On his way out of Spain in 1938, Bill Gresham, a Baltimore-born volunteer in the John Brown Artillery company of the International Brigades, heard a strange story from one of his comrades, Joseph “Doc” Halliday, about an alcoholic carnival “geek” whose featured attraction was biting the head off living chickens. The story haunted him, perhaps because Gresham was himself an alcoholic, and he tried to purge his imagination in the highly successful novel, Nightmare Alley, published in 1946. It was later made into a movie starring Tyrone Power. It’s the story of carnival life, told from the view of strange and troubled outsiders.

Gresham followed that book with another novel, Limbo Tower, which achieved less success and with several works of non-fiction. He never fully purged his demons. In 1962, the Spanish Civil War vet committed suicide in New York City.

Now his classic horror novel has been reissued in a handsome paperback edition. Nick Toshes, who writes a brief introduction, is at work on a longer book about Gresham.

This is an intriguing study of the relationship mostly of the Spanish Right, but also until the post-Franco years, of the Spanish state itself, with its own Jews, so to speak, the Sephardic community. It hearkens back to 1492 when the Jews were expelled from Spain. Now the survivors of that ancient Diaspora share with the veterans of the International Brigades the right to Spanish citizenship.

The Jewish component of the Spanish Civil War played a role in right-wing myth but also in the make up of the membership of the International Brigades. For the right, the enemy was the Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevist conspiracy. Capitalism was added to the mix, represented by Britain and the United States, at the time of World War II, including the idea that Roosevelt was of Jewish descent. Also, not surprisingly, quite a few members of the International Brigade were Jewish, according to one source 5 to 10 thousand of the 40,000 volunteers. With great specificity, Joseph Toch, a veteran from Austria, stated that there were 7,758 Jews in the Brigades, with 2,250 from Poland, 1,236 from the United States, 1,043 from France, 214 from Britain and 267 from Palestine. One is skeptical of such exact figures, but the comparatively high proportion is likely to be true. There was even, at the insistence of the French Communist party, a small Jewish unit, named after Naftali Botwin, a Communist who had been executed by the Poles in 1925.

But the thrust of this book is much more on the internal story in Spain and a discussion of how the Right viewed those expelled in 1492. Over the years there was in Spain a deeply entrenched anti-Semitism but also it could run alongside a tradition of philosephardism: a paradoxical position that even though the Sephardi were the enemy, they were “our Jews” with whom the Spanish state had a special relationship. In the period considered here, the state wished to exploit the dispersed Sephardic communities as it attempted to recover from the disaster of 1898 and the disappearance of its empire. The comparatively large Sephardic population of Morocco could be helpful both in imperial and financial ways. The Sephardi in French Morocco, particularly during World War II, might assist in bringing that area under Spanish control. Similarly the Sephardic population of the Balkans earlier in the 20th century might strengthen economic ties with the “old” country, even though it had been thrown out centuries before.

A similar split attitude manifested itself during the Second World War. Franco supported the Axis (but refused to declare war) which had been so important for his winning the Civil War. Some made favorable comparisons between Hitler and Ferdinand and Isabel. As the tide turned in favor of the Allies the regime wildly exaggerated the degree that it tried to help Jews. In fact, however, it was quite adamant against allowing even Sephardic Jews to escape to Spain and settle there. On the other hand, Spanish officials did, in no consistent way, allow some Jews to travel through Spain to Portugal and on to the Western Hemisphere. It also made some special efforts to assist small Sephardic communities, such as those of Budapest, Salonica and Athens, to get to Spain. But it was on the understanding that they would not remain (and while there they might have to reside in prisons or concentration camps) and would move on. This is fundamentally a very interesting story of incredible prejudice. What is particularly intriguing about it, however, is that it was a prejudice not against “others” but exercised against those who were very much part of the same history.

Peter Stansky, with William Abrahams, is the author of Journey to the Frontier: Two Roads to the Spanish Civil War.

Los Internacionales: English Speaking Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, edited by Antonio R. Celada, Manuel González de la Aleja, and Daniel Pastor García (ISBN 978 0 95541998).  This compendium with selected biographies and bibliographies, purportedly based on the latest research, is nonetheless studded with inaccuracies and might have been better suited for an online version that would allow corrections.

For all its internationalist appeal, the Spanish Civil War is almost always read through a national lens. This is true in particular for its literary versions. The French know the war primarily as it was told by André Malraux in L’Espoir (1937). For the English, George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938) is the foundational text. The American public still largely relies on Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) — which was lambasted by the Veterans of the Lincoln Brigade as soon as it came out and which, strangely, both John McCain and Barack Obama marked as one of their most inspirational readings. The dogged persistence of canonical domestic texts like these is remarkable—and to be honest, a bit aggravating—not only because they were written so long ago, during or immediately after the war, but because they provide at best a very partial, if not an outright skewed, version of what happened in Spain. More importantly, their steadfast predominance has tended to eclipse more interesting or accurate literary accounts, especially those written originally in other languages.

When it comes to historical fiction about the Spanish Civil War, the largest and richest tradition is, for logical reasons, the Spaniards’ own. A comprehensive catalog of Spanish Civil War novels written in Castilian, Catalan, Galician, and Basque would literally run into thousands of titles. (Many of these were written in exile and with the express purpose of countering Franco’s version of the war; but the dictator’s death did not stop the literary Civil-War wellspring, to the contrary.) With the exception of Arturo Barea and Ramón J. Sender, however, very few of these texts and authors have been made available in translation. Perhaps the most glaring absence in this respect has been the monumental Civil War work of Max Aub, which ALBA board member Antonio Muñoz Molina has ranked at the very top of the genre. Aub was a novelist and playwright of remarkable originality who spent his live chronicling the conflict that had torn his country apart and catapulted him into exile.

Aub had become a Socialist in the late 1920s, was actively involved in cultural and political work for the Republic, and continued to serve the government once the war had broken out. As the cultural attaché for the Spanish embassy in Paris and co-organizer of the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 World Fair, it was Aub who commissioned Picasso to paint the mural that would become Guernica. Following the Republic’s defeat, he spent three years in French concentration camps before managing to escape to Mexico, where he died thirty years later. The centerpiece of his extensive production is El Laberinto Mágico (The Magical Labyrinth)—five novels, a film script and some forty short stories that weave a sprawling epic tapestry of the war in which hundreds of characters, both historical and fictional, try desperately to make sense of their violent and chaotic times. Almost all of Aub’s books were banned from Franco’s Spain, while in Mexico his readership was limited. None of his Civil War work found its way into English.

Yet there is hope: almost forty years after Aub’s death, Verso has published Field of Honour, the English translation of Campo cerrado, the Labyrinth’s first novel, published in 1943. Field of Honour is a self-contained coming-of-age narrative that covers the final moments of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship and the five years of the Second Republic, which was proclaimed in April 1931. The book ends with thirty breathless pages covering the heady and chaotic first day of the war in Barcelona. The main character of the book, Rafael López Serrador, is an anti-hero of sorts, a pícaro or scoundrel who relies on his wit to survive: a poor and ignorant kid from a small town on the border between Catalonia and Aragon who decides to try and make something of his life. Via the provincial capital of Castellón he winds up as a metal worker in Barcelona, where he gets mixed up in politics and commits a murder (some echoes of Dostoiewski here). Initially his political position is determined by the people he hangs out with: because his roommate is an anarchist Rafael joins the syndicate, too. Later on he becomes enchanted with fascism. Once the war breaks out, however, Rafael is shocked into his senses and suddenly sees things for what they are: What matters is not he, as an individual, but the fraternity that binds the people together.

Aub wrote this novel in 1939, during the first precarious months of exile, holed up in a Paris attic room, separated from his wife and daughters. He would soon be arrested on false charges from an anti-Semitic and anti-Communist snitch. The text retains some of the urgency and claustrophobia of the moment. Ironically, Paris was Aub’s home town: he was born there in 1903 from Jewish parents of German ancestry—but the outbreak of World War I had fanned the flames of xenophobia, forcing his family to move to Valencia, where Aub, aged eleven, learned Spanish in addition to his native French and German. In the 1920s, when he began publishing, he did so as a Spanish writer. The Paris of 1939, on the eve of the Nazi occupation, certainly did not feel like home: it was again drenched in an irrational fear of the other. Foreigners, immigrants, Jews, radicals, and thousands of Spanish Republican refugees had been rounded up and interned in camps well before the Germans took over. Soon after finishing the manuscript of Campo cerrado, the camp became Aub’s fate too.

Although Aub’s literary youth was spent under the influence of the avant-garde, giddy with self-referential play and outrageous metaphor, in the 1930s he made the conscious decision to put his work at the service of a political cause. For him, this meant a commitment to realism: chronicling his times as faithfully as possible. Still, this first novel shows clear traces of Aub’s modernist schooling alongside inspiration from Quevedo, Goya, and Galdós.

This means, among other things, that the novel is not precisely an easy read. “The book has been a challenge for the translator,” Gerald Martin writes in his prefatory note, “and will be a challenge to the reader; but the rewards are great.” He is right on both counts. Aub’s style alternates between the elliptical and the florid; there is plenty of folksy dialogue, mostly marked by the characters’ violent disagreements on matters of politics or philosophy; the atmosphere is thick with tension and confusion. Martin meets the text’s many challenges with skill and grace. The dialogue comes through with the same force as in the original. Here’s a short interchange between Rafael and his friend González Cantos, a buddy of Durruti’s and active in the Anarchist CNT:

—¡A mí no me importa lo que soy, sino lo que quiero ser! Y quiero el poder para el pueblo.
—Y para ti ¿qué es el pueblo?
—¿Quién coño ha de ser? ¡Vaya salida de pipolo! ¡La C.N.T, hombre, la C.N.T.!
Luego solían enzarzarse en cuentas, números y disconformidades con los sindicatos provinciales.
—Ya veremos lo que dice el comité.
Con eso resolvían todas las cuestiones.

“Well, I don’t care what I am, only what I want to be! And I want power for the people.”
“And who are the people, according to you?”
“Who the fuck do you think? What kind of damn-fool question is that? The CNT, man, the CNT!”
Then they would get bogged down in endless facts, statistics and grievances against the provincial unions.
“Let’s wait and see what the committee says.”
That’s how they settled every question.

The novel is well edited, with a brief preface by the historian Ronald Fraser (author of Blood of Spain), an informative translator’s note, a chronology, and lists of historical characters and organizations. What both Fraser and Martin fail to mention is that this book’s publication is actually something of a miracle. In fact Martin translated it more than a decade ago, and Verso announced its publication for 1988, only to call it off at the last minute. Their decision to send it into print now was undoubtedly driven by the success of Martin’s monumental biography of Gabriel García Márquez, which came out last year with Bloomsbury and Knopf. Aub, who was frustrated by his repeated but failed attempts to have his work translated, would have chuckled at the idea that he owed the Laberinto’s English debut to his old friend Gabo, whom he knew as a penniless émigré in Mexico City, before the success of A Hundred Years of Solitude.

Sebastiaan Faber teaches Spanish literature at Oberlin College.

Martín Santangelo, the artistic director of Noche Flamenca, calls the Flamenco form “a primal scream.” The music evolved against the background of an epic tragedy in Spanish history: the expulsion of the Moors from Granada and the ensuing persecution, humiliation, and slaughter of Spanish Jews, Arabs, and Gypsies that followed. Flamenco evolved as the physical and musical expression of this horror. As historian Felix Grande writes: “If we do not relate the music . . . to brutality, repression, hunger, fear, menace, inferiority, resistance and secrecy, then we shall not find the reality of cante flamenco . . . it is a storm of exasperation and grief.”

This year Santangelo and Soledad Barrio, his wife, co-founder, and star of the troupe, recognize the resonance of this period with the terror of the Spanish Civil War and the 40 years of Franco’s brutal dictatorship. The featured piece in their program, “ALBA,” is a riveting, emotional tribute to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, based on the poem “To the International Soldier Fallen in Spain,” by Miguel Hernandez.

“ALBA” begins with a passionate lament expressed by two guitars and two male voices, Manuel Gago (tenor) and Miguel Rosendo (baritone). The dancers enter the low-lit stage led by Soledad Barrio, the sole female performer. As she kneels beside the spot (or perhaps a grave) where a Brigader has fallen, canes are silently passed from one dancer to another down the line of grieving figures until each holds one, straight and firm, on the cold ground. Suddenly, they strike the floor in unison, and the dancers explode into action. The canes’ violent syncopations are echoed by the dancers’ traditional footwork.

In a recent interview for The Volunteer, Santangelo described the symbolism of the canes: “They are the bones of the fallen, and as the Hernandez poem ends ‘around your bones, the olive groves will grow, unfolding their iron roots in the ground, embracing men universally, faithfully.’”

As the dancers move with increasing speed and intensity, intersecting and interacting in individual percussive rhythms, their feet, the guitars, and the voices combine to sound like bullets exploding and bodies falling. The emotional moments topple over one another. Moods change unexpectedly, often separated by frozen moments of incredible tension. It is, alternately, an expression of the fury of war, courage, the resolve of freedom fighters, and the grief of a nation. Packed houses respond to the troupe’s intensity with calls of “Ole” throughout the performance and, at the conclusion, a standing ovation!
A solo by guitarist Jesus Torres, who has been with the company for many years, is a perfect, quiet and contemplative antidote to “ALBA.” In a magical moment, guitarists Salva de María and Eugenio Iglesias enter upstage and sit in the shadows, listening with the audience. Then Mr. Torres rises to leave, his hands stilled, but the music mysteriously continues. It is a seamless transition between the guitarists, which introduces the next piece, a slow, beautiful and sensual dance of love choreographed by Soledad Barrio and performed by her and Noe Barroso. Two more virtuoso dance solos, performed with enormous energy, elegance, and an attitude of defiance by Antonio Jimenez and Juan Ogalla, complete the first part of the program.

The three pieces after the intermission are just as powerful as those that come before. Each dancer is featured in equal measure with Soledad Barrio’s exquisite solo piece, eagerly awaited by the adoring crowd. The standing ovations demand a short encore, and the audiences leave the theater nearly as energized and exhausted as the performers.
Many in the audience for the three-week run were from the ALBA community. On the last day of performance in New York City, Abraham Lincoln volunteer Matti Mattson attended. Mr. Santangelo came out before the performance of “ALBA” to introduce Mattson to the audience. Amidst heads turning, gasps of surprised delight, and applause from the audience, Santangelo noted that because of Mattson and those like him who joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and the International Brigade, “There is a freedom in Spain. The Brigaders planted a seed of a liberty that is extraordinary.”
After New York, the troupe went on to Philadelphia, Montreal, and Toronto, where they received enthusiastic responses. For their tour schedule in other cities, visit www.nocheflamenca.com. The ALBA newsletter will keep track of Noche Flamenca’s world tour and will announce its return to New York later this year.

Fredda Weiss is Vice Chair of ALBA; Jeanne Houck is Executive Director.

Further Browsing:
Noche Flamenca Web site
New York Times Review

TO THE INTERNATIONAL SOLDIER FALLEN IN SPAIN

By Miguel Hernández

If there are men who contain a soul without frontiers
A brow scattered with universal hair
Covered with horizons, ships, and mountain chains,
With sand and with snow, then you are one of those.

Fatherlands called to you with all their banners,
So that your breath filled with beautiful movements.
You wanted to quench the thirst of panthers
And fluttered full against their abuses.

With a taste of all suns and seas,
Spain beckons you because in her you realize
your majesty like a tree that embraces a continent.

Around your bones, the olive groves will grow,
Unfolding their iron roots in the ground,
Embracing men universally, faithfully.