Idealism, Humanity, and the Spanish Civil War

Book Review

By Mordechai Fishman

Harry Fisher is a piece of living history. The eighty-eight year-old activist, idealist and self-proclaimed "Communist with a little 'c,'"is one of the last of the one hundred and thirty or so surviving veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The Lincolns, as they were known, were the American contingent of the international volunteers who fought with the Loyalists against Generalissimo Francisco Franco's fascists in the Spanish Civil War. As one of the earliest to enlist, and one of the blessed few to survive all of the war's major campaigns, including the bloody Battle of Jarama, unscathed, Fisher is uniquely qualified to recount the events of a conflict that most Americans know little, if anything at all, about. In his book "Comrades: Tales of a Brigadista in the Spanish Civil War," Fisher tells of his war experiences in heartfelt and simple tones, yet his brutally honest look at war is a valuable lesson for all of humanity and an important addition to the histories chronicling the conflict.

The Lincoln Brigade was a unique group of individuals brought together by their desire to fight fascism. Of the nearly three thousand Americans who volunteered, nearly one third were Jewish (old school - with first names like Isadore and Morrie, and last names like Kauffman and Goldberg), while the remainder spanned ethnic and class lines. The Lincoln Brigade was also the first racially integrated unit in American military history. And while their dedication and ideological steadfastness kept the Lincolns going, it could not protect them against the bombs and bullets of the fascists. The majority of those who enlisted ended up as casualties - roughly nine-hundred were killed, and nearly ninety percent of the survivors wounded at some point during the war.

Fisher's narrative shines as it lays the ideological groundwork for comprehending the motives that drove him and his comrades to sail off and fight a vicious war in a foreign land. He recounts growing up in the Hebrew National Orphan Home in the Bronx, a poor, disenfranchised Jew, who saw and felt social injustice in a way we modern-day Jewish youth cannot even dream of. He recounts the hardships and rampant poverty of the Depression years, families being evicted and tossed on the street like human refuse, breadlines stretching for blocks, and children begging for a bite to eat. His social sensibilities forged by the suffering surrounding him, Fisher joined the Communist Party, because "They didn't just talk politics, they actually did something." He tells tales of forcing landlords to reaccept their indigent tenants with his Communist cohorts, and organizing labor unions all across the Midwest. "I never went to meetings," writes Fisher, who never claims in his book to be a deep political thinker. "I just wanted to help others."

It was this highly developed sense of right and wrong that led Fisher to "hate fascism, Hitler, and all he stood for," and ship off to fight a war, that in historical retrospective, was the prelude to the horrors of Nazi Germany that engulfed Europe soon thereafter.

Fisher writes as a simple soldier, and he eloquently and passionately describes the sick carnage of war. He describes his feelings and longings, the camaraderie and friendship that bound his fellow combatants together, and the daily deprivation and indignities visited upon those who toiled and died in the Spanish mud. He describes the bravery of those who marched off to gruesome, horrible deaths with the "Internationale" on their lips and a sense of destiny upon their shoulders. Fisher is most effective when recounting the indiscriminate suffering visited upon both sides by the barbaric savagery of war. In one of the most touching narratives of the book, he describes finding a family portrait jutting from the pocket of a dead fascist, a young man like himself, caught forever by the cruel hand of war. "They were just kids who happened to live in territory controlled by the fascists, kids who would surely have preferred soccer games to war," is how he describes the illiterate Spanish peasants fighting on the other side. Fisher saved the photo, and the picture in the book drives his tale home with a poignancy that would shatter any mothers heart.

He is equally unflinching when describing the shortcomings of the Communists. Fisher writes of atrocities and injustices inflicted by his own comrades and commanders in the name of a just cause. The end result is a despondent view of war - albeit a morally justified one, but horrific and barbaric nonetheless.

The book's strongest point is also its largest flaw. Harry Fisher never purports to be anything else but a simple idealist who was willing to die for what he felt was right and good. The plainly written story hammers home the uselessness of war in a way that no history textbook ever could, but the lack of a broad-based historical and global political view may leave the reader wanting to know more. Yet the simple words, human emotions, and day-to-day experiences of Harry Fisher put a human face on a forgotten war, and create a personal contextual framework that puts the conflict in its true perspective.

Speaking to Harry Fisher is pleasure onto itself. His wry humor, innate grace, and finely honed sense of social justice impart to his listener a feeling of hope for a gentler, kinder world. After Fisher recently spoke here at YU, students discussed his story and life long after he departed the campus. He never tried, in person or in his book, to make excuses for or whitewash his support of Stalinism and its policies, saying "I am not a scholar, I am not an intellectual." He merely imparts a historical truth - war is hell.

Summing up the experience of the Brigadistas, Fisher quotes the American activist and poet Genevieve Taggart. "They were young, there was much they did not know, they were human." His book is a shining testament to the enduring good of human nature and the senseless butchery of war.

Comrades: Tales of a Brigadista in the Spanish Civil War

by Harry Fisher

Foreword by Pete Seeger

Hardcover, 211 pp.

University of Nebraska Press