Susman in 1922, perched on the lap of the poet Morris Winchevsky, the grandfather of Yiddish socialism.
SALUD Y SHALOM: AMERICAN JEWISH VOLUNTEERS IN SPAIN By Joe Butwin Thirty years ago, I traveled around the United States equipped with a cheap tape recorder I spoke to 39 Jewish-American veterans of the Spanish Civil War. When they went to Spain in 1937, very few of the people I spoke to would have invoked their Jewishness for putting their lives on the line.
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early one third of the Americans who went to Spain to defend the Republic during the Civil War were Jews. Comparable percentages describe the composition of all of the International Brigades in Spain. Thirty years ago, between 1992 and 1994, I travelled around the United States from New York to Florida, to Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle equipped with a cheap tape recorder. A stack of cassettes and a list of addresses (and a modest subvention) provided by the Vets themselves. At that time,I spoke to 39 men and women. Their median age was 80. The Cold War had officially ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December of ’91. I spoke to men and women who had grown up with the Revolution of 1917. Some, in their childhood, had witnessed the Revolution first-hand; most were the children of immigrants from Czarist Russia; many of them were raised in a tradition of Jewish—and Yiddish-speaking—socialism before they joined the Communist Party in the 1930s. Nearly everyone I spoke to had left the Party long since, but this was the time for reckoning and reflection. We knew that there wasn’t much time. When they went to Spain in 1937, very few of the people I spoke to would have invoked their Jewishness for putting their lives on the line. They were “internationalists”; they were “anti-Fascists.” Half a century after the fact they were not likely to revise the rationale for going to Spain, but given the chance to talk about their entire lives many were ready, as George Watt explained, to “come out of the closet”—as Jews. Watt had been moved recently by an exhibit at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Israel, to assert that Jews had resisted Hitler before the partisans of Vilna or the ghettofighters in Warsaw did so in the early ‘40s. What the members of the wartime resistance in Poland and Russia had in common with brigadistas in Spain were the movements that had animated their parents and grandparents in the Czar’s old empire. Immigrants from Eastern Europe brought that spirit to the Jewish enclaves of American cities. George Watt, Bill Susman, Irv Weissman, Mike Bailin and others were nurtured in the Yiddish, Socialist shuln—the secular equivalent 16 THE VOLUNTEER September 2021
of the Hebrew schools that trained other children in traditional piety. George Watt lit up with pride as he told the story of his grandfather, Avremele der lamden, Abraham the Learned One, who was a leader in the first strike of Jewish workers in the textile factories at Łodz in 1902. “It was part of our family tradition.” Bill Susman showed me a picture of himself as a boy in Bridgeport, Connecticut, perched on the lap of the poet Morris Winchevsky, the zeyde or “grandfather,” of Yiddish socialism. When Bill said, “I was born to go Spain,” he was referring to a way of life that began before his birth and in another country. Israel Kwatt (otherwise Kievkasky) went to Spain as George Watt and Bill Susman went as Bill Ellis as members of a Communist movement that encouraged its members to shed the ethnic distinctions that had defined their youth and, for many, their political orientation. “We wanted to hide our Jewish identity,” Watt explained, “and that was really in response to anti-Semitism, feeling that people would not follow us. . . . We sort of went into
