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PORTSIDE CULTURE

SKETCHES FROM SPAIN: HOMAGE TO THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN BRIGADE  
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Philip C. Kolin, reviewer
March 1, 2024
Portside
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_ No one is better qualified than Peter Neil Carroll to write a book
of memorial poems about the valiant men and women who volunteered for
the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight the fascists in the Spanish Civil
War, 1936-1939. _

Sketches from Spain: Homage to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Main
Street Rag, ALBA Special Edition

 

Carroll has served as the historian and archivist for the Brigade and
has written the magisterial _Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade:
Americans in the Spanish Civil War_ (Stanford, 1994). Over the years,
he has interviewed many of these _brigadistas_ and has included poems
about the war in his nine earlier poetry collections. Now after five
years of research he has given us "a work of poetry [and]
non-fiction” paying tribute to them in “poetry takes the task of
understanding and empathy one step further.” Carroll’s assessment
is spot on. The poems are historical and personal at once, and, I
suspect, a catharsis for both poet and those who honor these heroes.
Doing so, he has “put the Lincoln Brigade back on the map” and
helped us to see how these horrific events in Spain foreshadow or at
least parallel those in America such as the McCarthy witch hunts,
civil rights tragedies, Watergate, the Iran-Contra plot, the plight of
immigrants, and, of course, the assaults on Ukraine and the
Israeli-Hamas War today. Carroll’s poems about the Spanish Civil War
thus point to the persistence of fascist-like atrocities that
continued far beyond the 1930s.

 
Sketches from Spain: Homage to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
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By Peter Neil Carroll
Main Street Rag, ALBA Special Edition; 110 pages
January 24, 2024
Paperback:  $2.00
ISBN: 978-1-59948-981-0

 

Each of Carroll's 80 plus riveting poems bears the name and dates of
one of the Brigade for a title, and most of the poems include
italicized lines with the words of these individuals gathered from
letters and other documents. Carroll's words mix with those of the
Brigade, poetry and non-fiction. Some poems contain only italicized
lines. Individually or collectively, the poems can be classified as
mini-biographies, encomia, dramatic monologues, lamentations,
eulogies, jeremiads, tombstones, or even love letters e.g., love of
freedom, love of the oppressed. Each poem is a haunted memory of these
individual heroes in their embodied voices heard in Carroll’s poetic
lines and their own words. The _brigadistas_ represented a
cross-section of occupations and nationalities; doctors and nurses,
artists and writers, barbers and florists, coal miners and taxi
drivers, students and seamen; some as young as “an 18-year-old
shouldering a Russian riffle” or as experienced as a 40-year-old
ambulance driver. Their ethnic backgrounds were equally
diverse—British, Finns, French, Irish, Italian, Polish, even
Japanese. But they were all activists determined to defeat Franco’s
(and Hitler's and Mussolini's) fascist dictatorship. “There is no
sacrifice we can refuse,” declared one of the Brigade.

              Regardless of their backgrounds, they all
voice the horrors of this war. Boleslaw “Slippery” Silvon
insisted, “I almost forgot to tell you about our bombing we got the
other day. . .they flew low as hell strafing their machine guns,
people panic stricken, running for shelter. . . .” Esther
Silverstein (Blanc) recalled “the constant threat, how fascist
bombers targeted rooftops and tents marked by hospital insignia.”
Doesn't this sound like Ukraine or Gaza, yesterday, today, or,
fearfully, tomorrow. The poems are filled with loss. In a poem about
Hank Rubin, Carroll observes: “Everyone who came with him to Spain,
left behind a limb or a life.” In Alvah Bessie's poem, Carroll tells
us this volunteer “saw horror, terrified men running for life.”
Lincoln volunteer Dr. Leo Eloesser described the Spanish Civil War as
“an epidemic of injuries.” Eight hundred of the Brigade died
trying to defeat fascism and preserve the Spanish Republic. In a
passage from Hemingway’s _On the American Dead in Spain_, serving as
an epigraph for Carroll’s collection, we hear: “No man ever
entered earth more honorably. . .[They] already have achieved
immortality.” But despite or in spite of these losses, the Brigade
displayed fierce, unwavering loyalty. The poem on Oscar Hunter begins:
“He was asked at age 72/ if he would do it all over--[and] replied,
Yeah, every bit.”

              Racial discrimination is another topic that
runs through these poems, a sign of those times and, sadly, ours, too.
References to Jim Crow, lynching, and other racial horrors surface in
poems about the Black men and woman who served in the Brigade. A Black
Mississippi youth, Eluard Luchell McDaniels was arrested once along
with the white woman driving him. When white members of the Brigade
expressed jealousy over the promotion of a Black officer, Oliver Law,
Carroll reminds us that this was an anti-fascist army that fought as a
unit. Of Salaria Kea, Carroll points out: “She stood out, the one
African American/woman in the Spanish Civil War, a nurse who/ spoke
her mind, fought racism, and saved lives,” virtues that
characterized the Lincoln Brigade. But Carroll also records the
prejudice she faced at home. “When the Ohio River flooded, she
offered to help/ the Red Cross. They replied the color/of her skin was
more trouble than she was worth.”

              Equally pernicious attacks were launched
against the politics of the men and women of the Brigade shortly after
and much later, accusing them of being Communists. A Black member,
James Bernard “Bunny” Rucker suffered on both accounts. “The Jim
Crow army had other indignities [for him] but as/ a Spanish Civil War
vet, Rucker confronted (like white vets)/ discrimination as a
suspected Communist. A hospital commissar “for the wounded and the
sick/ Oscar Hunter years later faced “the FBI in the Red Scare/ of
the fifties, and lived long enough/ to protest the war in Vietnam.”
One of Carroll’s most powerful poems (among many) turned to Jack
Lucid (1915-1977), “the old Communist” who served drinks behind
the bar. As one of his customers, Carroll declared:

He has stories./ Oral history we call it: I want his past, he hopes/
I’ll give him a future. He pours, I drink We begin. . . When we walk
through the zoo admiring caged monkeys, [Jack] talks about a Nuremberg
Tribunal for Richard Nixon. . . .

This fusion of time (past into future; present into past) is a
hallmark of Carroll’s intense desire to show history repeating
itself. Many of the poems like Lucid’s are warnings about what
happens if and when fascism comes to America. We learn, for example,
that “While sleuthed by the FBI, [Lucid] persuades an agent/ to give
him free rides; he can live without his car./ At his job in a
mayonnaise factory, he declines/ promotions so immigrant workers get
better pay./ One night he warns me his comrades are dying fast./ He
says I'll be seeing you soon—as a ghost./ We scatter his ashes, as
he wished, with the fish/ outside the Golden Gate where no one could
find him.” A gut-wrenching tribute to this volunteer soldier who
brought the values of the Brigade home with him even as he defied
America four decades later. In a sense, Lucid’s biography—and his
quotations—are the bedrock of belief that underlies Carroll’s
carefully crafted and compelling poems.

              _Sketches_ concludes with “Paul Robeson's
Legacy,” a fiery poem on how this controversial actor and singer
changed the words of a song he had performed to emphasize the
overwhelming influence the Spanish Civil War had and how “_La lucha
continua_: the struggle continues.” Transformed in Robeson’s
lines, civil rights leaders such as Dr. King or Rosa Parks become
“Spanish Civil War veterans” who “re-entered font lines in
Mississippi, the south side Chicago, Louisville, Harlem, Selma,
Newark, Detroit, Seattle, Sacramento, San Francisco.” The Spanish
Civil War and those who fought in it on the side of the Republic
brought their bravery and convictions home with them and it became one
of the most influential events in American history. As Carroll
declares in one poem, “The Spanish Civil War never ended.” His
meticulously researched, jaw dropping poems will make sure it never
does. They are necessary reading to understand why.

 

 

_[PHILIP C. KOLIN is the Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus
and Editor Emeritus of the Southern Quarterly at the University of
Southern Mississippi. He has published 15 collections of poems, the
most recent being White Terror, Black Trauma: Resistance Poems about
Black History
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(Chicago: Third World Press, 2023).] _

* Abraham Lincoln Brigade
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* Spanish Civil War
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* Spanish Republic
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* Fascism
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* Anti-Fascism
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* anti-fascists
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* Spain
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* Franco
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* united front
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* Popular Front
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* 1930s
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* fascists
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