Journey Through the Spanish Civil War, by S. L. Shneiderman. Translated from the Yiddish by Deborah A. Green. Amherst, MA.: White Goat Press, 2024. 139 pp.

Flocks of journalists descended on Spain during the Civil War, shipping dispatches off around the world. Some of these reports quickly emerged as books, freezing yesterday’s news into durable documents. Herbert Matthews of the New York Times, published Two Wars and More to Come in 1938; Vincent Sheean’s Not Peace but a Sword appeared early in 1939.

Shmuel Leyb Shneiderman, who was born in Eastern Poland in 1906 and moved to Paris in 1933, held press passes from Yiddish newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic. (He emigrated to the United States in 1940.) His book Krig in Shpanyen, now translated by Deborah A. Green as Journey through the Spanish Civil War: The Hinterlands, was first published in Warsaw in 1938. Although an introduction to the original Yiddish edition identifies Shneiderman as “the first Jewish war correspondent in Spain,” he was not the only one. Marion Greenspan, who wrote as James Hawthorne in the New Masses, arrived early in August 1936; Herbert Matthews of the New York Times, also Jewish, arrived in November. Jacob Soifer (Joe North to readers of the Daily Worker) came later. Still, none of these wrote as Jews to a Jewish audience in a Jewish language, as Shneiderman did.

The Hinterland of the subtitle (the word is the same in Yiddish) suggests the land “behind,” or away from a coastal metropolis. But in his dispatches, Shneiderman writes almost entirely from two cities, Barcelona and Valencia, both enlarged by the rush of refugees from Spain and elsewhere in Europe. The Hinterlands was supposed to be followed in 1939 by a second volume that would take the reader into combat. It never appeared.

In this volume we remain on the periphery of military action, but close to what Shneiderman regularly calls “the revolution.” He notes the difference in manners, clothing, popular education, religious practice, and services offered to refugees, from what a recent newcomer cautiously calls “the other side.” The observant journalist records the patterns of continuity and change that characterize the Spanish Republic. Trains continue to run, for example, but they dim their lights as they leave darkened stations. Brisk business at a winery whose Fascist owners have escaped to Italy generates much needed foreign revenue from the export market, while also providing wine for the Republican army. The Cordoníu champagne company was a very old enterprise, but its co-operative ownership was quite new.

Shneiderman’s ears perk up around Jewish involvement in the war. His attention is drawn by “the odd name of ‘Moysh,’ a Yiddish name” on a worker at a cooperative textile mill. Elsewhere we meet Shaya Kinderman, a Jewish tailor who arrived in Barcelona in 1935; now he’s a soldier who mentors “newly arrived volunteers from all corners of the world” in German, French, and Yiddish. A Jewish watchmaker from Kyiv fixes machine guns. The Dutch “queen of the machine gun,” Fanny Schoonheyt, is one of the many Jews who have come to Spain to join the International Brigades. The library of the Benedictine abbey at Monserrat, he notes, holds “ancient Talmudic tracts … next to old Latin folios” along with Yiddish kitsch “still being sold on Nalewki Street in Warsaw.”

In the early 1930s, Spain had fewer Jews than any country in Europe. A chapter on “The Jews of Spain” tells the grim history of the Inquisition and expulsion in the fifteenth century followed by its ironic sequel—the recent arrival of thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing the rest of Europe. The Catalan leader Lluís Companys assures Shneiderman that “the doors of my country and the doors of my heart are open to the Jews.” No one was saying this on Franco’s side.

But it is not simply his attention to Jewish news that distinguishes S. L. Shneiderman from other journalists in Spain. I am inclined to read the line that Deborah Green translates as “the first Jewish war correspondent”—in Yiddish, “dem ershtn yidishn krigs-reporter”—as the first Yiddish correspondent, that is, the first writer imbued with the spirit of Yiddish language and literature. There were other Yiddish journalists in Spain, and long before the war in Spain Sholom Aleichem’s fictional character Menakhem Mendl writes letters home to his wife, Sheyne Sheyndl, about the First Balkan War of 1912.

It’s hard not to smile when a squeamish Shneiderman finds himself sitting next to a Jewish leather merchant at a bullfight in Barcelona. Shneiderman recounts how the merchant “squeezed his fist in anger” at the sight of repeated jabs from the picador—“and screamed in Yiddish, ‘They’re ruining my bull’s hide!’” Shneiderman greets his landsman “with a hearty ‘Sholem aleykhem!” and learns that the man, a furrier from Warsaw, buys the hides for shoe leather and would rather not see them punctured. Shaya Kinderman, the tailor who greets Brigadistas at the Hotel Colón in Barcelona, “is short and timid looking, and nobody would take him for the hero he is … with a Browning automatic in his hand.”

In Spain Shneiderman joined his brother-in-law, the great Jewish—I might say Yiddish—photographer David Seymour, known as “Chim,” whose photographs appeared in the original Yiddish edition as they do at the end of the current translation. The Yiddish text can be found online at the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA., which also runs the White Goat Press. Apart from a few minor slips—the Basque metropolis is Bilbao, not Balboa—the translation is graceful, faithful, and poetic where poetry is appropriate. The book makes splendid reading and a fine addition in English to the expansive library of first-hand reportage from the Spanish Civil War.

Joe Butwin is an Associate Professor Emeritus of the Department of English at the University of Washington. He is the author, most recently, of Salud y Shalom: Conversations with Jewish Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which will appear with the University of Illinois Press in March.