Spain in Our Hearts, Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39 by Adam Hochschild
Sum total of my knowledge of the Spanish Civil War:
1-Guernica (the painting not the city)
2-In 1936, nineteen-year-old Jessica Mitford and her communist boyfriend (also her second cousin) ran off to fight for the Republic. Hopping mad, her father Lord Redesdale promptly send relatives to Spain to haul them back.
His sense of urgency was not prompted by a fear for Jessica’s life, but a fear for Jessica’s reputation as the lovebirds were unchaperoned!
So I had lots to learn about the war that foreshadowed (and has been overshadowed) by WWII.
As the title suggests, Spain In Our Hearts is not a traditional history of the war, but rather an account of some of the 2,800 Americans who fought with the newly formed Republic against a fascist uprising led by Francisco Franco.
The men and women of the International Brigade were communists, artists, academics, union leaders, adventurers, journalists and well known (or soon to be well known) authors such as Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell.
Hochschild also exposes the reprehensible behavior of an American who supported the other side. As the Chairman of Texaco, Texan Torkild Rieber illegally supplied oil and ships to Franco without the knowledge or consent of his board of directors, shareholders, or the U.S. Government.
The title of the book comes from Albert Camus:
“Men of my generation had Spain in our hearts…It was there that they learned…that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit and that there are times when courage is not rewarded.”
A must-read for history buffs.
WHAT OTHER REVIEWERS SAY
The New York Times: “Adam Hochschild is both a gifted historian and a man of the left. In Spain in Our Hearts, he retells this familiar tale in an unfamiliar and convincing way — as a collective biography that strongly sympathizes with the Americans who fought for and wrote about Republican Spain but refuses to spare them from criticism. By assembling a well-chosen set of individual narratives, many about figures who are relatively unknown, he captures why so many people thought the fate of the world might be decided by who won the conflict in a poor, mostly rural country on the edge of Europe.”
WHO WROTE IT
Adam Hochschild is the author of eight books and a cofounder of Mother Jones. King Leopold’s Ghost was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as was his recent To End All Wars, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Bury the Chains was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the PEN USA Literary Award.