The Association of Friends of the International Brigades (AABI) has just announced the Fifth Brunete Memorial March, to be held in Spain on July 2. See for more information the flyer (pdf).
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In response to the Guardian´s request for father's day letters, Julie Norton writes to her father, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War who died in 1958:
I was too young and self-absorbed to appreciate that actually you were a hero, a veteran of the Spanish civil war. You didn't see much...
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Guy Hedgecoe covers the continuing controversy over the Valle de los Caídos for the Deutsche Welle:
Three decades after the transition to democracy that followed Franco's death, the Socialist government intends now to turn the monument into a symbol of reconciliation between the two sides in the Civil War, which started...
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The AP reports:
Spanish prosecutors are investigating 849 cases of newborn children stolen from their mothers and sold to other families for profit, the country's attorney general said Friday. Candido Conde-Pumpido said 162 cases had already been referred for trial and only 38 have been dropped for a lack of evidence. It is well...
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Bernard-Henry Lévy pays tribute to Jorge Semprún, the Spanish novelist and public intellectual who died earlier this month:
He had the eyes of a warrior, but his gaze became veiled and a bit haunted when he spoke of "his" dead -- glorious elders of the Spanish Civil War, companions of the maquis...
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Our friend Manus O'Riordan writes:
On June 6, 2011, Athol Books of Belfast, Northern Ireland, published a new web booklet on its site entitled The Vindication of Brigadista and Union Man Jack James Larkin Jones: in refutation of the British intelligence campaign of character assassination. This booklet brings together a series of five articles written...
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In the first piece of positive judicial news for Judge Baltasar Garzón in a long time, the Supreme Court has announced the recusal of five of the seven Supreme Court justices initially assigned to the tribunal in charge of judging Garzón for alleged abuse of power when opening an investigation into crimes committed by...
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The death earlier this week of the Spanish-French novelist Jorge Semprún Maura at age 87 has spurred dozens of reflections on the importance of his life and work--both intimately tied up with the major events and movements of the twentieth century. Semprún, who wrote most of his books in French, was the son of...
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PBS's History Detectives airing on June 28, 2011, includes a moving episode on the friendship between Lincoln Brigaders Sol Fellman and Doug Roach, featuring interviews with Matti Mattson and ALBA's Jim Fernández. View the whole 18-minute segment here. Be sure to check the listings of your local PBS station for more details. 
A Moment in the Sun, the monumental new historical novel by ALBA board member John Sayles, is praised by Tom LeClair in this weekend's Times book review:
“A Moment in the Sun” is, it should be said, nearly 1,000 pages long. Sayles responds to readers’ presumed resentment against its bulk (a resentment...
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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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