Journey through the Spanish Civil War, with Deborah A. Green

Click here to register for this free virtual event, co-presented by the Workers Circle / Arbeter Ring of Northern California.

Despite the possibility of imprisonment or death, around 40,000 people from 54 different countries left their homes and families and volunteered to fight fascism in Spain during the 1930s. They became known as the International Brigades. Thirty percent of these volunteers were Jewish; Yiddish became the second most popular language spoken in Spain.

Poet, translator, and literary journalist S. L. Shneiderman left Poland for Spain in 1936, reporting on the conflict for his Yiddish-speaking readership. With the collaboration of his wife, Eileen, and photographs by his brother-in-law David Seymour (known professionally as Chim), Shneiderman’s dispatches from Spain made him one of the era’s most influential Yiddish journalists. Almost a century later, his book on the Spanish Civil War, originally  published in 1938 and translated for the first time into English by Deborah A. Green, remains a vivid ground-level record of the conflict through a uniquely Jewish lens.

Deborah A. Green is an author, historian, translator, Yiddishist, and retired litigator. Her books are based on previously untranslated Yiddish sources. Her most recent work, Journey through the Spanish Civil War (White Goat Press, 2024), is a translation of S.L. Shneiderman’s Krig in Shpanyen. Green has translated many Yiddish books, articles, and Yizkor [memorial] books. Her upcoming book Heroines of the Holocaust: Jewish and Christian Women of the Resistance is about Jewish women in the ghettos, forests, and camps, and the Christian women who helped them. Her following book, Kaddish for the Fallen: Jews Fighting Fascism, focuses on Jews who volunteered to fight in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War.

Program made possible, in part, by Judy Baston.