The Volunteer, Vol. 37, No. 3 (September 2020)

September 2020

Vol. XXXVII, No.3

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

Bartolí: The Republic Betrayed

Josep Bartolí © Actes Sud (2009) - El Mono Libre (2020)

ALBA’s First Online Workshop p 5 Quakers in Spain p 14 Paul Robeson as Antifascist p 17

Dear Friends, 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 4 p 5 p 6 p 7 p 12 p 14 p 17 p 17 p 19 p 20 p 23

News from ALBA Innovation and Human Rights Online Teacher Workshop Faces of ALBA Georges & Josep Bartolí Pins for Spanish Democracy Quakers in Spain Paul Robeson as Antifascist The Last Veteran of La Nueve In Memoriam Reviews Contributions

2 THE VOLUNTEER September 2020

As the chaos of this pandemic summer seems to foreshadow an even more eventful fall— please be sure you’re registered to vote!—we’re poised to continue our work with more determination than ever. Teaching history, inspiring activism, and upholding human rights: It’s hard to think of a time in recent memory when ALBA’s motto applied more urgently than it does now.

July saw worrisome developments in Portland, where Border Patrol agents recruited by Homeland Security were dragging antifascist protestors into unmarked vans. On July 31 we were shocked to hear from No More Deaths (NMD), the volunteer organization that won this year’s ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism, about a raid of a humanitarian aid station in Arivaca, AZ. The barbaric act, also perpetrated by the Border Patrol, was clearly in retaliation for the activities of No More Deaths. Needless to say, ALBA stands in solidarity with NMD and will continue to support its efforts to bring medical care, food, water, shelter, and other basic services to those in desperate need.

Meanwhile, in July, we taught our very first online workshop for teachers, after the pandemic forced us to cancel our planned in-person workshop in Massachusetts. Although it was organized relatively late, we were blown away by the response. We’d initially set the enrollment limit at 35 but the course filled at close to 50 participants, not just from Massachusetts but from many other states and even from Spain. See page 5 for a report.

Our newly designed website at alba-valb.org continues to feature new elements—including a completely updated biographical database of the more than 2,700 volunteers who went to Spain from the United States. Following our successful online celebration this spring, the Bay Area group, in collaboration with JCC Manhattan, organized an online tribute to Honorary Board member and prominent filmmaker Judy Montell, who passed away in June. Our online programming continues with an August 30 screening of The Internationale, a compelling documentary by ALBA board member Peter Miller (check our website for details). Finally, mark your calendars for the online celebration of the newly restored Lincoln Brigade Monument Celebration in San Francisco, scheduled for Sunday, September 12 at 5 PM EDT. For these and other news items, see page 3.

Look to page 6 for a conversation with Cynthia Young of the International Center of Photography—and one of the new faces on ALBA’s board. We’re also featuring an interview with the nephew of the Catalan artist Josep Bartolí, and pieces on Paul Robeson, Quakers in civil-war Spain, and a touching obituary for Chato Galante by the two filmmakers who featured him in their Peabody-winning documentary The Silence of Others. Also, check out the centerfold for Roger Lowenstein’s unique collection of Lincoln Brigade pins.

As you well know, we wouldn’t be able to do all this work if it weren’t for your continued support. Please consider using the enclosed envelope for a tax-deductible gift, or simply go to alba-valb.org/donate, where you can also set up recurrent donations. It’s those donations that make this magazine possible. ¡Salud!

Peter N. Carroll & Sebastiaan Faber, editors

P.S. Please continue to support ALBA’s new online Teaching Programs. We reach a lot of kids!

News from ALBA ONLINE SCREENING OF THE

INTERNATIONALE

Join us on August 30 (time TBA) for an online screening and discussion of Peter Miller’s documentary The Internationale. The film chronicles the history of the song—which was written by Eugene Pottier in 1871 at the fall of the Paris Commune— from before to the end of the Cold War. It includes performances and interviews with musicians and activists from around the world, including Billy Bragg and Pete Seeger.

CELEBRATION OF THE SAN FRANCISCO MONUMENT Following its successful online spring gala, ALBA invites you to join a live-streamed celebration of the Lincoln Brigade Monument in San Francisco, which has been recently restored. Speakers include Isabel Allende, Bill Fletcher, Walter Hood, Susan Schwartzenberg, Rafael Jesús González, and Harvey Smith. With various musical performances.

ALBA Online Monument Celebration September 12, 5pm EDT/2pm PDT More information at www.alba-valb.org Due to the pandemic restrictions, there will be no physical gathering at the monument.

ALBA WEBSITE UPDATES Volunteer Database

Featured Tamiment Collections

In August, ALBA’s data team completed the migration of the volunteer database to the new website. As part of this effort, the team also performed an initial update and loaded and completed quality checks on over 2,700 individual records. The team—Chris Brooks, Dennis Meaney, Elizabeth Yearsley, and Jeff Barckert—collectively put in more than 300 hours to complete the task.

Updating our webpage gave us the opportunity to showcase our incredible partnership with NYU’s Tamiment Library. We have created a centralized page where visitors to our website can navigate to our ALBA collections at Tamiment which include the Harry Randall Collection, the Manny Harriman Video Oral History Collection, the John Gerassi Oral History Collection, the Arthur H. Landis Oral History Collection, and the Francis Patai Audio Collection. Visitors can also access the link to Tamiment’s entire digital collection, filled with incredible labor and radical histories.

The volunteers’ data is intended to provide information about the lives of Americans who volunteered to serve in the Republican armed forces and ancillary services during the Spanish Civil War. The objective is to provide both an overview of their service and a list of sources.

The records are aimed at historians, educators, students and the family members of the volunteers.

The database is an ongoing project. Near-term enhancements include: • Additional records from the Russian State Archive of SocioPolitical History (RGASPI).

• Passport information and photographs from ALBA’s passport project.

• Family background information from Ancestry.com.

• Links to oral histories posted online by NYU and other entities.

Event Videos As COVID-19 has forced many of our in-person events online, we have begun to record them for later viewing. Visitors to the home page of our new site will notice that a recording of our Special Online Gala Event is available for viewing. We hope to continue to add event videos from future programs as well as adding older footage from ALBA’s storied past to our place online.

Monument Page In celebration of our new webpage and the completion of repairs to our San Francisco Monument, we have created a dedicated space online for this great memorial to the men and women of the Lincoln Brigade. The page features various images and press on the monument, directions on how to get to the monument at Embarcadero Plaza, as well as text and video of a moving speech giving by ALBA Board Member Peter Glazer given at the original dedication ceremony in 2008.

Invisible Heroes To highlight the African American participation in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade we have created a special spotlight page for the documentary Invisible Heroes. Documentarians Alfonso Domingo & Jordi Torrent produced this particular film to highlight the African American contribution to the ALB, their fight for democracy, and fight for the civil rights that were denied to them in their own country. Visitors will be able to view the film’s trailer, several reviews of the film, and can contact ALBA if they wish to purchase it for themselves.

Visit our website at www.alba-valb.org September 2020 THE VOLUNTEER 3

INNOVATION AND HUMAN RIGHTS: ESTABLISHING A SINGLE DATABASE ON THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR AND THE FRANCO REGIME

By Concha Catalán Innovation and Human Rights (https://ihr.world/en) was established in 2016 as anon-profit to provide information, supported as far as possibleby documentary evidence, to enable people to discover whathappened to their relatives during the Spanish Civil War andafterwards under the Franco Regime.

To achieve this, we are putting together an online database (https://ihr.world/en/) of names of people who werekilled, imprisoned, subjected to reprisals or whose lives weresimilarly affected by these events. The database now includesover 700,000 records, all of which are referenced to archivesand academic research such as doctoral theses, articles, etc.In addition to helping the families of the victims to gain accessto documentation about their relatives, we have other aims;to promote wider public knowledge and understanding of the purpose of archives; to encourage greater public access to the archives; and, by republishing material from the archives, tomake their contents more widely available.

One of the most important sources for the database is the records of military judicial proceedings. It is not generally recognized that, in many respects, the Civil War did not end in 1939. The state of war, declared by the Francoists in July 1936, was extended until April 1948, so until that date all justice was military justice. As a result, people who had supported the legally established Republic were court-martialed and subject to death sentences, execution, imprisonment or forced labor.

So far, using data from the Ministry of Defense, we have included the results of nearly half a million military judicial proceedings. These come from 11 of the 50 provinces in Spain. In the four provinces of Catalonia alone there were nearly 70,000 proceedings, and, as a result, 3,358 people were executed, most of them by firing squad. Seventeen women were among them, and the youngest was aged 20.

Records in the database are related to a particular event. Since they have usually been published in formats which are not readily accessible, we have converted them into spreadsheets so that the information can be included in the database. The database also has data from some of the 27 military archives in Spain and from published research, as well as from the list of missing people gathered by Spain’s Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH), recipient of the fifth ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism. Each dataset is accompanied by a description in Spanish, Catalan and English as well as a similar description for each author or source.

There are, for example, over 130,000 personal records of soldiers in Disciplinary Labor Battalions or over 16,000 names of people sentenced to death whose sentences were revised by 4 THE VOLUNTEER September 2020

the Comisión Provincial de Examen de Penas (CPEP) and, as a result, were commuted to terms of imprisonment. Other datasets are smaller, like 1,000 names of people who were held in the ‘La Alcazaba’ Concentration Camp in the city of Selouane, at the time in the Spanish protectorate in Morocco (1913-1956); nowadays in Morocco; or even 150 names of soldiers who died in a surgical hospital located on a train.

The original idea for this project came as a result of coordinating a website about the bombings of Barcelona for our local TV station. This involved interviewing descendants of some of the victims. These people had only recently found out about the circumstances of their relatives’ deaths. In Spain archive records or access to them has never been a priority and, until 2013, Spain never had a Freedom of Information Act. Although the Ministry of Culture maintains a database of the victims of political reprisals, silence about what happened in the war and under the dictatorship has been the rule in most families.

Our work is made possible by the generous efforts of a team of volunteers who devote part of their time to the project. We are journalists, historians, archivists, engineers, etc. We receive no public funds or subsidies and we rely on small research jobs and donations to pay for our expenses. We have signed agreements with various universities and institutions and are looking for funding and/or a technological partner to improve our record management.

Stuyvesant Students Build Lincoln Brigade Website This spring, students at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan built a website, https://scwnyc.stuy.edu, featuring Lincoln Brigade volunteers from New York City. Their history teacher, David Hanna, reports: “Last semester I taught a new elective course on the Spanish Civil War. Its 33 students learned how important New York City's role was in contributing to the International Brigades. I was aware that San Francisco has a monument to their volunteers, but our city did not. This was the origin of the project, which turned into a website documenting New Yorkers who served in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

Students were assigned a volunteer each and conducted research over a period of two months. Angel Ortmann-Lee and Theadora Williams designed the site.

“My hope is that in the future the course will continue to run, and each new cohort will research another batch of New York-affiliated volunteers. However, with approximately over 800 names still to be researched it will take 24 years to complete! Hopefully this site can be a catalyst for getting a monument erected here in New York City to its sons and daughters (and adopted sons and daughters) who joined the 'Good Fight' in Spain.”

Close to 50 Teachers Join ALBA’s First Online Teacher Workshop ALBA’s first-ever online teacher workshop, conducted over five weeks this summer, drew participants from the US, Spain, and Latin America. The topic: The United States and World Fascism: Human Rights from the Spanish Civil War to Nuremberg and Beyond.

I

t was ALBA night every Tuesday evening this past July, as close to fifty teachers and activists joined an online workshop offered by ALBA’s Peter Carroll and Sebastiaan Faber, along with master teacher Kelley Brown and Rich Cairn of the Collaborative for Educational Services (Massachusetts). In addition to five one-hour live sessions, participants viewed some six hours’ worth of documentaries and pre-recorded videos, read two dozen texts, and engaged in small-group discussion online.

Offered as a substitute for ALBA’s regular two-day Massachusetts workshop, the online version drew more than double the usual number of participants, as people dialed in from Oregon, Wisconsin, New York, Puerto Rico—and even Spain, despite the fact that the course met at 1 AM European time.

“Although it was the pandemic that forced us to go online, this successful experiment has showed us the great advantages of this format,” said Sebastiaan Faber, ALBA chair. “For one thing, doing this online allows for a much wider geographic reach. For another, spreading the course out over five weeks rather than concentrating it in one or two days allows for a very different type of teaching and learning.”

“The level of engagement was off the charts,” said Peter Carroll. “It was amazingly gratifying to see the great discussions that the participants were having with each other week after week.”

I came into the course with minimal knowledge of this time period in the US or Spain and feel like I gained an ability to connect it to WWII in my teaching.

Great materials, great organization, great teaching, very clear, focused and concrete.

Introduction to new materials, a practical and realistic sense of teaching students in a wide variety of scenarios, and the sharing of projects on the Spanish Civil War make the course extraordinarily useful.

While there is not a lot of correlation of the Spanish Civil War to my curriculum, there were so many great themes that can be carried into almost any historic discussion. We have so many things happening currently in our country that can link to the themes of the Civil War. I look forward to finding ways to use the sources and these topics to offer great ways to start conversations about important topics.

This PD has been excellent in terms of providing resources and ideas that I will actually implement in my classroom. Often when you take PD, you go through the class, make the final lesson plan, and then never use it again, but I am definitely planon using some of the documents, videos, etc. experiment ning in class next year.

This successful has showed us the great advantages of this format.

Starting with the initial reactions in the United States to the rise of fascism in the early 1930s, the course covered the Spanish Civil War, World War II and its aftermath, and the Cold War, focusing on questions of human rights, (non-)intervention, and transitional justice as a way to better understand the challenges the world faces today. Although the course was geared toward schoolteachers in subjects like History, Spanish, and English Language Arts, it also drew college professors, activists, and others with a political or family interest in the history of antifascism and the Lincoln Brigade.

More than three quarters of the participants reported to have learned a lot and found the course very useful for their teaching.

Some 90 percent said they’d be likely or very likely use what they learned in their work.

Here’s a sampling of participants’ comments: It was great to see how studying these events can connect to broader themes in history, as well as ethical and philosophical questions that are of great importance.

Loved the class. Thank you so much. The content and discussions were so relevant.

This was a very enjoyable course … I feel like I am more knowledgeable now than I was when the course began.

Thanks for a nice experience!

This was an outstanding professional development experience.

Thank you for all of the insight and beautiful lessons. This was a really great class. I took some classes this summer to keep my mind off of the insecurities of the upcoming school year and to keep busy while trying to stay put at home. I have really looked forward to the readings and lessons and then our live meetings. It has been a nice way to keep busy, although it has had my head spinning at times, it has been a very fun look at history!

It has been eye-opening and relevant!

ALBA’s online institute was co-sponsored by the Collaborative for Educational Services and the Library of Congress. All of ALBA’s teaching programs are made possible through the generous support of the Puffin Foundation. ALBA’s next online workshop will be offered on election day. More information at alba-valb.org.

September 2020 THE VOLUNTEER 5

Faces of ALBA: Cynthia Young

By Aaron Retish

Cynthia Young recently joined ALBA’s Board of Governors. She is the curator of the Robert Capa and Cornell Capa Archive at the International Center of Photography. Cynthia has also curated exhibits and published several books on Capa and other leading contemporary photographers.

For many people Robert Capa’s photographs, especially Death of a Loyalist Soldier, are how they visualize the Spanish Civil war. What does the work of the curator of the Robert Capa and Cornell Capa Archive entail?

The most important work of the archive is preserving the materials and making the work available to the public. There are about 8,000 vintage Capa prints in the collection. Nearly all are digitized on the collection database, and are accessible from the ICP website. The entries are constantly updated with new information about each print, from the location to the date and even the maker. So much new research on the Spanish Civil War has surfaced in the past ten years.

We have done a lot in house with contemporaneous magazines and our own research, but we also receive emails from researchers from various parts of Spain who can confirm an exact location of an image. But the Capa archive is very entwined with the archives of Gerda Taro and Chim at ICP. The three of them were the most prominent and important foreign photographers working in Spain during the war, so requests regarding Capa’s work often include images

by Taro and Chim. ICP loans prints for exhibitions internationally and help provide images for educational projects. I also curate shows and publish essays about Capa’s work, which enables the research we are doing internally to make its way into the public.

Do you remember when you “discovered” Robert Capa for the first time? How has your understanding of Capa’s photography changed and can you tell us what you think makes Capa’s photography so captivating?

I am not sure I remember when I first saw Capa’s work, but I certainly remember, after having worked on the archive for several years, thinking how genuinely interesting his work was, and how I neither disliked nor distrusted him as a person, which can happen after too much time working on any one artist. He is obviously celebrated for the subjects he covered, but there is less appreciation for his sense of composition, which, if you have to work quickly under pressure as he did, was quite sophisticated. The continued appeal of his work comes from several directions. First is the commitment to the stories he was telling. He was partisan, he had political positions, and he understood and cared about the subjects he covered. The images are imbued with information, but also with emotion. He worked hard to bring the viewer with him into the story he photographed. There is a physical energy in many of the images. He was deeply serious about making images that could engage magazine readers and sway opinion, and that intention still translates today.

You have spent the last twenty years as a curator in the ICP while curating exhibits and editing several books on photography. Are you a photographer yourself?

I studied photography years ago and worked with several amazing artists and photographers, but I no longer make my own photographs, other than what we all do with our phones. After working in the archive, I got a new perspective on the effort required to preserve even one print, so I became a little too conscious about adding more.

6 THE VOLUNTEER September 2020

How did you feel going through the rediscovered images from the three boxes of film by Capa, Gerda Taro and Chim that arrived at the ICP in December 2007?

Going through the rediscovered negatives from the Spanish Civil War was the most exciting project that I ever have done, possibly the most interesting that I will ever do. I really did not know what to expect before looking through the rolls of film. Opening up each film for the first time, carefully unspooling the rolls, was like watching an image come to life. Maybe I knew one image, but now I could see the five frames before and after that one. People in one frame moved in another frame. Two incredible images I could now understand were taken on the same roll of film. Seeing the negatives is incredibly instructive to understand how a photographer works. I have often compared it to looking at sketches or drawings for a larger painting. You see how the photographer is framing and reframing the subject to get the composition they want. Or, particularly at the start of the Spanish Civil War, when the three photographers had few resources, you can see how carefully they used their film so as not to waste frames. Each frame was almost a new subject in that period, and that is not something you can understand if you only have a pile of prints. So when I see Chim working over several frames to get the best image of the Republican soldiers helping with the art inventory at the Descalzas Reales Monastery in Madrid, I know that he understood that this story was important for the international press to counter arguments that the Republicans were destroyers of cultural heritage.

How do you think we can teach the Spanish Civil War, and the legacy of the Spanish Civil War, through Capa’s photographs?

One of my favorite parts of my work is speaking about Capa’s work in Spain to students, in part because it is not taught with much depth in courses of Twentieth-Century European History. I know ALBA is working to help change this through the educator’s programs and curriculum guides. I often speak to Spanish language or history students, so Capa’s perspective of the war may be new to them or generally falls in the category of other artists and writers who dedicated themselves to the Republican cause. I think it is always valuable to look at how the war was covered in the magazines that published his images and what captions were used. His, Chim’s and Taro’s work can certainly be used to simply illustrate the general history of the war, but there is also tremendous value in the details of what is in the pictures, that is, what history the photographs tell. My friend once teased me for the espadrilles I was wearing for a strenuous walk up an alpine path, and I retorted that espadrilles were worn throughout the war, so I had nothing to complain about. But more seriously, so many of Capa’s images look like they could have been published in yesterday’s papers because cycles of civil war and violence continue and hundreds of thousands are forced from their homes and across borders. How are the conditions in those countries similar or different from Spain in the 1930s? How are artists and writers today responding to the rise of the far right in democratic societies? Rather than just descriptors of the past, the images can be a point of departure for conversations about society today.

“If Spain became a Republic once again, we’d have lost the war a little less.”

Georges and Josep. Georges Bartolí Archive.

Georges Bartolí Remembers His Uncle Josep

By Sebastiaan Faber

Among the hundreds of thousands of Spanish refugees who ended up in French concentration camps was the graphic artist Josep Bartolí, who would later become a well-known artist in Mexico and New York. His dramatic drawings of the Civil War and life in the camps are featured in a new book by his nephew, the French photographer Georges Bartolí. A feature-length film of Josep’s life will be premiered at Cannes this fall. An interview.

O

ne morning in 1971, Georges Bartolí woke up more excited than usual. The day had finally come; he was going to meet Josep, his legendary American uncle.

Georges, 14, lived with his parents, Catalan Republican refugees, in Perpignan, in the south of France. Josep Bartolí was visiting them from New York, where he had been a renowned illustrator and painter for a quarter of a century.

“An uncle from America! I imagined him in a Stetson hat, cowboy boots

and spurs,” Georges recalled when I spoke with him this past July. Alas, reality did not live up to the teenager’s imagination. “He was a short man who appeared to be in his early sixties— which he was—and who looked like my father’s brother—which he was, too.”

Still, despite the momentary disappointment, uncle and nephew soon hit it off: “I immediately took a liking to his way of speaking. He was a man of a pure and hard intelligence who spoke with the same irony that he deployed in his graphic work. It’s as if he were

always drawing, even when he talked.”

The reunion was an emotional one: Georges’ father, Salvador, had not seen his brother since 1939.

Josep Bartolí i Guiu was born in 1910 in Barcelona. He lost his mother young; his father was a musician. The Nationalist coup of the summer of 1936 finds Josep in the Catalan capital, working as a newspaper illustrator. Although he sympathizes with the POUM, which leans Trotskyist, he helps found the Professional Illustrators’ Union of CataSeptember 2020 THE VOLUNTEER 7

Josep Bartolí © Actes Sud (2009) - El Mono Libre (2020)

lonia, which affiliates with the Socialist UGT. He spends the three years of the war working for the union, fighting at the front—in Aragon, he serves alongside Ramón Mercader in a unit of the Catalan Communist Party (PSUC) led

by Ramón’s mother, Caridad—and in the hospital, recovering from his frontline injuries. In early 1939, together with half a million Spanish refugees, he crosses the French border and is interned in a concentration camp. Between various arrests and escapes, Josep passes through the camps of Argelès, Saint Ciprien, Bram and Barcarès. The Nazi invasion finds him living and hiding in Paris. Miraculously, he manages to arrange for boat passage that, via Casablanca, takes him to Mexico.

In Mexico City, Josep joins the Republican exile community—some 20,000— picks up illustration gigs and is adopted into the circle of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. In 1944, he publishes the scores of heart-wrenching pen drawings he’d made in the camps, in a book co-edited with his friend Narcís Molins. Channeling Dürer, Goya, and the avant-garde, Bartolí resorts to caricature to capture the tragedy, misery, and bitter irony of the Republican defeat. His images overflow with anger at the inhumane treatment of Spanish refugees—skeletal and saint-like—by fat, lascivious French gendarmes.

Two years later, Bartolí moves to New York City, where he joins a group of abstract expressionists that includes Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning. For several years, he carries on an intense love affair with Frida Kahlo, whom he had met in Mexico and who passes through the city for her medical treatments.

(Twenty-five of Kahlo’s love letters to Bartolí were sold at auction five years ago.) While working on his painting, he earns his living as a cartoonist and designing sets for Hollywood—until he ends up on the blacklist, a stigma he shares with Lincoln vet Alvah Bessie. In New York, he illustrates ads for luxury products and works for magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and Holiday, a luxury travel monthly. In 1951, Holiday

until 1977, two years after Franco’s death, following another extended stay with his brother’s family in Perpignan.

By then, Georges Bartolí had turned 20 and had embarked on what would become his profession, photography.

(Today he is a well-known photojournalist for L’Humanité and other venues).

“At that time, Josep was preparing an exhibition,” Georges recalls. “He’d set up a workshop of sorts next to my darkroom. We lived together for more than a year. We smoked and argued every day. I was a member of the Communist Party. My uncle, who like the rest of the family was more of an anarchist, wasn’t happy about that, to put it mildly.”

features four pages of his artistic impressions of Franco’s Spain. “José Bartolí, who has revisited his native country with a notebook and pencil, captures its tragic grace in street scenes and national types,” an editorial note states. The images include a view of Barcelona, which, according to the caption, has “repaired its scars from the Civil War.” In fact, Barcelona had not erased its scars—nor had Josep set foot in Franco’s Spain. He didn’t cross the border again

Josep never returned to Europe for good; he died in New York in 1995. In 2009, Georges paid tribute to his uncle with La Retirada: Exode et exil des républicains, a book published in French that, in addition to an anthology of drawings of the war and the camps, included a series of short memoirs by Georges. It closed with a photographic record of Georges’s retracing the route his parents and uncles took 70 years earlier, from the front to Barcelona, through PortBou, to the beaches of Argelès-sur-Mer. The updated Spanish translation La Retirada was published this summer.

In France, meanwhile, the well-known cartoonist Aurel has made a biographical feature film about Josep Bartolí that will be part of the official selection at the Cannes festival this fall.

Your uncle, a Catalan, was born Spanish, but became a Mexican and American citizen. As the son of refugees, how do you deal with the issue of national identity?

I’m French. My sisters and I were born Spanish, but French law allowed us to be nationalized. My dad didn’t want to; he was convinced that we’d be going back to Spain soon. At that point my mother, who was smarter than him, asked him: “So you want your son to be drafted for Franco’s military?” That convinced him.

Josep Bartolí © Actes Sud (2009) - El Mono Libre (2020) 8 THE VOLUNTEER September 2020

Josep Bartolí © Actes Sud (2009) - El Mono Libre (2020)

September 2020 THE VOLUNTEER 9

Do you feel French, Catalan, Spanish?

I feel many things, but they complement each other. I know I owe a lot to France. No matter how badly it received my parents, the country protected us, educated us, made us who we are.

I wholly accept my French identity.

My passport is French. But I also feel Catalan. Most of my Catalan family is pro-independence. Of my three identities, what I feel least strongly is Spanish. Still, as the son and grandson of Spaniards, I have the right to Spanish nationality. If I applied for a passport, they’d have to grant me it.

But you’ve never applied for one.

No, because even before being French, Catalan or Spanish, I am a Republican. And I will not apply for Spanish nationality as long as Spain remains a monarchy, heir to the Franco regime. I refuse to be a subject to a king who was placed on the throne by Franco.

And if Catalonia were to become independent?

In that case, within 24 hours you’d see me in the Catalan village closest to the border to request a passport. (Laughs.)

About Spain, you write in the book: “If the Republic returns one day, we will have lost the war a little less.”

Today’s Spain is obviously not Franco’s Spain. But I still see a lot of residual Francoism: in the political world, the armed forces, the judiciary, general mentalities and, as I said, in the Monarchy. The famous Transition erased us from history. My parents and all the exiles—who never had a real existence, by the way, because exile is the denial of what you are—were sacrificed for the sake of national reconciliation. The only way to rehabilitate us a little would be if the monarchy fell.

Your mother, who was a teenager when she crossed the border, wanted to be a medical doctor. “She was not destined to be a housewife or a shopkeeper in Perpignan,” you write; “That is her broken dream of the Republic. I am the child of the broken dream.” Is the desire for re10 THE VOLUNTEER September 2020

habilitation primarily sentimental and family related, or primarily political?

It’s one hundred percent political. If I talk about my family it’s because that’s what I know. But when I do, I’m referring to the half a million Spaniards who were erased from history. I was simply lucky enough to know my family, to have my family assume their Republican legacy, and to have an uncle who was able to capture that history in his work.

Speaking of erasures, the French Republic has also had a hard time coming to terms with the past. A lot was covered up for a long time. I am referring not only to the infamous collaboration of Vichy, but also to the concentration camps that your family lived through, or the leading role played by the Spanish Republicans in the resistance against the Nazis. In France too, acknowledging those chapters of the national past has been a slow, partial and contradictory process. As you write in the book, for example, it was ironically a right-wing president, Chirac, who in 1996 finally granted the status of former combatant to the French survivors of the International Brigades who participated in the Resistance. France, too, has been frightfully forgetful.

Exactly. That’s why, when I wrote this book in 2009, I did so primarily for a French audience. Beyond the south, many still don’t know the slightest thing about the history of the concentration camps. The truth is that France betrayed the Spanish Republicans three times. The first was the so-called “non-intervention” of 1936. The second was in 1939, when the country treated them as enemies. And the third was when France, with the connivance of the British, left Franco in power after the Second World War after having taken advantage of the Republicans’ help to defeat the Nazis. France broke all the promises it made to the Spanish Republicans, who not only sacrificed themselves to free France but were often among the most capable of the maquis.

That third betrayal was perhaps the harshest one of all.

You explain in the book that the silence extended beyond the official history.

There was also plenty that was left unsaid within your family.

That’s right. Don’t forget that our story was one of humiliation. We’d been defeated. We had lost the war—unfairly, since Franco won it with the help of Hitler and Mussolini. As often happens, those stories were covered up. Until very late in life, my father would barely speak to me about the war and even less about la Retirada, the Retreat. And I understand that. It’s not easy for a father to talk to his son about a defeat. That is why I was able to talk much more about it with my uncle, who had no children and with whom I had a more political relationship, almost as an equal, although of course we were far from equals. He simply wasn’t my dad and that made a world of difference. That’s also when I realized that what my dad couldn’t do—to tell the story of what happened to him and his family—was now my job. And I am lucky enough to have my uncle’s work to help me do that. Nothing explains that story better than his drawings.

That means a lot, coming from a photographer!

I’m serious. The drawings are a truer, more realistic record of the refugees’ experience than the photographs that exist of the camps, most of which were taken by outside photographers, for whom the prisoners posed with their fists raised.

The drawings, on the other hand, show life from the inside. They document the suffering, the illnesses, the humiliations the refugees endured at the hands of the gendarmes and the colonial troops that guarded the camps. I’ll tell you an anecdote: my uncle had only one copy left of the book on the camps he’d published in Mexico in 1944. That copy was used for an exhibition he had in Terrassa in 1984. When the exhibition ended, he gave it to me as a gift with the following dedication: “For Georges, this ‘photographic’ testimony that perhaps one day will manage to break the conspiracy of silence.”

Josep Bartolí © Actes Sud (2009) - El Mono Libre (2020)

Do you feel that you’ve followed in your uncle’s footsteps?

work on the war and the camps is at the municipal archive of Barcelona—but as far as I know, the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, for example, has not a single piece of his in its collection. How is the situation in France?

I don’t have the slightest talent for drawing. But if I chose photography as a medium it’s because it, too, is political. I have never believed in the supposed objectivity of photography. A photograph is a composition as much as a drawing is. And it’s true that the way I see photography owes a lot to the conversations I’ve had with my uncle. I use the camera in the same way he used the pencil: as a weapon. A non-lethal weapon, to be sure, but a weapon nonetheless. We’re combatants.

Josep Bartolí briefly fought with lethal weapons as well. On the Aragon front, at the beginning of the Civil War, he served alongside of Ramón Mercader, in a communist militia, although your uncle sympathized with the POUM, which leaned more Trotskyist. He also helped found a union that affiliated with the Socialists. Four years later, that same Ramón Mercader killed Trotsky who, like your uncle would later, have an intense love affair with Frida Kahlo.

How did Josep deal with all that political and romantic intrigue?

After fighting in the ranks of the Fifth Regiment, for all intents and purposes he broke with the Communists. But the truth is that he never was a cardcarrying member of any party. At heart, he was a libertarian communist. He was close to the anarchists, but their dogmatism turned him off. And he felt the same about the communists. The fact that his union joined the UGT was almost accidental. They could just as easily have joined the Anarchist CNT. And then there was his Catalanism, which complicated everything, as it still does today. In exile, he ended up associating mainly with former members of the POUM. How my uncle Josep dealt with all that? By sticking to a simple motto: Republic, socialism, humanism.

Better. In addition to Aurel’s film about Josep that has just been selected for the Cannes festival, there will be a big exhibition of his work here in 2021. His widow, who is still alive, has donated her entire legacy to the Occitan region.

The exhibition will be held at the Campo de Rivesaltes Memorial, which was built about five years ago. a certain point—thanks in large part to Frida Kahlo—he decided to switch from black-and-white to color. In both art and life. Frida told him: “You’ll never win the civil war. Memory is one thing and life is another. You must accept the memory, but you can’t let it consume your life. You’ve got to move on to something else.” And that’s what he did.

Although he never lost sight of who he was and where he came from.

It seems he also sympathized with the US civil rights movement early on. I came across a book of his on African American history. In the text that opens it, he calls Spain out for its complicity in the history of American racism: “The black American child is taught white ‘history’ and when he is told about Africa, the story is limited to the image of a vast jungle territory populated by apes and European explorers, thus hiding or distorting the truth about the purposes of the atrocious hunt for humans that the Arabs, Spaniards, Portuguese, English, Dutch and French carried out in the African ‘wilderness.’”

Once in New York, did he get involved with the Spanish exile community?

Yes—that book, The Black Man in America, came out in Mexico but was designed as a project for a mural commissioned by an important New York bank. But just like the famous mural that Diego Rivera did for Rockefeller, Josep’s was never executed because it was considered too radical.

Not really. Although he always knew he was linked to the history of the war, at

It is striking how little Josep Bartolí has been recognized in Spain. Most his

Does that mean that, in Perpignan at least, the legacy of the camps is no longer controversial?

Thanks in part to the Memorial, much has been done in recent years to recover the memory of the Retreat. We have finally moved beyond the taboo phase.

You were raised within the refugee community. I understand you even ended up marrying an exile’s daughter.

Well, yes, it’s true, but don’t forget that here, in the Perpignan area, a third of the population are descendants of Spanish refugees. That’s one in every three women! (Laughs.) To be honest, I keep my distance from the exile community, which sometimes tends toward a too victim-centered view of history that I personally don’t agree with. Yes, we were obviously victims—although that’s less true for my generation than that of our parents. But we have cried enough.

What I want is a combative memory that’s not afraid to take on the world. I like to say that our memory is a particularly tough one: it does not let itself be erased, but it also does not hide behind tears. It’s time to stand up for what our parents were and what we are as their children -- proud of their legacy.

Sebastiaan Faber teaches at Oberlin College. A version in Spanish of this interview appeared in CTXT: Revista Contexto in July.

September 2020 THE VOLUNTEER 11

PINS IN SUPPORT OF SPANISH DEMOCRACY: A COLLECTOR’S STORY

By Roger Lowenstein

I

’m a collector of American left-wing protest pins. As a radical lefty lawyer, I’ve found it to be one way to be connected to the great social movements of my lifetime and before. Although I have 9,000 pins (www.LowensteinCollection.com), none are more valuable to me than those supporting the loyalist effort in Spain. I like to think that had I been young and able-bodied in 1936, I would have had the courage to go to Spain and fight or drive an ambulance or do something bravely antifascist. I’m also fascinated by political graphics and serve on the Board of the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, an arts organization with the largest protest poster collection in the United States. As anyone who reads this magazine knows, the Second Republic may have lost the war, but they won the art. Loyalist posters are some of the best political art ever produced and played a critical role in maintaining civilian commitment during the struggle. Some of Spain’s most famous artists participated and the designs are extraordinary, often incorporating elements of cubism, fantasy, and modern technique. I have a set of postcards that were made to send to the soldiers at the front in order to maintain dedication to the cause.

Very few of the American pins, however, mimic the aesthetic of the posters. Most of them simply identify the wearer as someone who sympathizes with the antifascist struggle in Spain, belongs to a local support group, or is someone who has donated. Also, many of them are designed to raise consciousness about the victims of the war—orphans, refugees, starving children, invalids. Most of the pins are small, less than an inch, with tiny writing that might require a magnifying glass to read.

LAS SOCIEDADES HISPANAS CONFEDERADAS In the same way that the Popular Front was able to win an electoral majority in 1936, the SHC was a coming together of many domestic American organizations, as many as 80 to 100, in order to fight fascism in Spain. Some of these organizations were immigrant groups based on Spanish geography, while others were from labor organizations—communist, youth, anarchist, socialist, feminist, social democrats—who together raised considerable sums at a time when the government of the United States was enforcing a cruel “neutrality.” Most groups raised money for ambulances, but the SHC also sent a ship filled with supplies. The group of 19 pins all mention the SHC directly. Two show ships. Two very fanciful pins show an ordinary person/fighter vanquishing the fascist enemies in the form of a three headed snake-like monster—monarchist, capitalist, soldier. Both say ¡Ayudemos! (Let’s help!) And both are drawn on the face of a clock, with the heroic antifascist holding back the clock hands: Obviously, time is running out. Another shows a woman’s face backed by the strawberry tree and bear, the symbol of Madrid. Yet another shows a muscular male soldier with the SHC tricolor flag alongside a female soldier carrying the red and black anarchist (CNT/FAI) flag. Others support refugees and orphans, invalids and the disabled.

To learn more about the SHC and its magazine, España Libre, take a look at the book Fighting Fascist Spain: Worker Protest from the Printing Press by Montse Feu, a faculty member at Sam Houston State University, or Prof. Feu’s article in the July issue of The Volunteer.

SHC MEMBER ORGANIZATIONS Many pins were made by member organizations of the SHC.

12 THE VOLUNTEER September 2020

Here are some initials to help: AMA is Agrupación de Mujeres Antifascistas; AOE is Alianza Obrera Española; FPE is Frente Popular Español. Women were obviously a powerful part of the antifascist movement. There are many pins of women’s groups, pins with generic women in the art symbolizing Spain or nurses, and some promoting women heroes such as Lina Odena and Dolores Ibárruri (La Pasionaria of “¡No pasarán!” fame).

Theater played a significant part in the antifascist movement.

Many organizations used theatrical productions to raise money and maintain enthusiasm. I have one pinback of the El Teatro del Pueblo in the anarchist red and black with the photo of Durruti. One pin says to Remember the Mar Cantábrico, the ill-fated freighter captured by the nationals with aircraft, munitions and clothing. Two pins show a photo of Pablo Iglesias, the father of Spanish socialism and the founder of the PSOE. Another is from the Grupo Salmerón in Brooklyn, named after the President of the First Republic. General Rojo gets a couple of pins; General Miaja gets one; and there is one with often (probably unfairly) vilified Juan Negrín, President of the Second Republic, and one with Valentín Gonzalez, known as El Campesino, a communist general.

Take a look at the Comité Antifascista of Elizabeth, New Jersey pin. It advocates “Books for Franco,” but the book is in the shape of a bomb. This is possibly an acknowledgment of the embargo of military equipment and munitions that could, illegally, be skirted by labelling the containers “books.” Or it could reflect a book sale to raise money. Or, it simply acknowledges fascist anti-intellectualism. In the group mentioning the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion/ Brigade, note the pin from NYU. That university, along with CCNY, contributed the largest number of students and faculty volunteers. The support groups on campus were extremely active.

I put one group of ambulance and medical funding together.

One of those is on behalf of the teachers’ union raising funds for an ambulance in memory of Joe Streisand. Another is a green cross of the Medical bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy, the organization of the amazing Dr. Edward Barsky. There is a communist party ambulance fund named after Oliver Law (spelling his name incorrectly).

Most of the meanings of the pins are self-evident. Some are dramatic, such as “Muertos antes que esclavos” (Death before slavery). Others are straightforward, such as Friend or Defender of Spanish Democracy, or Rescue Spanish Refugees. Some, however, are puzzling. Take the one that is a large V. It shows a worker with an implement smashing the Falange and says “Unidos Para La Reconquista.” The Reconquista in Spanish history was the effort by Christians to re-conquer Spain from the Muslims.

It took about 780 years, leading up to 1492. But here we are talking ironically of the re-conquest of Spain by the loyalist forces against the fascist defenders of the Church. This button must have been made after the fall of Madrid. The V represents the victory of allied troops in World War II. The V was a common pinback for allied war effort support, and the double V was a civil rights pin demanding victory in war and at home.

This pin, I believe, is an encouragement of the allies to get rid of Franco and restore Spanish democracy. It could have been made in 1942 when Rommel was defeated in North Africa and pressure was being put on the Western allies to open a second front (eventually Sicily and the Italian campaign), or more likely, when the defeat of Hitler seemed inevitable, when Stalin, FDR (later Truman) and Churchill debated what to do about Spain (and chose to do nothing!).

People who collect pins are forced to be amateur historians.

But we also honor the people who owned and proudly wore each pin and had the courage to declare to the world what they stood for. We are at an historic inflection point today.

Soldiers recruited by our president and his lackey attorney general lounge on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, poised to clear the streets of peaceful protesters. ¡No pasarán!

For more color images, see the version of this article in our online edition at albavolunteer.org

September 2020 THE VOLUNTEER 13

Gota de Leche: Quakers in the Spanish Civil War

By Camilla Meek

In the summer of 1937, Esther Farquhar, an Ohio Quaker recruited by American Friends Service Committee, arrived in Murcia to organize the feeding of the starving refugees. A photo diary discovered in the archives inspired the author to join humanitarian relief efforts happening today. “If they were able to do so much with so few resources, might I not be able to help refugees as well?”

T

he summer of 2017 was a period of rest and reflection for me, and I chose to take a month’s sabbatical at Pendle Hill, the Quaker retreat center in Wallingford, Pennsylvania. Unlike most people who stay at Pendle Hill for an extended period to work on a project, I arrived without one. I slipped into the daily routine of morning meeting for worship, meals, and loafing, allowing for Spirit to lead me in a new direction.

The library was my favorite spot. It is situated on the ground floor of Pendle Hill’s newest dormitory, and its tall windows look out on the lawn and the center’s vegetable garden. I recalled times spent in libraries as a child, when I would walk to the local library to escape the summer heat and boredom, spending hours reading anything that attracted my curiosity.

One day a shelf of books bound in green with gold embossed lettering caught my eye. Organized by year, they contained the leaflets and booklets published by American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). In the volume of literature pertaining to the Spanish Civil War, a picture of a middle-aged woman holding a crying child next to a man dressed in white caught my eye. The caption read: “‘Life,’ says this refugee baby in Spain, ‘is a matter of milk!’ Esther Farquhar and the doctor agree.”

The woman was dressed in a linen suit in the style of the late ’30s. She wore her hair in a plain side part and had large rimless spectacles. She looked more like a schoolmarm than a nurse, yet her concern for the child was unmistakable. Intrigued, I flipped through the pages of the 1937 section of the journal for clues to her identity.

Another pamphlet titled Relief in Spain featured the same photo on the cover. Inside was a picture of a malnourished infant lying on its back in a crib. The caption said the picture was taken in the Friends Hospital in Murcia, Spain.

In early 1937, the combined Fascist forces of Franco and Mussolini mounted an offensive on Malaga, in the south of Spain, then the main location of the anti-Fascist Republican army. The attack left thousands of pro-democracy Republicans dead. The Republican women, children, and elderly fled north and east along the coastal road toward Almeria, and then further to Murcia.

14 THE VOLUNTEER September 2020

Franco’s army chased the fleeing people by air, shelling the column of refugees like an angry child stepping on a line of ants.

This bloody exodus is known in Spanish history as the Caravan of Death. Half-starving, the refugees who survived the slaughter arrived in Almeria and Murcia, 250 miles from Malaga, with nothing but the clothing on their backs.

Murcia, a small city in a region of eastern Spain, lay in the area defended by the Spanish Republicans. Most of the refugees took up long-term residence in abandoned buildings in squalid conditions in the region, relying on rations from relief centers or hospitals for their food.

A joint relief effort of American and British Friends and Mennonites undertaken during the escalating Spanish Civil War was centered in Murcia. The area of relief, known as the “American Quaker Sector,” covered about 200 miles of coast from Alicante to Murcia and extended about 45 miles inland, according to Gabriel Pretus in Humanitarian Relief in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939.

It was in Murcia that Esther Farquhar, an Ohio Friend recruited

by AFSC, arrived in June 1937, shortly after the joint relief effort was begun, to organize the feeding of the starving refugees.

Farquhar had taught Spanish at Wilmington College in Ohio, after working for a time in a Friends school in Cuba. She had also worked in Cleveland, Ohio, as a social worker. Her professional background made her a good candidate for the work, but it was her even-handed approach with the refugees, multi-national relief workers, and the Spanish officials that gained respect for the relief work of the Friends and Mennonites and made it so effective.

Once in Murcia, Farquhar saw an immediate need for extra nourishment for the youngest refugee children. The standard ration up to that time was a small amount of bread per day, hardly enough for a baby to grow on. The youngest children showed signs of malnutrition.

Gota de Leche (Drop of Milk), as the milk centers for infants and small children were named, was Farquhar’s passion. She imagined the milk centers as places where mothers could get enough milk each day to supplement either breastfeeding or

Leaflet from the American Friends Service Committee (Haverford College Library).

Gota de Leche (Drop of Milk), as the milk centers for infants and small children were named, was Farquhar’s passion. to Murcia. The first Gota de Leche was on its way. Others were added in cities where the Friends had refugee feeding stations.

If diplomacy was Farquhar’s strength, paperwork was her weakness, so it is difficult to tally exactly how many children received nourishment through Gota de Leche. An excerpt from a cable dated December 27, 1938 in the AFSC Archives in Philadelphia, notes that 50,000 children were receiving bread daily, “plus 10,000 in milk canteens under direct Quaker administration.”

solid food. This might prevent malnutrition, rickets, and death.

Fortunately, the head of the Friends Committee on Spain, John Reich, was supportive of her plan. Farquhar sent a cable to the Swiss organization Save the Children asking for 200 cases of either fresh or condensed milk to be shipped to her as quickly as possible. They responded immediately with the shipment of milk Syrian children at the TIAFI feeding station in Turkey. Photo Eliane Mans.

The selective and at times ad hoc nature of the relief feeding efforts was dictated by the small staff and intermittent flow of supplies into the region from Europe and the United States.

The nonpartisan stance of AFSC, and the success of relief efforts in Germany and Austria after WWI, made it possible to serve Spanish civilians in both the Republican and Fascist regions of the country from 1937 to 1939.

Esther Farquhar worked in Murcia only one year until her health failed her and she was forced to return home. Her work, September 2020 THE VOLUNTEER 15

continued by others, was deemed a critical necessity for the survival of thousands of refugee children in Republican Spain.

An AFSC report on the work says: After a year of single-handed responsibility for the hospitals, feeding centers and other refugee aids in Southern Spain, Esther Farquhar returned home in June 1938. Her rare tact and sympathy won the lasting affection of the Spanish people and laid a firm foundation of the continued work of Clyde E. Roberts; Emily Parker; Alfred H. and Ruth B. Cope; Florence Conard; and representing the Church of the Brethren, Martha Rupel.

My fascination with Farquhar and AFSC relief work led me to the AFSC Archives at Friends Center in Philadelphia one afternoon before the end of my Pendle Hill retreat. There I found the photo diary of Emily Parker, a young AFSC worker who assisted Farquhar in Murcia. Bent and aging sepia snapshots in an old, deerskin-covered album showed a woman dressed in white with schoolmarm hair and glasses holding an infant in her lap.

Written in ink next to it were the words, “Baby born on Malaga Road during flight from that city. In picture is 18-month-old and weighed slightly under 10 pounds.” Just below it, another snapshot without description showed the same woman cradling the child and feeding it a bottle of milk.

I was profoundly impressed by what I learned of the relief effort mounted by this small group of dedicated American and British faith workers. If they were able to do so much with so few resources, might I not be able to help refugees as well?

My research on refugee relief through the Internet and social media led me to a small, informal non-governmental organization (NGO) in Turkey that posted a request for volunteers online. Ironically, the group is also led by a middleaged woman who, through a passion for service, founded Team International Assistance for Integration (TIAFI). Run by volunteers, the group has created a community center where vulnerable Syrian refugee women and children receive daily meals, language instruction, and job training in order to begin new lives in Turkey.

Through email and Skype, I was able to make contact with TIAFI’s volunteer coordinator. We agreed that if I came to work at their community center, my skills would be put to use.

With Turkish tourist visa in hand, I left for Europe in October, planning to travel from the United States to Rome to Izmir, Turkey, for several weeks of volunteering. But once I arrived in Italy, I learned that the Turkish government revoked all tourist visas for American citizens as a result of an escalating dispute between the two governments.

Instead, I sent TIAFI a donation of what amounted to my round-trip plane fare from Rome to Turkey. With my donation they purchased a heating stove for their center just as the weather turned cold. I am now working remotely with their volunteer coordinator to support their social media and marketing efforts.

16 THE VOLUNTEER September 2020

Backpacks and purses that the Syrian women have been trained to make in TIAFI’s workshop are available for a donation to the group. The Turkish government forbids them to be sold as TIAFI isn’t recognized as a legal entity. This helps the Syrian women to cover some of their living expenses. Hopefully the refugee families will be able to return to Syria once it is safe.

Inspired by the story of Esther Farquhar’s Gota de Leche, I found a sense of agency I’d lacked. I’m now confident in my ability to effect a small change or give relief, where before I felt baffled about how to begin.

The United States and the European Union have almost completely stopped accepting refugees from Syria and Africa because of political backlash. The refugee crisis has grown to epic scale. Many families wait in squalid conditions in Turkey and Greece, unable to officially relocate to a new home and unable to return home. Not since World War II have so many been displaced. The work of Friends in Spain points the way to our power to relieve the suffering of others.

There are ways each of us can give comfort to refugees. The easiest is by financially supporting the many NGOs working in the region. Some of the larger ones are listed at USAID Center for International Disaster Information’s website: cidi. org/syria-ngos. I found TIAFI through a social media search.

Facebook has a number of pages that are a clearinghouse for refugee volunteer activities. Many of the smaller groups welcome students and adult volunteers for short work stays in the refugee camps in Greece, where it’s easy to travel. It is always advisable to thoroughly research an organization before committing time and money.

Camilla Meek lives and works in Durham, North Carolina. She remembers seeing machine gun-armed Franco regime soldiers stationed in front of public buildings while visiting Madrid in the early 1970s. Her early literary influences were Pilar in For Whom the Bell Tolls and Gertrude Stein. For Camilla, writing is a way to bring extraordinary human qualities to light. Special thanks to Don Davis of the AFSC Archives.

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Robeson in the 1940's. Photo by Gordon Parks.

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USF34-013362-C.

Racial Justice, Then and Now: Paul Robeson’s Antifascist Legacy

By Lindsey Swindall

Paul Robeson’s anti-fascist activism sought full freedom for oppressed people around the world. The singer consistently spoke against segregation and racial violence in the U.S. as well as colonialism in Africa. Anti-fascism impugns white supremacy, then and now.

A

s police violence against Black Americans has sparked protests around the country, the term anti-fascism has returned to the headlines.

But rather than confronting the reality of institutionalized white supremacy, some on the political right prefer to fuel fear for a loose coalition called “antifa,” which Stanislav Vysotsky has described as a “decentralized collection of individual activists” who use “mostly nonviolent methods” and define fascism as “the violent enactment and enforcement of biological and social inequalities between people.”

Anti-fascism, which has long had an uneasy relationship with mainstream politics in the United States, has been historically important in the fight for racial justice in this country. The Black artist/ activist Paul Robeson, for example, formed an independent anti-fascist viewpoint that was grounded in full freedom for oppressed people around the world. He consistently spoke against segregation and racial violence in the U.S. as well as colonialism in Africa. Anti-fascism, in Robeson’s view, impugns white supremacy, the system that helps secure most of the country’s power and wealth in the hands of the few.

Much as the political right today evokes anti-fascism as a supposed threat to take attention away from anti-racist protests, in

the post-World War II years, anti-communist hysteria and fear of anti-fascists, served to distract attention from racial injustice. Portraying anti-fascists as part the communist “menace” obscured their role as supporters in the struggle against race discrimination.

In a 1950 speech, Robeson clarified where the root of the problem lay. What is the greatest “menace” in the lives of African Americans? he asked the audience.

“Ask the weeping mother whose son is the latest victim of police brutality.” The menace, he said, are not anti-fascists or communists, but “white supremacy and all its vile works.”

Robeson’s anti-fascism had reached maturity by the 1950s, but it was the Spanish Civil War that helped solidify his perspective.

A world-famous vocalist and actor by the 1930s, Robeson spent much of that decade performing and making films in the U.K., Europe, and Soviet Union. In 1934, he had an encounter with Nazi soldiers in a train station that confronted him with the climate of “hatred, fear and suspicion” that was fueled by fascism. By 1937, his anti-fascism coalesced around the war in Spain. At a rally for Spanish refugees in London, Robeson delivered what became one of the most iconic speeches of his career. He argued passionately against fascism and pointed out that “because fascism fights to destroy the culture which society has created” September 2020 THE VOLUNTEER 17

Robeson's grave at Ferncliff cemetery in Hartsdale, NY is engraved with part of his 1937 speech. Photo by author.

Robeson maintained his anti-fascism even as U.S. politics began to portray communism, not fascism, as the greatest threat to democracy. the artist “cannot hold himself aloof” from the conflict. “The artist must take sides” in the fight for freedom over slavery.

“I have made my choice,” Robeson affirmed, “I had no alternative.” This speech signaled a turning point in Robeson’s career. Afterward, he publicly wedded his anti-fascist politics with his artistic career and used his celebrity as a platform for social justice advocacy.

The next year, Robeson traveled to Spain and sang for soldiers near the front lines. (This visit has been well documented in The Volunteer, June 2009.) He was moved by the commitment of the international volunteers in Spain, especially the African Americans he met. He also learned about the Black commander of the battalion, Oliver Law, whom he hoped to one day honor in film. In an interview, Robeson clarified that his support for the Spanish anti-fascist cause stemmed, in part, from his racial heritage. “I belong to an oppressed race,” he said, “discriminated against, one that could not live if fascism triumphed in the world.” Fascism was a threat not only as a destroyer of culture, but also as a spreader of the false idea of racial superiority. “My father was a slave,” he added, “and I do not want my children to become slaves.”

In 1939, as World War II commenced, Robeson returned to the United States. Once the nation officially joined the global war against fascism, following Pearl Harbor, anti-fascism became a widely embraced political position. Activists in the Black community advocated a broad interpretation of anti-fascism that was sometimes referred to as the “Double Victory”: not only over Axis powers but also over segregation at home. Robeson’s anti-fascism went a step further, adding the dismantling of Western colonialism—ending all forms of race discrimination.

Robeson worked tirelessly for the war effort in the early 1940s at war bond rallies and even performing in the first desegregated U.S.O. show for troops. In a 1943 speech, he stressed that African Americans must view their struggle for rights as part of the “global struggle against fascism.” In another speech that year, he connected African Americans with the colonized peoples in Africa, noting that “their freedom is our freedom.”

He closed a speech on Black Americans by stressing that “we recognize the fact that our enemies are not only Germany, Italy and Japan; they are all the forces of oppression, intolerance, insecurity and injustice ….” His comprehensive understanding of anti-fascism was a reminder that Germany was not the only country with policies of racial supremacy.

Robeson maintained his anti-fascism even as U.S. politics began to portray communism, not fascism, as the greatest threat to democracy. Racial violence increased after WWII but was often ignored as anti-communist hysteria gripped the nation.

Robeson, incensed that Black veterans were being lynched, 18 THE VOLUNTEER September 2020

led a delegation to speak with President Harry Truman in 1946. But the president replied that it was not politically expedient to act against lynching.

When, at a press conference following the meeting, Robeson was asked about his political affiliation, he described himself as an anti-fascist, noting that he had “opposed Fascism in other countries and saw no reason why he should not oppose Fascism in the United States.” That same year, when he testified before a California committee on Un-American Activities, Robeson once again characterized his politics as “anti-Fascist and independent.”

In 1956, Robeson was called to testify before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC). By then he had lived through a decade of blacklisting and repression because of his political advocacy. The tone of that testimony was more charged then ten years before. When the committee asked why he did not simply move to Russia or another country, Robeson shot back: “Because my father was a slave and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here and have a part of it just like you. And no Fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?” The committee tried to trap Robeson, but he turned the discussion back to racial justice and anti-fascism. Robeson, knowing that the HUAC had been formed by segregationist Democrats like John Rankin and had refused to investigate KKK violence, kept the issue of race at the heart of his testimony, not allowing it to be diluted by anti-communist probing.

The antifa hysteria today fuels fears of violence against white property. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof noted in June 2020 that “antifa panics are where racism and hysteria intersect.” Much in the same way, in the 1950s hysteria was fueled by stoking fears of communist infiltration and casting civil rights activists as communist agitators. Rather than examining racism, people focused on an internal communist menace that never materialized. Today, the perceived threat of antifa prevent some from addressing problems of police brutality and systemic racism. Or worse, as Mark Bray warns, “the allegation that destruction is being wrought by antifa threatens to expand government and police repression to everyone out on the streets.” We should, like Robeson, remember the connection between anti-fascism and racial justice and not be deterred in the fight against the long-standing foe: white supremacy.

Lindsey Swindall teaches at Stevens Institute of Technology.

She is the author of Paul Robeson: A Life of Activism and Art and The Path to the Greater, Freer, Truer World: Southern Civil Rights and Anticolonialism, 1937-1955.

Chato Galante in a still from The Silence of Others.

Chato Galante (1948-2020)

By Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar

José María “Chato” Galante passed away on March 29, 2020, in Madrid, Spain, due to coronavirus, following treatment for lung cancer. Chato was a lifelong activist fighting for justice for victims of Spain’s Franco dictatorship and was one of the protagonists in The Silence of Others, by Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar.

“Look for the big guy with really white hair. His name is Chato.”

That’s how we met José María “Chato” Galante in Madrid in 2012, early in the seven-year journey of making The Silence of Others. Chato, then 64, was helping to organize an international lawsuit that would attempt to prosecute crimes against humanity committed during Spain’s 40-year dictatorship. As Chato would later retell with a mischievous smile, at the time, the lawsuit had hardly gotten any press, so when we showed up to that meeting with a big camera and a long boompole, everyone stared at us in disbelief. It was a moment when nothing that would later unfold seemed possible. It also marked the beginning of our journey with this white-haired man who would become our friend.

In 1969, one of Chato’s friends, Enrique Ruano, who had been organizing fellow university students against Spain’s dictatorship, died at the hands of the Spanish police’s “political brigade.” The killing galvanized a generation, and Chato decided to dedicate his life to fighting the dictatorship. As a result of his activism, Chato was jailed and tortured— experiences that marked his life forever.

The Silence of Others picks up the story 40 years later, as Chato and dozens of other victims and activists come together to demand the justice that they were denied in the 1970s, when

Spain transitioned to democracy. Over six years of shooting, we would often find ourselves at Chato’s place, filming him working tirelessly for the cause, strategizing with the lawyers about the lawsuit, preparing testimony, and so much more.

Chato soon became accustomed to the camera in front of Almudena’s eyes, and Robert at boompole distance. As our trust grew, Chato would share wisdom from decades of activism and we learned much history and strategy, but above all, we came to admire how Chato had truly built a life living by his core beliefs. Two years before we finished the film, Chato was one of the first to embrace the possibility that it could be a tool for impact, and joined us at Good Pitch (a forum to support potential high impact documentaries) in Stockholm to make an emotional appeal: "In jail, we political prisoners used our spoons to dig an escape tunnel that would lead us to freedom, he related. "Now this film must become our spoon… But we can’t do it alone. This is the moment when we need all of you to pick up your spoons. We need your help so that millions of people see this film and we can break this impunity.” The audience rose in a standing ovation and, in that moment, surrounded by people who had come together because of their belief in the power of film to transform societies, Chato got his first taste of what would one day come with the film.

When The Silence of Others premiered in Spain—where it was eventually seen by more than a million people and won the September 2020 THE VOLUNTEER 19

Goya (Spain’s Academy Award)—people began to stop Chato on the street, recognizing his white hair immediately, to share stories of suffering or resistance, or simply to give him a hug. In these moments he would savor that the impunity of torturers and other perpetrators was now widely known, and that people were starting to see it not just as “the victims’ problem” but as something affecting society as a whole. But his hard work of activism never ceased.

Chato travelled internationally with the film, with boundless energy, to seize the opportunity of bringing the discussion to other societies – and he never, ever forgot the International Brigades. At Sheffield Doc/Fest he visited the Plaque remembering the International Brigades and deposited flowers.

At Toronto’s Hot Docs (North America’s biggest documentary festival) he said, deeply moved, “the Brigades represented the best of humankind”. After the screening an older lady approached him. Crying, she told him her name was Mora. “My father named me Mora because that was where he was stationed in Spain as a brigadista”. They embraced with tenderness.

Judith Montell (1930-2020)

Once we asked him how long we would fight. He responded: “Until we win. With the spoon in hand.”

Her other work includes A Home on the Range, about the Jewish Petaluma community of chicken farmers in northern California, and a favorite at the SF Jewish Film Festival. Her last film, In the Image: Palestinian Women Capture the Occupation (2014) was made when Judy was 83. It was inspired by the work of B’Tselem, the human rights organization in Israel/Palestine, of which her daughter Jessica was the director at the time.

Hasta siempre, white-haired warrior. We will carry on your spoon.

Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar are the directors/producers of The Silence of Others, which won the 2019 Goya for Best Documentary Feature (Spain’s Academy Award) and was shortlisted for Best Documentary Feature for the 91st Academy Awards. Their previous film, Made in L.A., won an Emmy. This article originally appeared in March 2020 in the online platform for Documentary magazine, published by the International Documentary Association, a nonprofit media arts organization based in Los Angeles.”

Judith Montell, prize-winning documentary filmmaker and long-time member of the ALBA Board of Governors, passed away on May 23 after a long illness.

Her best-known film was surely Forever Activists: Stories of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1991. She also directed shorter films dealing with the Lincoln veterans, including The Return of the Brigade, which focused on the 1996 reunions in Spain, as well as documentary footage of the dedication of the national monument to the Lincoln Brigade in San Francisco in 2008.

Besides her important films, Judy was active in the Bay Area post of the Veterans of the Lincoln Brigade for many years. It was her friendship with the vets that made her work accessible to a large public. She was a member of ALBA’s Honorary Board at the time of her death.

Film Review: What Can’t Be Seen

Mientras dure la guerra / While at War, dir. Alejandro Amenábar, 2019; La trinchera infinita / The Endless Trench, dir. Jon Garaño, Aitor Arregi, and Jose Mari Goenaga, 2019.

Reviewed by Jo Labanyi Spain’s memory boom of the last few decades has produced a flood of new films on the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath that invite the public to identify with the defeated Republicans. Unfortunately, many adopt a glossy, heritagemovie-like aesthetic while they simplify history into a fairy-tale plot of good guys vs. bad. The two films under review here both manage to avoid these traps. While at War, by blockbusting director Alejandro Amenábar, charts philosopher Miguel de Unamuno’s political and emotional roller-coaster ride during the final months of his life, as his initial support of Franco’s July 1936 military coup turned to a sharp condemnation. The Endless Trench, by Aitor Arregi, Jon Garaño, and Jose Mari Goenaga, tells the story of a modest town councilor in an Andalusian village who escapes 20 THE VOLUNTEER September 2020

persecution from the Francoists by holing up behind a false wall in his home for 33 years, from the beginning of the war in 1936 until a 1969 amnesty.

Both movies have won many awards in Spain and both boast wonderful cinematography and impeccable period sets and costumes. Yet they are anything but glossy. Both films make a smart use of darkness to show what cannot be seen. In The Endless Trench, it cloaks the restricted vision of the holed-up protagonist. In While at War, which attempts the difficult task of representing ideas through a visual medium, darkness has engulfed Unamuno’s anxiety-ridden home and the institutions that cramp freedom of expression.

Karra Elejalde as Unamuno

For Amenábar, this isn’t the first time he’s risked making a film with a philosopher protagonist. His English-language Agora (2009) focused on the fourth-century Alexandrian woman philosopher Hypatia. Unamuno—known for his austerity—is an even less sexy subject for a movie. (In Agora, Amenábar could at least cast Rachel Weisz as Hypatia.) Still, Karra Elejalde’s Unamuno is brilliantly convincing. Much of the film consists of Unamuno’s arguments with Republican friends as he stubbornly clings to his belief that Franco’s coup will restore order. (Having raised the Republican flag on Salamanca’s City Hall as a Republican deputy in April 1931, in the years following he had become progressively alienated by what he saw as the Republic’s exclusionary politics.) The film’s dispassionate representation of Unamuno makes us aware of his unvoiced feelings, but its greatest strength are perhaps the women: Unamuno’s daughter María, who argues back at him, as well as the wives of his arrested friends, who are largely responsible for making him recognize that he was wrong.

Unamuno famously promoted contradiction as a way of life, and in the DVD extras Amenábar explains that he wanted to make the point that a debate between opposing positions is healthy in and of itself. Still, the film fails to properly explain the background to Unamuno’s initial support for Franco’s coup. It does a better job showing his disillusionment with the crassness of the military leaders and his painful realization, as more and more of his friends are shot or arrested, that he got things wrong. The plot predictably culminates on October 12, 1936, when Unamuno, as Rector of the University of Salamanca, takes advantage of his Día de la Raza speech—a ceremony attended by some of the coup’s military leaders—to denounce Nationalist violence in no uncertain terms. In this scene the film omits a central detail, probably because it would have been complicated to explain. Every year, Unamuno would use the occasion to honor the Philippine intellectual José Rizal, who was shot by the Spanish colonial authorities in 1896. According to Unamuno’s biographers Colette and Jean-Claude Rabaté, it was this tribute that provoked the Nationalist general Millán Astray, as a teenage hero of the colonial war in the Philippines, to jump up and interrupt Unamuno with the infamous cry “Long live death! Death to intellectuals!”

Unlike Amenábar’s film, The Endless Trench is not a drama of ideas, although it does depict the invisible and mostly unvoiced thought processes of its protagonist, Higinio, the sole surviving councilor in an Andalusian village where all the other Republican councilors are shot by the Nationalists.

The film’s length, at 2 hours 21 minutes, makes the point that 33 years in hiding is a very long time indeed. And this film, too, is a tribute to the strength of women: Higinio’s wife Rosa keeps him going, fending off harassment and earning a living as a seamstress. While the couple’s marital tensions help ward off sentimentalism, the movie also avoids high drama. When Higinio finally emerges into daylight, after initially mistrusting the news about the 1969 amnesty, there is no heroic welcome. In fact, no one notices him; he’s simply a man forgotten. The same restraint is evident in

the film’s soundtrack, which relies less on music than on a sophisticated array of noises, which are all Higinio has to figure out what’s going on beyond his hiding place. Several sequences are shot in near or complete darkness, while intense use of point-of-view shots alternate with extreme close-ups of Higinio’s eyes peeping through the cracks in the entrance to his hideout.

The story is punctuated by a series of thought-provoking intertitles. The sequence titled “Ally,” for example, juxtaposes radio reports on Eisenhower’s 1959 visit to Franco’s Spain— betraying the Allies’ World War II fight against fascism— with the alliance Higinio establishes with the gay couple who use his house for their trysts while Rosa is away. Higinio keeps their secret in exchange for food. The point is clear: Francoism forced both the republican defeated and sexual dissidents into the closet.

The Endless Trench, now available on Netflix, has deservedly been a greater audience success. But While at War is an uncomfortable reminder that the story of the Spanish Civil War cannot be simplified into a mere two positions— Republicans versus Nationalists. There were many more in between.

Jo Labanyi is Professor Emerita at NYU. Her books include the co-authored Cultural History of Modern Literatures in Spain (Polity, 2021). She is working on a cultural history of the Spanish Civil War.

September 2020 THE VOLUNTEER 21

Book review

Christopher J. Castañeda and Montse Feu, editors. Writing Revolution: Hispanic Anarchism in the United States. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019. 322 pp.

Reviewed by Morris Brodie This new collection edited by Christopher J. Castañeda and Montse Feu fills a substantial historiographical gap in the English language on Hispanic anarchism in the United States.

Several books on the American anarchist movement have appeared in recent years, but none have devoted so much space to this particular diasporic radical community. The book follows the trajectory of the movement from its earliest days in the 1880s through to the late twentieth century, interspersing the lives of notable figures with important national and worldwide events such as the Haymarket Affair, the Cuba Libre movement and the Spanish Civil War. The focus is on the importance of Spanish-language periodicals—and individuals associated with them—in forming and sustaining the transnational networks that have been so important to anarchism since the late nineteenth century.

Readers of The Volunteer will be drawn to the book’s final part on the Spanish Civil War and exile, but to overlook the previous sections would be a mistake. The collection is sprawling in its ambition, with chapters ranging from discussions of early Spanish Republicanism and important but largely forgotten figures to analyses of individual newspapers and magazines.

Despite this conglomeration of topics, the book flows easily, thanks in part to its chronological and thematic organization. Several chapters expand on figures introduced earlier in the book, highlighting the role of individuals in maintaining the movement. Although its subtitle suggests a focus on the United States, the book is far broader in its geographical remit, taking the Spanish language as its starting point. The result is a dismantling of the borders that sometimes frame radical history. In fact, one of the book’s strengths is how it places the experience of Spanish-speaking anarchists within the wider American and global anarchist movement.

An interesting theme that emerges from the collection is how often Spanish anarchists living in Spain idealized the United States and its supposedly liberal democratic system.

Immigrant Spanish anarchists were quick to correct this rose-tinted view of the young republic. Working conditions in the US were not noticeably better than those back on the peninsula, as shown by Kirk Shaffer’s contribution on Anglo racism against activists in the cigar factories of Tampa. There are surprises, too. One of my favorite chapters is Jesse Cohn’s account of a ‘global anarchist network’ in the heart of the 22 THE VOLUNTEER September 2020

Rust Belt in Steubenville, Ohio. This discovery challenges our perceived notions of Hispanic anarchism as primarily a coastal (East, West and Gulf ) phenomenon.

Castañeda has two chapters in the collection, both of which focus on anarchists’ attitudes to developments outside the US: the Cuba Libre movement of the 1890s and the Mexican Revolution. The former is an illuminating account of the tensions between Cuban-born (creole) and Spanish-born (peninsular) activists in New York City. Some Cuban nationalists accused peninsular anarchists of prioritizing their own wages over independence, a claim that José Cayetamo Campos (a Cubanborn anarchist and editor of El Despertar) rejected outright.

The chapter raises interesting questions about the relationship between anarchism, nationalism and anti-imperialism.

Co-editor Feu has an equally thought-provoking contribution examining the Spanish anti-fascist exile newspaper España Libre and its anarchist editor Jesús González Malo. Feu’s discussion of ‘reformist’ anarchism after defeat in Spain is a counterpoint to those representations of anarchism as a sectarian, ultra-revolutionary sect. The chapter on the Spanish Civil War itself is a well-argued piece by Michel Otayek that looks at the propaganda networks between Spain and the US during the conflict. Information exchanges between the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) in Spain and those across the Atlantic were fraught with difficulty, although I think Otayek is slightly too harsh in his treatment of the German Augustin Souchy, the head of foreign anarchist propaganda in Barcelona. The United Libertarian Organizations (ULO), the hub of US anarchist solidarity on the East Coast, initially sent its request for newspapers to the wrong address in Barcelona, which is symptomatic of a degree of disorganization on both sides of the pond. Images of some of the propaganda produced by the CNT for consumption overseas included in the chapter are a particularly welcome addition.

The final chapter is an extended eulogy of Federico Arcos, a veteran of the Libertarian Youth (FIJL) during the civil war who moved to Canada in 1952. He later became a muchloved figure for the Detroit anarchist movement across the river from his adopted hometown of Windsor in Ontario.

One memorable passage from this chapter by David Watson is when he describes Arcos’ desire to move forward from the civil war, unlike some of his comrades “whose watches seemed to have stopped when they crossed the Ebro River.”

The anarchist movement spent decades rhetorically refighting the battles of the civil war, which served to ossify the conflict as an almost mythical ‘last stand’ between anarchism and the militarized capitalist state. This book shows that Hispanic anarchism in the US was far more than simply the civil war and its fallout—it was an enduring network of activists from an expansive geographical range, one that contributed an important, if perhaps forgotten, part to American working-class life and culture.

Morris Brodie is a historian at Queen’s University Belfast.

His new book Transatlantic Anarchism during the Spanish Civil War and Revolution, 1936-1939: Fury Over Spain was recently published by Routledge.

CONTRIBUTIONS RECEIVED FROM MAY 1 TO JULY 31 Benefactor ($5,000 and above) Puffin Foundation, Ltd.

Sponsor ($1,000-$4,999) Ruth & Jacob Epstein Foundation • Josephine M. Labanyi • James and Ellyn Polshek • Len & Nancy Tsou In Memory of Wen-Rao Chen (aka Dong Hong Yick)

Supporter ($250-$999) Joshua Barnett • Christopher Brooks • Peter N. Carroll & Jeannette Ferrary In Memory of Perry Rosenstein • David Elsila • Alan Entin In Memory of Bernard Entin • Joan & Allan Fisch • Henry Kahn • Francis Nash & Sherron R. Biddle In Memory of Jack Penrod • Anne Taibleson In Honor of Judith Montell • Nancy Wallach In Memory of Hy Wallach • Jason Wood

Contributor ($100-$249) Fred Blair In Memory of John Clarence Blair • Jorgia Bordofsky In Memory of Joseph Siegel • Bunny & Jeff Dell In Memory of Joseph & Pauline Rosmarin • Rory Flanagan In Memory of Terry Flanagan • Paul Friedlander In Memory of Paul Sigel • Lola Gellman In Memory of Isaiah Gellman • Lisa McGurrin In Memory of Bill Bailey and Vincent Lossowski • Geraldine Nichols & Andres Avellaneda In Memory of Muriel Avellaneda • Duna Penn In Memory of Ted (Penn) Pniewski • Julie Eva Penrod-Glenn In Memory of John A. Penrod • Barry Yormack In Honor of Milton Cooper

Friend ($1-$99) Everett Aison In Memory of Irving Fajans • Paul Baicich In Memory of Saul Wellman • Mary Lee Baranger In Honor of Lini De Vries • Jane Bjoze In Memory of Jack Bjoze •Marion Burns In Memory of Harry Randall •Claude Chaney In Honor of Nicolas Niederman •Martin Comack In Memory of Buenaventura Durruti •David Warren & Susan Crawford In Memory of Alvin Warren, Maury Colow & Arthur Munday • Marc Goldstein In Memory of Maynard Goldstein • Julio Granda In Memory of Luis & Maria Granda • Linda S. Grossman In Memory of Dr. Aaron Hilkevitch • George Haber In Memory of Louis Stoloff & Rose Haber •Timothy F. Harding In Memory of Abe Osheroff • Kevin Joyce & Kate Shore In Honor of Coleman Joyce • Ethel and Keith Kirk In Memory of Hilda Roberts • Richard P. Layh In Memory of Herb Rathman • Leonard J. Lehrman In Memory of Gabriel Jackson, Nathaniel S. Lehrman, and Perry Rosenstein • Jean Kathleen Ranallo In Memory of John Hovan of Providence • Joanne & August Ricca In Memory of Carl Geiser • Suzanne & Alan Jay Rom In Memory of Samuel S. Schiff and Isabelle P Schiff • Fred Siegel In Memory of Joseph Siegel •Rita Spiller In Memory of Samuel Spiller • Luise S. Stone In Memory of Ely J. Sack • Eric Tabb In Memory of H.L. Tabb • Robert H. & Lois Whealey In Honor of Angel Viñas

Did you know?

ALBA’s new website makes donating easier than ever. Make a one-time gift or set up a monthly donation. All donations are tax-deductible. Go to www.alba-valb.org/donate September 2020 THE VOLUNTEER 23

ONLINE SCREENING OF THE

INTERNATIONALE

Join us on August 30 (time TBA) for an online screening and discussion of Peter Miller’s documentary The Internationale. The film chronicles the history of the song—which was written by Eugene Pottier in 1871 at the fall of the Paris Commune— from before to the end of the Cold War. It includes performances and interviews with musicians and activists from around the world, including Billy Bragg and Pete Seeger.

CELEBRATION OF THE SAN FRANCISCO MONUMENT Following its successful online spring gala, ALBA invites you to join a live-streamed celebration of the Lincoln Brigade Monument in San Francisco, which has been recently restored. Speakers include Isabel Allende, Bill Fletcher, Walter Hood, Susan Schwartzenberg, Rafael Jesús González, and Harvey Smith. With various musical performances.

ALBA Online Monument Celebration September 12, 5pm EDT/2pm PDT More information at www.alba-valb.org Due to the pandemic restrictions, there will be no physical gathering at the monument.

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.

Each edition of The Volunteer costs $7,500 to publish. Would you consider donating at this amount to cover the cost of one edition? Your name would be prominently displayed (with your approval) in that edition, as the single donor who made that edition possible.

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.

Please know that we appreciate every gift, large or small, that comes our way. Thank you for your generosity and your support of The Volunteer.