A piece in the LA Times calls attention to a series of events surrounding the legendary Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, who fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War:
In a serendipitous convergence of events, Siqueiros is having his biggest Southern California moment in decades: Construction of...
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At an improvised press conference last night, Judge Baltasar Garzón denounced the request from Supreme Court Justice Manuel Marchena to have the judicial police investigate his private bank accounts as "lacking all legal foundation" and "very harmful" to him and his family, El País reports. "I have nothing to hide," the Judge...
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Garry Wills and Jim Jump remember the SCW vet and classicist in obituaries for the New York Review of Books and The Independent. Wills:
It is not often that one has a professor who fought guerrilla wars in three different countries (Spain, France, and Italy). To a man left...
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The Earth Times reports:
Legal proceedings against Spanish top judge Baltasar Garzon widened Thursday as the Supreme Court ordered police to investigate his income in connection with corruption allegations against him. The order came two days after the court had confirmed that Garzon could be tried...
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Balada triste de trompeta, Alex de la Iglesia´s new film, partly set during the Spanish Civil War, which premiered at Toronto a couple of weeks ago, is now competing for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Today's El País features a positive review and an interview with the...
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The Spanish Supreme Court announced yesterday that, at a session held in late July, it voted to reject the appeal filed by Judge Baltasar Garzón in his trial for prevaricación, or knowingly overstepping his judicial boundaries, and not to allow Garzón's defense to call on other judges as expert witnesses on crimes without statute...
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EFE reports that former Chilean president Michele Bachelet, visiting in Spain last week, defended the need for historical memory and, in particular, the way in which Chile has dealt with its repressive past through judicial means--notably different from Spain. In response to a question about the controversy surrounding Judge Garzón's attempt to open...
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This morning's issue of El País highlights the exhibit "La Colonia, Spanish Immigrants in New York, 1898-1945," curated by ALBA's James D. Fernández and co-sponsored by ALBA and the K Juan Carlos I of Spain Center at NYU, opening September 17th at 6:15pm. Through some sixty family photographs and other objects, the show...
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A lengthy obituary by G.W. Bowersock in The New Republic:
Not far from Madrid he received a serious wound to his neck and right shoulder that brought him close to death. He later recalled that as the blood drained out of him he had felt full of rage that he was...
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EITB reports:
A court in Argentina has reopened an investigation into killings committed during the Spanish Civil War and the early years of the Franco dictatorship, such as human rights groups and families of victims requested, court officials reported this week. The court overturned a previous...
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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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We talk about the “return” of Picasso’s Guernica to Spain, even though that massive painting had never been here before its “repatriation” in 1981. The magnificent show “Ben Shahn: On Non-Conformity” curated by Laura Katzman and on display until February 26 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, elicits a similar sense:...
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Richard Rothman is Special Pro Bono Counsel to Weil Law Firm, where he previously served as co-head of Complex Commercial Litigation. In 2023, Rich was honored with the New York Law Journal’s prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award. In his forthcoming memoir Finding Ruby, Rothman explores the lives of two grandfathers of his who fought with...
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Mark L. Asquino (born in 1949) is a Foreign Service officer who retired in 2015 after a long career with postings including in Latin America, Europe, Central Asia, and Africa. Asquino’s memoir, Spanish Connections (2023), narrates a diplomatic journey that ended in Equatorial Guinea, Spain’s only former colony in sub-Saharan Africa, where he served...
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When IB vet Hans Maslowski visited his family in East Berlin in 1969, he gave them a Spanish fan signed in 1938 by 31 fellow antifascists. More than 50 years later, his great-nephew finds out who they were.
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Marianne Angermann, a young German biochemist, joined a Madrid lab in late 1935 to work with her compatriot Franz Bielschowsky, a Jewish refugee who’d been there since 1933. When the war broke out the following year, both decided stay in Spain and serve the Republican war effort as medical personnel. Marianne’s letters to her...
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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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