Dora Birnbach was born on Septmber 20, 1911 to a Jewish orthodox family in the town of Sokolov, Poland. She entered Spain on a small fishing boat with a doctor from Bulgaria, nurses from Poland and Romania, a former Canadian priest who brought money donated by Canadian workers for the Republic and a young...
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Peter Glazer's Radical Nostalgia: Spanish Civil War Commemoration in America (Rochester, 2005) has been reissued in paperback, just in time for the holiday season:

Radical Nostalgia asks and answers important questions about the meaning of memory and the politics of history. Peter Glazer's warm, empathetic, and insightful study of ceremonies...
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Europeana, the central digital repository for Europe's cultural heritage, features some 150 items related to the Spanish Civil War, including videos, posters, and photographs from the collections of the Imperial War Museum (UK), Televisió Catalana, and the Scottish Life Archive.
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Franco died on November 20th, 1975, and for almost thirty-five years following his death, his followers and sympathizers--including Falangists and other neofascists--gathered at his tomb in the Valley of the Fallen to pay him tribute. This year the Spanish government ordered their access to the tomb blocked, Público reports, officially for security...
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Richard Schickel reviews Jonathan Miles' The Dangerous Otto Katz: The Many Lives of a Soviet Spy for the Los Angeles Times:

He had at least 21 aliases. He insisted that he was briefly Marlene Dietrich's husband in 1920s Berlin, which was probably not so, though he was possibly...
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Sir Geoffrey Cox, the New Zealand journalist who covered the Spanish Civil War (see, among other places, Paul Preston's We Saw Spain Die, reviewed here), is featured this week at New Zealand History Online.
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Agence France-Presse has come out with a piece on the ten-year anniversary of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory:

Over the past 10 years, the association has opened some 150 mass graves and exhumed around 1,500 corpses in its quest for truth, which is emerging just as slowly,...
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Bethune Imagined, a play based on the life of Norman Bethune, the Canadian physician whose innovations in blood transfusion techniques during the Spanish Civil War were documented in the film Heart of Spain (Herbert Kline, 1937), has opened to mixed reviews:

When the world remembers Canadian icon Norman Bethune, it...
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Patti Smith, who last month performed in an ALBA benefit event alongside Pete Seeger and Guy Davis, has won the National Book Award with her memoir Just Kids, the BBC reports.
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The author of the acclaimed SCW novel Winter in Madrid (reviewed earlier in The Volunteer) speaks with The Guardian's Sarah Crown:

for Sansom, the novel was, and is, a personal endeavour. Studying the period, he was "appalled – by the way the Spanish people were treated by Franco's fascists, the...
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