The Telegraph published an obit of the SCW vet classicist yesterday:
Though left for dead in a pool of blood, he somehow managed to make it to a dressing station, his will to live miraculously restored by the appearance of the journalist Claud Cockburn with a bottle of scotch.
MoreThe Times' Edward Rothstein writes about Nueva York, 1613-1945, in which ALBA collaborated and for which James D. Fernández has curated an accompanying exhibit which opens today:
Instead of viewing the city and its past along an East-West axis and seeing its conflicts and culture through interactions with...
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La Colonia: Spanish Immigrants in New York, 1898-1945, a photography exhibit curated by ALBA Board member James D. Fernández, and co-sponsored by ALBA, is opening this Friday, September 17, at 6:15pm at NYU's King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center (53 Washington Square South).
In the early decades of the twentieth century, New York experienced a substantial influx...
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Judge Baltasar Garzón Real, who has been suspended from his post at Spain's National Criminal Court for his investigations of possible crimes against humanity committed under the Franco regime, has been honored with the Hrant Dink Award, named after the prominent Armenian journalist who was assassinated by a Turkish nationalist in January 2007....
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Broadcasting with Democracy Now! from Germany, ALBA Activist Award-winning Amy Goodman interviews the Spanish human rights attorney Juan Garcés, who worked as an advisor to Chilean President Salvador Allende until his death in the 1973 coup, and who was a key player in the 1998 indictment and arrest of General Pinochet, as...
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The Art Daily reports:
Tate Modern will present the first major retrospective of Joan Miró (1893–1983) to be held in London for almost 50 years. Opening on 14 April 2011, Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape will bring together over 150 paintings, works on paper and sculptures...
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Next week at the Cervantes Institute in London: a roundtable discussion featuring Paul Preston and Julián Casanova. Date and venue: 21 September 2010, 6.30 p.m. at the Instituto Cervantes, 102 Eaton Square, London, SW1W 9AN (near Victoria Station). More here.
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Alex de la Iglesia's new Spanish Civil War film, Balada triste de trompeta (The Last Circus), has just won a Silver Lion for direction and the award for Best Screenplay at the Venice Film Festival, Variety reports. See also De la Iglesia's blog (in Spanish).
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The Friends & Family of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (FFALB) report:
Almost seventy people attended a ten oʼclock screening of “The Good Fight” in Portland, Maine, on August 26th. Sponsored by Activists Forever! Friends & Family of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (FFALB), it was one of four films shown at...
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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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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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