Counter Wedding” in the town of Sada at the gates of the Pazo de Meirás complete with a mock Francisco Franco bedecked in a full dress Admiral’s uniform, a Cardinal, a wedding party and Moorish guards. Scenes of the lighthearted demonstration as Franco family guests arrived at the manor gates are still visible on internet.

National politics have also played a role. The conservative MP Mariano Rajoy was ousted by a vote of no confidence sponsored and carried by Pedro Sánchez of the Socialist Party. This reverse of the Popular Party on the national stage was an opportunity seized by the Galician Popular Party to distance itself from the Franco claims, one aspect of which was its support for recovering the Pazo de Meirás.

From that point on there was no turning back. All local and regional institutions and parties were on board to reclaim the property from the Franco family. The verdict in favor of the State is the result of this long struggle. As Fernando Souto Suárez, president of the CRMHC stated: “There are no charismatic leaders in our movement. Everyone participates and each person is an equal protagonist.

We call the broad participation and the wide consensus to guide actions ‘the Meirás Method’ and we hope it will be used as a model for future endeavors of this type.”

Robert S. Coale is Professor of Hispanic Studies at the Université de Rouen-Normandie in France and a member of the Board of ALBA.

Why Do So Many Historians Fail to Understand the War in Spain?

By Helen Graham

The war of 1936-39 in Spain had much in common with the many other conflicts being waged in societies across Europe after the First World War, as those who sought to maintain old hierarchies clashed with those striving for change. Yet the evident similarity is one that English-speaking historians often seem oblivious to. What explains their curious blind spot?

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n the early 2000s, a popular British history magazine commissioned me to write an essay on the war of 193639 in Spain. But when I filed my piece, they told me they couldn’t publish it because their readers “wouldn’t recognize in it the war they knew.” In my essay, I’d analyzed the conflict in Spain in the context of the many related ones catalyzed across continental Europe by the war of 1914-18. In the end, I argued, these were all conflicts between those who wanted to preserve the hierarchical social and political structures of the pre-1914 European world and those who sought to achieve some form of social and political change—whether by reformist or revolutionary means. Everywhere, Spain included, such conflicts arose from a broader context: accelerating urbanization, industrialization and, crucially, the accompanying processes of increasing migration from countryside to city.

The magazine’s response seemed unusual.

My “Europeanizing” perspective was not new in academic circles, although it wasn’t until later that it began to reach a more general readership—largely as a result of Mark Mazower’s book Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (1998). Mazower painted a picture of Europe between 1918 and 1948 in the throes of rapid structural change, a process accelerated by the First World War and consummated by the Second.

Social and political conflict across the continent, he argued, virtually always sprung from the changing relationships between urban and rural populations. He also connected the violence that Europeans brought on each other with the long

history of imperial violence inflicted on colonized populations; the idea that, as Aimé Césaire wrote, Fascism and Nazism were “colonialism come home.” All of this was also true for Spain, even though the country had not been a belligerent power in the First World War. The military coup in July 1936, after all, was perpetrated by officers from the colonial army of Africa, who designed their “occupation” of Spain as a pushback against the levelling effects of an urbanizing and industrializing society.

Once Spain’s military coup began to falter in the face of urban resistance, its instigating officers welcomed the Nazi and Italian Fascist intervention that would see it escalate to a battlefield war. (The golpistas had not envisaged a war of that kind, even though they had intended to inflict “exemplary” violence on civilians who opposed them.) As it was, the coup itself also triggered a dirty war in which civilians used lethal violence against each other. Here, in fact, the Spanish case prefigured the Second World War in Europe as a series of internal wars waged by civilians on other civilians. These wars—catalyzed by Nazi occupation and expansionism but not reducible to the Nazi agenda—would help shape postwar Europe.

My own Europeanizing magazine essay on the conflict in Spain would become a book, The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction (2005), which has sold over 50,000 copies in English and been translated to German, Portuguese, Greek, and Turkish. Unlike those magazine editors, its readers have had no trouble recogniz-

ing and understanding the relationship between what happened in Spain and the violence across other areas of Europe in the crucible of the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s.

And yet for historians that continues to be a hard nut to crack. The editors’ comment from almost twenty years ago about “a war we do not recognize” still describes an enduring blind spot among British and North American Europeanists. To be sure, most have long assimilated Mazower’s perspectives—but they somehow still have trouble applying them to Spain.

Over the past two decades, this curious inability has given rise to other, equally curious phenomena. For one, the war in Spain, and the extreme nationalism to which it gave rise under Francoism, almost always remain “invisible” in what are otherwise wide-ranging and sophisticated transcontinental studies of political and social violence in twentiethcentury Europe. Still today, standard Anglo-American works of comparative European history tend to mention the conflict of the 1930s in Spain only in passing, referencing great-power diplomacy in the “run-up” to the Second World War. If, unusually, an attempt is made to go into particulars, references tend to bypass the past thirty years of specialist historiography on the topic. No comparative Europeanist would consider this acceptable if they were writing about Germany, Italy, or Russia. The fact that it still goes unremarked where Spain is concerned indicates that, in the minds of most British and American Europeanists, the country’s history inhabits some sort of “antiquarian niche.”

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Milicianas near Guadarrama, eating, Aug. 1936.

Bundesarchiv, CC-BY-SA 3.0.

This phenomenon is closely connected to the legacy of the Cold War. Other areas of post-war European history saw a gradual unfreezing of Cold-War distortions starting in the 1990s (even if things have since re-skewed by the re-emergence of extreme forms of nationalism across Europe). Yet in the case of the war in Spain that opening has scarcely occurred at all. Thus, British and North American Europeanists continue to view Spain, often without even realizing it, through a Cold War lens—if they don’t directly adopt representations manufactured by the Franco dictatorship. That Franco’s own PR was permitted such latitude for the duration of the Cold War is unsurprising, given that the dictatorship was underwritten not just by the United States but by the entire Western alliance.

More surprising is that a sanitized myth of Francoism should still be resistant to dismantling even today. The excuse of a perennial lack of English translations of specialist historiography on Spain is not sufficient—nor is the fact that comparative Anglo-American Europeanists still tend to lack a reading knowledge of Spanish.

The real question doesn’t concern these lacunae themselves but why they are still perceived not to matter. The unspoken answer is that, even without access to recent specialist historiography, the essentials about the 1930s in Spain are assumed to be already known. It is in this assumption where the persistence of the Cold War lens is most glaringly visible.

A second curious side-effect of what I’ve called Spain’s “antiquarian niche” is the extent to which British historians of the United Kingdom have been blind to the broader context surrounding the war in Spain. By the 1930s, of course, Spanish high society and British elites were closely intertwined in social and economic terms. And yet mainstream British historians have still not produced any real analysis of the hugely erosive effects that the war in Spain had on British imperial power and strategy. Nor, for that matter, have they had much to say about the many ways in which the war in Spain was bound up with social change inside the United Kingdom itself.

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I wrote in A Very Short Introduction, the global phenomenon of the International Brigades is inconceivable without taking account of the massive displacements that occurred after the First World War, and especially from central and southern/ south-eastern Europe. But for the British Isles, too, there is an interesting historical analysis still waiting to be pieced together on the relationship between colonialism, migration, and volunteering in Spain.

Yet there is no lack of primary source material in this area or empirical work already done—from the humanitarian mobilization inside British civil society catalyzed by the war in Spain to the work on the thousands of volunteers who joined the International Brigades.

The fact that the overwhelming majority of these volunteers went to support the beleaguered Spanish Republic because they perceived in it a symbol of hope for a fairer society, clearly links back to the others forms of social and economic change across Europe occurring since the end of the First World War. But given how little most volunteers from the United Kingdom really knew of Spain (George Orwell included), it is obvious that the historical significance of their perceptions, as well as their engagement with Spain —whether they traveled there or undertook humanitarian activities within Britain—belongs first and foremost to British interwar history itself. Yet the British historical mainstream has yet to take notice of what this all might have meant in terms of the changes occurring to social consciousness and to social structures within the UK. Part of the problem may be ideological in a deeper sense. The British historical mainstream is still fairly traditionalist and focused on high politics. But studying the social and political impact of the Spanish conflict in the UK brings center stage questions that touch on race, ethnicity and, above all, social class, at whose confluence in the 1930s lay the phenomenon of migration. Across continental Europe, many of those who volunteered for the Spanish republic were shaped by experiences of migration. As

Instead, what still prevails in the literature are statements like “a lot of people joined communist organizations or sympathized with them in the 1930s and this led them to join the International Brigades.” Aside from the empirical limitations of this view—there is no perfect symmetry between communist affiliation and support for the republic in Spain—it completely fails to address the pertinent historical question: What in the sum of the volunteers’ lived experiences explains their political affiliation and their engagement with the Spanish conflict? “Because they were communists” is not an explanation—it’s not even a useful recapitulation of the historical question, which remains oddly out of focus.

When it comes to the connection between migration and Europe’s wars of social change, once again many ordinary readers have an easier time understanding than mainstream Anglo-American historians. In my own teaching experience over thirty-seven years, I’ve seen this among British undergraduates. The profile of British university students has of course changed significantly over the past fifteen or twenty years. Because so many more history students count a family background of migration within their own memory and experience, they are more open to understanding this key aspect of interwar European history. To be sure, the student cohorts who now recognize these things for what they are do not much resemble the demographic still imagined by popular British history magazines. But they understand the war in Spain only too well.

Helen Graham is Professor of Spanish History at Royal Holloway, University of London. A longer version of this article appeared in Contemporary European History, vol. 29 (2020), pp. 268-71.

Lini Bunjes, Dec. 1936. Photo Juan Guzmán.

How an Anti-Fascist Photographer Landed in a Republican and Francoist Jail

THE LINI BUNJES STORY

By Sílvia Marimon Molas with research by Montserrat Bailac

The Dutch photographer Lini Bunjes was among the first foreign volunteers to join the defense of the Spanish Republic. A free-spirited and independent woman, she attracted suspicion from both the Republican and Nationalist authorities and spent several stints in jail. When she left Spain, in January 1941, she was 23, had an infant son, and was poised to continue the fight against fascism in her home country.

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arolina Bunjes, known to her friends as Lini, looks confidently into the camera, smiling. In the picture, taken by Hans Guttmann, aka Juan Guzmán, in December 1936, she’s wearing her arm in a sling. The photograph was distributed widely, along with others shot around same time by the Republic’s best-known photographers. “The Woman Fighter,” the caption of a full-page portrait on the back cover of the popular magazine Mundo Gráfico read: “This girl, the German antifascist Lini Dunjes [sic], … continues to fight … despite her hand wound.”

Thanks to the investigative work of Montserrat Bailac, a researcher, we now know that the story behind the picture is more complicated than that.

For one thing, Lini was a photographer herself. She had arrived in Barcelona from Paris shortly before the Popular Olympics that were supposed to begin on July 19, 1936; and although she was only 18 at the time, she was among the 1,200 women who immediately joined the front as milicianas. For another thing, she was persecuted by both Republican and Francoist security

agents and ended up imprisoned by both sides. By the time she left Spain, in January 1941, she was 23 and had an infant son. She’d continue to fight fascism in her home country, the Netherlands.

Lini Bunjes was a precocious political activist. Born in Utrecht in 1918, she didn’t find out that her family was Jewish until she was 13 years old. Her father had fled Germany after deserting the army during World War I; her mother was Dutch. As a teenager, Lini joined various antifascist organizations. When she was 16, she met Franz Lowenstein, a young German Communist in exile, with whom she eventually moved to Paris, and who accompanied her to Barcelona in the summer of 1936.

In the Catalan capital, Franz and Lini made a living as sports and news photographers. Once the failed coup of 1936 devolved into a civil war, both joined the front. Franz fought in the Thälmann Centuria in Aragón and would eventually be appointed to the General Staff of the International Brigades in Albacete. He died in the Battle of the Ebro in September 1938. By then, he and Lini had already separated.

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Bunjes on the cover of “Mundo Gráfico”, 9 Dec. 1936. Biblioteca Nacionaol. SS BY SA 4.0.

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Lini, for her part, had traveled to Madrid in September 1936, where she ended up as a Second Lieutenant in the Joven Guardia Battalion, combining her military duties with photography.

She reportedly sent her images to her sister Cato, who worked at the Brigades office in Paris, although none of her negatives or prints have as yet been recovered. The battle of Madrid, in November, found Lini fighting at the front line. There she met Antonio Blas García, a Spaniard, whom she married at the end of that month. In December, at the Navalcarnero front, she incurred the hand wound with which she’d land on magazine covers later that month.

Although the pictures were widely published, Lini wasn’t treated like a war hero. Instead, she drew the attention of the Military Intelligence Service (SIM), the Republic’s counterintelligence agency, which suspected her of being a German spy.

She was shadowed for ten days; the surveillance reports detail whom she talked to—and with whom she spent the night. Although a mail cover and phone tap did not yield any confirmation, she was ordered to leave the front and return to Valencia to allow for a more detailed investigation of her past. Eventually, the SIM decided to expel her from Spain—not because they found proof of her spying but because, as the report stated, she was a woman who “could seduce our comrades”: “she is young and beautiful, very intelligent, and speaks our language.” (It was a similar form of gender prejudice that compelled the Republic to ban most women soldiers from the front by early 1937.)

Lini entered the Valencia women’s prison on December 19, 1936, under the orders of the Dirección General de Seguridad, as a suspected spy. A little over a month later, at the end of January 1937, she was transferred to the Provincial Hospital because she had an extrauterine pregnancy. By the time she was released from the hospital, in March 1937, she’d lost her baby. She was transferred to a prison in Madrid. When Antonio Blas found out, he requested the Communist Party authorities to release her immediately.

Lini then joined Blas, who was a commander in the 109 Mixed Brigade, at the front in Extremadura. In 1938, Blas was captured to the north of Badajoz; he was never heard of again.

(The available documentation indicates he entered the Francoist concentration camp at Logrosán that summer. His death was never registered.) Lini, who had become pregnant again, decided to stay in Herrera del Duque, Extremadura, where she’d been living close to the front. Her son, named Antonio after his father, was born in Madrid in November 1938.

Soon after, Lini and Toñino (as she called him) returned to Extremadura, still hoping for Blas’s return. In January 1939, however, the town of Herrera del Duque was taken by Franco’s troops. (Barcelona fell that same month.) As often occurred, the Nationalists invited the townspeople to denounce their neighbors. Lini was given up by a Fascist after she’d refused to sleep with him. On May 30, 1939, she was imprisoned again, this time because she’d been a left-wing photojournalist. She was released after an intervention from the Dutch consul, who also made sure she received money sent by her mother from the Netherlands. He told her to leave Spain as soon as possible. With her mother’s money, she took a taxi to Madrid,

where she lived for a couple of months in Antonio’s mother’s home while she requested the Dutch consulate to help her get home. The Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in May 1940 did not make things easier.

Still a free spirit, Lini wasn’t comfortable at her mother-in-law’s and decided to take the train to Barcelona in an attempt to return home from there. She’d heard about a Jewish lawyer, Louis Stern, who was helping refugees cross the border. Yet she was unlucky: While trying cross the Pyrenees on foot, she was arrested by the Spanish police and imprisoned again, this time in Figueres. (Little Toñino, who had become ill, was taken in for several months by a local pediatrician.)

Lini was released on the first day of 1941, escorted to the Barcelona airport by a member of the German consulate and an armed guard, and took a plane to Munich, from where she traveled by train to Nazi-occupied Holland. She immediately joined the Resistance in Scheveningen, near The Hague, where she successfully found hiding places for Jews, until she herself was arrested by the Gestapo. In her memoirs, she recalls that, although her interrogators knew she’d been in Spain, she was released for lack of evidence. By the summer of 1944, she decided it’d be safer to move north, to Friesland, where she continued to work to hide Jews from the Nazis, as well as weapons caches for the armed resistance.

At the end of the war, Lini returned to Amsterdam, where she met her second husband, Edward Rosenthal, an Auschwitz survivor who was director of a high-end department store and had a son from a previous marriage. In May 1949, she gave birth to a daughter, Katrin; soon after, the family moved to Luxemburg. Yet again, the small, prejudiced community proved unbearable to Lini. She and Rosenthal grew apart, although they stayed together until his death in 1957.

Not long after, Lini met Carlo Alvisi, an Italian who, like her, had fought in the International Brigades. Together with her three children, she and Carlo moved to Northern Italy, where they opened a hotel named Mimosa, possibly in honor of the Anarchist miliciana Georgette Kokoczynski, who’d been killed at the Aragon front in October 1936. By 1977, the busy hotel work had taken its toll on Lini’s heart. She moved back to Amsterdam to retire, spending the summers with her children in Italy. Her son Toñino died of cancer in the 1980s; Lini herself passed away, age 98, in 2016, in Italy. In an interview she said that, while she doubted the Spanish Civil War had served any purpose, she hoped that she’d be remembered as a woman who stood up to fascism when it mattered.

Sílvia Marimon Molas is a reporter for the newspaper Ara; Montserrat Bailac is a researcher for Catalan public television. A longer version of this article appeared in Ara on May 24, 2020. Adaptation and translation from Catalan

by Sebastiaan Faber.

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From Fundraisers to the Blacklist Hollywood and the Republican Cause

By Rick Winston

After the outbreak of the Civil War in July 1936, not a week went by in Hollywood without a fundraiser for the Republican cause. The film colony was passionately on the side of the Loyalists—a position for which many paid a price in the years of McCarthyism. A look back on a remarkable chapter in movie history.

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hen the actor-director José Ferrer was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951, he was repeatedly questioned about his support for the Republican cause in Spain. Did he give a speech at a fund-raising event for the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee in 1944? Did he appear on behalf of the Spanish Refugee Appeal in 1945? Was he a sponsor of the American Committee for Spanish Freedom in 1946? And, pressed the counsel, Frank Tavenner, “Weren’t you aware of the Communist Party infiltration into these organizations?”

Ferrer claimed naïveté, saying “However negligent I may have been, my actions have never been other than anti-Communist and pro-American...At this point, I have publicly repudiated all Communist links and sympathies.” Nora Sayre in her book about the Hollywood blacklist, Running Time, described the ordeal Ferrer and others experienced as “a ritual of public humiliation.” Ferrer continued to work in Hollywood in the 1950s, memorably starring in Moulin Rouge and The Caine Mutiny. But other actors and writers who unapologetically supported the Spanish anti-fascists faced the likelihood of a blacklist.

Ferrer’s self-abasement speaks volumes about the fear that gripped the nation, and Hollywood in particular, during the Red Scare era, when investigators demanded an accounting for past political involvement. Individuals and groups that continued to support Spanish Civil War veterans and exiles after the end of the war in 1939 became a target for anti-Communist investigators.

If we were watching a Hollywood film, now would be the time for a gauzy screen to indicate a flashback. Just a decade earlier, Hollywood had been a very different place. After the outbreak of the Civil War in July 1936, observers noted that not a week went by in the film colony without a fundraiser for the Republican cause. Screenwriter Salka Viertel, whose Santa Monica home became a leading gathering place for European emigrés, described the scene: “With the exception of a few calcified reactionaries, Hollywood was passionately on the side of the Loyalists.”

As Larry Ceplair and Ken Englund write in their history The Inquisition in Hollywood, “the Depression, the New Deal, labor 18 THE VOLUNTEER December 2020

strife, the influx of European refugees, and the growth of homegrown fascism “formed a combustible mass, and when struck by international events, blazed forth with Hollywood anti-fascist rhetoric and action.”

Liberals and Communists in Hollywood were united in a display of “Popular Front” solidarity. Groups like Dr. Edward Barsky’s North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, which provided medical aid, found eager supporters. Screenwriter Bernard Vorhaus and his wife Hetty Davies produced a nightly current events radio show on KFPW, highlighting the war in Spain.

Screenwriter Mary McCall (herself a liberal anti-Communist) complained jokingly in 1937 that “nobody goes to anybody’s house any more to sit and talk and have fun. There’s a master of ceremonies and a collection basket, because there are no gatherings any more except in a good cause.”

With military aid prohibited by the Neutrality Act of 1936, fundraising in Hollywood centered on ambulances, medical supplies, food, and clothing. One memorable event was a fundraising tour by the French author and aviator André Malraux. At Salka Viertel’s house, “Malraux urgently and passionately asked for help for the heroic struggle of the Loyalists and told about the great support Franco was getting from Hitler and Mussolini ... His speech made such an impression that my guests contributed around five thousand dollars”—an amount that comes to roughly $90,000 today.

An even bigger event was a stop by Ernest Hemingway, traveling with the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens, whose film The Spanish Earth was narrated by Hemingway. Hemingway headed a group, which included writers Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, Archibald MacLeish and John Dos Passos, called “Contemporary Historians, Inc.” that financed the film. Hemingway promised that each thousand dollars the film raised would go towards buying ambulances for the Republican forces. On July 12, 1937, three thousand Angelenos, many in the film industry, saw the film and heard Hemingway speak, raising several thousand dollars. However, none of Hemingway’s well-connected friends in the film industry could persuade the studio heads, fearful of controversy, to make The Spanish Earth available for general audiences.

“The possibility that things might go bad for the Loyalists was unthinkable, unbearable.”

A breakthrough of sorts came in 1938, when a script by John Howard Lawson was turned into the film Blockade. Henry Fonda had the role of a Spanish peasant whose town is threatened by indiscriminate bombing. While in production, the film was attacked by the pro-Franco Catholic Church and the final product was inevitably watered down by Hollywood to the point where the sides in the conflict were not identified by name. Otis Ferguson, the film reviewer of The New Republic, gave an accurate summation of the film’s problem: “Although it is always possible that the right company could make a good fiction-picture out of current affairs in Spain, the odds against are too infinite to monkey with. ... If they make a film on anything like Spain, they have to make it mostly hokum or just in fun.” Lawson, in later years, reluctantly agreed with Ferguson’s assessment.

“The possibility that things might go bad for the Loyalists was unthinkable, unbearable,” the actress Karen Morley said, looking back in a 1995 interview. But Franco’s forces were victorious in March 1939, and some in the film community continued to support groups like Dr. Edward Barsky’s new organization, the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee (JAFRC), which was dedicated to “the rescue and relief of thousands of anti-fascist fighters trapped in Vichy, France, and North Africa.” Dorothy Parker became the group’s most active fundraiser in Hollywood.

Although Parker is known today mainly for her witty epigrams at New York City’s “Algonquin Round Table” and her humorous poems, she had been a well-paid screenwriter in Hollywood during the 1930’s, writing the script for the original version of A Star is Born.

With the onset of post-World War II anti-communist frenzy, groups like the JAFRC and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (VALB) were targeted for being, in the phrase of the time, “premature antifascists.” Phillip Deery, in his book Red Apple: Communism and Anti-Communism in Cold War New York, theorizes that Lincoln Brigade fighters who had returned to the United States were singled out by government agencies because, unlike many Communist Party members, the veterans had actual battlefield experience.

Then, in October 1947, the Hollywood blacklist began after the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings in Washington D.C. investigated alleged Communist influence in the film industry. All the members of what became known as the “Hollywood Ten” or the “Unfriendly Ten” had been supporters of the Republicans. Two of the Ten were writers with a direct link to Spain: Ring Lardner Jr., whose brother James was killed in 1938 at the Ebro Offensive, and Lincoln Brigade veteran Alvah Bessie, whose book Men in Battle is still considered one of the finest eyewitness accounts of the war. Bessie had gone to Hollywood upon returning from Spain; his original story for Objective Burma, starring Errol Flynn, had earned him a 1945 Oscar nomination.

At the HUAC hearings, none of the “Ten” were allowed to read their opening statements, setting the stage for hostile exchanges between the Committee and the witnesses; only Bessie was able to get as far as his second paragraph before he was shut down.

His full written statement put his Spanish experience in context: “In calling me from my home, this body hopes to rake over the

smoldering embers of the war that was fought in Spain from 1936 to 1939. ... I want it on the record at this point that I not only supported the Spanish Republic, but that it was my high privilege and the greatest honor I have ever enjoyed, to have been a volunteer soldier in the ranks of the International Brigades throughout 1938.”

Once the Hollywood Ten had exhausted their appeals and went to prison for contempt of Congress, the blacklist reached into all corners of the film industry. An informal—and highly profitable—“clearance” industry emerged in 1950, when three former F.B.I. agents began publishing Counterattack: The Newsletter of Facts to Combat Communism. Their handbook, Red Channels, was required reading for executives in film, radio, and television, who were fearful of hiring a performer whose participation would be the subject of protests or boycotts. A suspect actor or actress could gain re-employment, but only for a certain fee, a public disavowal of previous political stands, and a willingness to “name names” before an investigating committee.

A glance through Red Channels reveals that participation in events for VALB or JAFRC was a certain indicator of the threat of blacklisting—as it was for José Ferrer. Dorothy Parker’s entry, for example, goes back to 1938, when she was a sponsor of American Relief Ships for Spain, the Coordinating Committee to Lift the Embargo, and the Medical Bureau and Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy. She was also listed for being a sponsor of the ALBA Fund Drive for Disabled Vets, and a speaker at a 1948 rally for the Spanish Refugee Appeal. Other performers cited in Red Channels for appearing at VALB or JAFRC events were Morris Carnovsky, John Garfield, Howard da Silva, Karen Morley, Sam Jaffe, and Zero Mostel.

Dr. Edward Barsky, whose various organizations had so much support in Hollywood years earlier, ultimately served six months in prison for refusing to share JAFRC’s membership rolls with Congressional investigators. Howard Fast, a celebrated author and JAFRC board member, was also sentenced to three months in prison, where he began writing what was to be his most well-known book, Spartacus. In a piece of delicious irony, Kirk Douglas’ production of the film version of Spartacus (with the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo receiving a screenwriting credit) became a key event in breaking the blacklist a decade later.

Alvah Bessie served a year in prison for refusing to answer questions at the HUAC hearings, and, save for one script written under a pseudonym, never wrote for Hollywood films again.

Just eleven years separated the outbreak of the Civil War from Bessie’s appearance before HUAC. As Popular Front enthusiasm gave way to post-war fear, hundreds in the film industry who had passionately supported the Republican cause found themselves unemployable. Veterans of the political struggles connected to the Spanish Civil War can attest that this political chill—and not just in Hollywood—lasted well beyond the Red Scare.

Rick Winston is a film historian living in Adamant, Vermont. He is the author of Red Scare in the Green Mountains: Vermont in the McCarthy Era 1946-1960.

December 2020 THE VOLUNTEER 19

Book review

well connected to American political and intellectual circles.

The SHC’s network of close associates included figures such as Nancy and Dwight Macdonald, Roger Nash Baldwin, Norman Thomas, and Rudolf Rocker. As Feu also uncovers, the US freedom rider James Peck was interested in protesting Franco’s Spain as much as he was fighting racial segregation in the American South.

Reviewed by Eric R. Smith

As time moved on, the Cold War pushed some of the journal’s contributors into surprising directions. The novelist Ramón J. Sender, for example, ended up voicing support for the war in Vietnam. Feu also reveals that some of the journal’s contributors were what we would now call “undocumented.” The German anarchist Rudolf Rocker was worried about his possible deportation to Nazi Germany where he would face certain death.

Fighting Fascist Spain: Worker Protest from the Printing Press, by Montse Feu. Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2020. 278 pp.

I

n her new book, Montse Feu examines España Libre, a Spanish-language journal associated with the Spanish anarchist movement that was published in the United States from 1939 until 1975. Emerging at the end of the Popular Front era from the fractures and new alliances formed in the wake of the defeat of the Spanish Republic, España Libre is a rich source for understanding the doctrinal disputes within the movement, its international influence, and the complicated world of Cold War politics. The journal itself, for example, was born out of another periodical, Frente Popular, published by the USbased Comité Antifascista Español (CAE). Shortly before the conflict between communist and anti-Stalinist factions that would break up the Spanish refugee-aid movement, the CAE became the Sociedades Hispanas Confederadas (SHC) and its journal was renamed España Libre. A brief recounting of that history appears in chapter three.

Feu tells a story not only of fracture and weakening influence but also of considerable reach and power. At its peak, the SHC had 65,000 members. Over the course of its existence, it raised $2 million in aid despite “chronic financial shortfalls” in the periodical’s own fiscal health. This aid was distributed to nearly 30 percent of its distressed exile and refugee readership.

Feu is interested in “the web of anarchist, anarcho-syndicalist, and socialist connections that facilitated the political engagement of local activists and organizations to enlarge the global reach of the organization” and in recovering “talented working-class authors and artists who were no longer invested in imminent revolutions but instead adapted to the demands of exile and the Cold War.” The first part of the book is historical and biographical in focus, while the second, shorter part centers on aesthetics and representations.

España Libre was anything but a marginal journal. For example, it frequently featured speeches and editorials from the members of the Republican government in exile (although the editors insisted on their editorial and organizational independence). The periodical was regularly smuggled into Franco’s Spain and, conversely, relied on sources on the inside to reveal the scale of the repression. Not surprisingly, the editors drew the attention of the FBI. They were also 20 THE VOLUNTEER September December 2020 2020

Within the US public sphere, España Libre pushed back consistently against the attempts—from Spain but also from US intellectuals and politicians—to put a friendly face on the Franco regime. As Feu shows, the journal painstakingly documented the regime’s executions, acts of torture, and imprisonment of political dissidents. In the same spirit, one of Feu’s footnotes provides names of the pro-Franco US congressmen that España Libre attempted to rebuke.

Feu holds a strong interest in theater, and the book’s close to forty pages of appendices include an exhaustive list of “Original Antifascist and Exile Plays, 1937-1950,” most of which are lost. Feu also highlights the role played by women, who often assumed central functions in fundraising activities, although relatively few were involved in publishing España Libre.

For all its breadth, the book leaves some areas relatively underexplored. This reviewer would have been interested to read more about the effects of McCarthyism and FBI surveillance, for example. And while it is undoubtedly true that “[d]espite the ideological differences, as well as doctrinal confrontations among leaders and theorists, antifascist sentiment encouraged the confluence of socialist, republican, and anarchist militants,” I wondered about the political and ideological conflicts spurred by the Cold War. Did the support for Vietnam by some of its contributors foster discord?

If so, how was it addressed?

Those questions notwithstanding, Feu’s book is an important contribution to the growing scholarship on refugees and relief aid in the wake of the Spanish war, as well as anarchism, radical literature, and the Spanish diaspora more generally. This book’s most important contribution, in fact, may be that it gives voice to those anarchists who are generally neglected in the larger narrative of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath.

Eric Smith, author of American Relief Aid and the Spanish Civil War (University of Missouri Press, 2013), holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago and is an instructor of history at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy.

Opening image from the MGDC/WildUp production.

MARTHA GRAHAM’S DANCES FOR SPAIN Reviewed by Lourdes Dávila

In June, the Martha Graham Dance Company performed Immediate Tragedy, a long-lost solo piece that Graham performed in 1937 in support of the Spanish Republic. Its reconstruction was only possible thanks to a cache of recently recovered photographs of Graham’s original show. Together with Deep Song, inspired by Lorca, the piece marks a crucial phase in Graham’s development of a new language of dance.

“T

he battle of Spain is the immediate tragedy of our lives, far more so than the Great War.” This statement from 1937 by Lincoln Kirstein, co-founder of the New York City Ballet, reflects the overwhelming support among the US dance world for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. In fact, in 1937 and 1938 the American Dance Association (ADA)—founded in 1937 to secure dancer’s rights, promote world peace, and fight fascism—sponsored two fundraising events called “Dances for Spain.”

Kirstein’s words return in the title of one of the two solos that Martha Graham (1894-1991), one of the most influential choreographers in the United States, devoted to the conflict.

Immediate Tragedy: A Dance of Dedication, premiered on July 30, 1937, in Bennington, Vermont. The second solo, Deep Song, inspired by García Lorca’s Poemas del Cante Jondo, was performed at the ADA’s second “Dances for Spain” event, held in January 1938 at the Hippodrome Theatre.

December 2020 THE VOLUNTEER 21

Seemingly forgotten, Graham’s two solos for Spain lay dormant for many years.

Sadly, there are no filmed records of either of those dances.

Worse, both were initially left out of the Martha Graham repertory. Seemingly forgotten, they lay dormant for many years while their musical scores, by Henry Cowell, were thought lost.

And yet both dances are crucial for understanding Graham’s trajectory—specifically, her development of a new language of dance with a deep awareness of historical necessity.

In 1988, Terese Capucilli, a principal dancer with the Martha Graham company who’d become its artistic director from 2002 to 2005, worked with Graham to reproduce Deep Song, relying, among other materials, on a series of about 100 photographs from the Barbara Morgan archives. Because the original music had not been found yet (it was later discovered behind a desk on the floor at the Graham Center and placed in the proper archive), they decided to use another piece by Cowell, “Sinister Resonance,” as a score. This is the music used to this day when the piece is performed.

It’s hard to exaggerate the significance of Deep Song. In Terese Capucilli’s words, it “was Martha doing in dance what Picasso did in art.” It had always been Martha Graham’s intent to produce a narrative that could approach the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War while depicting a universal condition— showing, in the words of Robert Burns, how “Man’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn.” In Deep Song, the dancer’s movement initiates the plucking of piano strings and the music ends while the dancer continues her plaintive movement in silence beyond the blackout. The bench where the soloist moves into the first contraction—and to which she returns time and again after swirling, crawling, reaching, taking in, contracting and falling—becomes the catalyst for the entire piece. The bench is a center of energy that, beginning as a home, or a womb, transforms itself into the trenches where men are fighting, the weight that the woman must carry, the grave that she inhabits for a moment, and the final resting place against which she mourns. In Capucilli’s words, the bench is both a source and a confining element that drives the dancer back.

Immediate Tragedy followed a more sinuous path. As Capucilli tells us in a 2014 interview with Leah Clay, in 1988 there was not much information to reconstruct the piece. Unlike Deep Song, there was no substantial archive of photographs for reference, and the possibility of recreating the piece became even more distant after Graham’s death in 1991. All that changed recently, and unexpectedly, when Douglas Fraser contacted the company to explain how his father, Robert Fraser, a photographer, had happened to be sitting in the front row when Martha Graham performed the piece in Bennington in 1937. On June 19, 2020, amidst the height of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, the Martha Graham Dance Company, together with the musicians from Wild Up—under the direction of composer Christopher Rountree—offered a virtual performance of Immediate Tragedy that is available in full on YouTube. (The piece was commissioned by the Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for the Performing Arts in LA.) 22 THE VOLUNTEER December 2020

Included in the YouTube video is an illuminating pre-performance dialogue among the show’s creators. The cultural historian and critic Neil Baldwin reads a letter from Graham to Cowell in which Graham speaks about the success of the piece: “I felt in that dance, Immediate Tragedy, that I was dedicating myself anew to space and that in spite of violation, I was upright and that I was going to stay upright at all costs.” Janet Eilber, the company’s artistic director, describes the dance as a dedication to the Spanish women of the era.

As Anna Kisselgoff wrote in 1988 when reflecting about the reconstruction of Deep Song, “A tragedy experienced is not the same as tragedy remembered. Distance has its effect.” The dancer’s embodied knowledge cannot be that of the historic experience. But it was never meant to be. From the very beginning, as the program notes for Deep Song attest, these two pieces were not meant to depict the image of a Spanish woman. They were meant to make visible the embodied experience of history witnessed and brought near—to make history immediate by bringing immediacy to the reality and suffering of the Spanish Civil War. This immediacy was heightened by the circumstances under which the piece was performed in June: the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd.

Toward the end of the pre-performance dialogue, Christopher Rountree from WildUp asked Janet Eilber what she thought the piece’s subtitle, “Dance of Dedication,” meant. It referred, she replied, to a moment “when you are committed to a cause— whether it is dance or whether it’s a revolution.” Graham, she added, “was creating a revolution.” Eilber’s reflection invites a new reading of both Deep Song and Immediate Tragedy, in which the aesthetic meets the political—where the demands of history, to which Graham willingly responded, coincide with the development of a new language of dance. I, for one, will never think of a contraction quite the same way again.

Lourdes Dávila, the managing editor of NYU's Esferas, is a Clinical Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at NYU. She worked for many years as a professional dancer for the companies of Joyce Trisler, Lucinda Childs and David Gordon.

Visit the online Volunteer at albavolunteer.org for a longer version of this review and a video of the performance.

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FOR THOSE WHO CAME AFTER: SONGS OF RESISTANCE FROM THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR

A new interpretation of ten iconic songs from the Spanish Civil War Recorded live at the Japan Society in 2016 commemorating the 80th anniversary of the war, the album features a fragment of an interview with Abe Osheroff and the voice of Delmer Berg, with liner notes by Adam Hochschild.

Now available at info@alba-valb.org $20 (for domestic orders. Price includes shipping & handling.) All proceeds from the record are being generously donated to ALBA.

THE VOLUNTEER NEEDS YOUR HELP! Every three months, ALBA is pleased and proud to send you this publication. We know that so many of our readers treasure it, and we value your feedback, your encouraging words as well as your constructive criticism. We strive to make the publication a forum for the exchange of information and ideas of interest to the ALBA community.

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We know this is a big “ask�! If you are able to consider a gift at this level, to sponsor an edition of The Volunteer, please contact Mark Wallem directly at mwallem@alba-valb.org.

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