The media are overflowing with commemorations of Ernest Hemingway, who killed himself fifty years ago. Here's Clancy Sigal in The Guardian:
In previous months, he had submitted to more than 15 punishing ECT (electroshock convulsive) treatments at the Mayo clinic, due, in part, to his fear that the FBI was shadowing him....
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Our friends at the International Brigade Memorial Trust across the pond send along their press release about the 75th anniversary celebration on July 2 in London:
75th anniversary tribute to Spanish Civil War volunteers
British volunteers of the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War will be remembered at 1pm on Saturday 2 July 2011 at the International...
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The legendary anti-Francoist Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura, whose classic Cría cuervos (1975) has just been theatrically re-released in the UK, speaks with The Guardian's Giles Tremlett:
Saura, now 79, has little cause to remember his own childhood with nostalgia, since he is old enough to remember the most painful event in Spain's recent history:...
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Picasso's daughter-in-law doesn't like the political nature of latest exhibit at the Picasso museum in Málaga. The Independent's Andrew Birch covers the story:
The new show, "Viñetas en el frente" (Cartoons on the front line), is unashamedly partisan, consisting of Republican posters and cartoons from the Spanish Civil War, and famous anti-Nazi...
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The July issue of In These Times features a long excerpt of the speech Judge Garzón gave at ALBA's annual event in New York after accepting the first ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism. The excerpt will be available online on June 28.
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Our friends at the International Brigade Memorial Trust are organizing a commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the creation of the International Brigades, on July 2, 2011, at 12:30pm at the Jubilee Gardens IB Memorial, featuring music and speakers. For more information see the flyer (pdf).
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The Tate Modern's Marko Daniel--co-curator of Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape, up until September--blogs on Miró's Still Life with an Old Shoe, often considered to be the Catalan painter's "Guernica":
Just before starting on the still-life he wrote, ‘We are living through a terrible drama, everything happening in Spain is terrifying...
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PBS has just uploaded the 20-minute segment from next week's episode of History Detectives featuring the story of Lincoln volunteers Sol Fellman and Doug Roach. Watch the segment here:
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The Village Soup previews next week's episode of the PBS series History Detectives, which interviewed Matti Mattson for a segment on the friendship between Lincoln volunteers Sol Fellman and Doug Roach (more details here):
Ilona Mattson described her father as a vigorous and youthful man who went to the gym twice...
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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). Learn more at our website or
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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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