On October 14 and 15, ALBA's Prof. Anthony Geist will be at Casa Aboy in San Juan to screen his documentary on the Lincoln Brigade, Souls Without Borders, and to open ALBA's traveling exhibit They Still Draw Pictures: Children's Art in Wartime from the Spanish Civil War to Kosovo. More information
Prize-winning graphic novelist Paco Roca has just released El ángel de la retirada (The Angel of the Retreat), EFE reports, a historical novel based on a script by the novelist Serguei Duonovetz set among second-generation exiles in post-war France. The main character, Victoria Valiente, has to decide whether or not to return to...
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October 16 is the date, the Museum of the City of New York the place. Order tickets here. Download the press release with all the details here.
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Among the buzz-generating new films at the San Sebastián festival last week was the Catalan film Pa negre (Black Bread), by Agustí Villaronga (1953), set right after the Civil War. Indiewire reports:
“Bread” has one of the most jaw-dropping prologues in recent memory, in which a horse-drawn cart is pushed off...
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El País's Sunday magazine published a large spread on the Mexican Suitcase yesterday. Read it here.
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Herman Scheerboom, the last living Dutch veteran of the Spanish Civil War, passed away in the second week of September. Born in 1912, he was wounded at Teruel in January 1938 (shot in the head), and captured at Villalba. When he was finally freed in 1943, he immediately joined the fight against the Nazis,...
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With one unprecedented dissenting vote, the Spanish Supreme Court has rejected a second appeal filed by the defense of Judge Baltasar Garzón, who is being tried for allegedly overstepping his judicial boundaries when he opened a case to investigate crimes against humanity committed under Franco's rule, in October 2008. Público reports that...
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In the New York Times, which also includes a photo album, a slide show, and an interactive feature, Holland Cotter writes about Capa, Chim, and Taro:
They were ... committed to a new style of wartime journalism, which found photographers embedding themselves right in the center of combat...
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ALBA Board members Antonio Muñoz Molina and John Sayles today shared the front page of El País, the most widely read newspaper of the Spanish-speaking world. Muñoz Molina, speaking at the Hay Festival in Segovia, criticized Spaniards' lack of knowledge about their own past. Sayles, meanwhile, screened his new film Amigo, about...
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Sparking media attention world-wide, the International Center of Photography in New York will be opening its doors tomorrow for the exhibit featuring a selection of more than 4,000 negatives of Spanish Civil War material photographed by Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and Chim (David Seymour). The two-volume exhibit catalog--which features essays by several...
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What Was a Young Dutch Pilot Doing in Civil-War Spain? Saturday, March 20, 1937. Farmers at work in a vineyard near Narbonne, in southern France, see a Dutch plane circling for hours. At four in the afternoon, a car arrives whose driver unfolds a white sheet. At this signal, the plane lands on a...
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Carmelo Delgado, a Puerto Rican law student in Madrid, fought as a militiaman on the Republican side until he was taken prisoner by the rebel forces and shot. Can his remains be recovered? In their moving graphic novel El abismo del olvido, which deals with the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Paco Roca...
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As Patricia Schechter dug into her family’s history, she uncovered one of the untold stories of the Spanish labor movement: an Andalusian strike in early 1936 grounded in a rich legacy of disciplined pacifism and sturdy worker cooperatives. After the July 1936 military uprising that unleashed the Spanish Civil War, hundreds of men from...
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Vince Lossowski (1913-1984), who was born and raised in Rochester, New York, in a Polish working-class family, served with the International Brigades from August 1937 until September 1938. In 1942, he was recruited for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), along with half a dozen of his fellow Lincoln Brigade vets. During World War...
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The roots of fascism lay right here in the United States. In fact, anti-Blackness is a persistent feature of fascism in all its forms. But there is a long lineage of Black antifascists that still have things to teach us. When the House Un-American Activities Committee was first created, in May 1938, its chair,...
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Despite their name, the famous International Brigades of Spain’s Republican Army included thousands of Spanish soldiers who served alongside the foreign volunteers. Among them was César Orquín, an anarchist from Valencia who served as a commissar in the Lincoln Battalion. Details of his extraordinary life, long shrouded in mystery and scandal, have recently come...
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Over the many years I spent researching the presence of the International Brigades in the town of Vic and its surroundings, in northern Catalonia, I’d always been curious about the case of Simon Bulka, a medical captain, and his wife, the nurse Chrissie Wallace, both from Scotland, who were assigned to the International Hospital...
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The lives of Ruth and Haya Meites, two sisters who left Jewish Palestine in order to help Republican Spain in its struggle against fascism, illustrate the level of international women’s participation in the Spanish Civil War—and its limits.
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“Oh, you were a premature antifascist,” the chair of the Yale Classics department replied to Bernard Knox when, during a job interview in 1946, Knox told him about his stint with the International Brigades preceding his US army service during World War II. “I was taken aback,” Knox wrote later. “If you were not...
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Contemporary Spanish photographers are finding new ways to return to the memory of the Civil War, departing from the sober documentary approach that was dominant until recently.
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ALBA's project to provide a complete list of the more than 2,800 individuals who left from U.S. territory to fight with the Spanish Republic
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