About the Author and Translator

My father, Leon Satz, was the sole survivor of his family because of a fluke. He was drafted into the Red Army two months before the Nazis violated the Molotov-Ribbontrop Non-Aggression Treaty. Not wishing to be used as a human mine detector, he and several friends jumped from a moving military truck and deserted into a nearby forest during a Nazi attack on his convoy. Picked up by the NKVD (the Soviet Secret Police), for speculation several months later (he was selling his jacket to buy bread), he was arrested and sentenced to ten years in Aktyubinsk, a Soviet gulag in Kazakhstan.

He served three years, three months, and seventeen days. Amnestied as a “political” at the end of the WWII, he was not a fan of communism. As imagined, dinner conversations while growing up were interesting.

One of the few things my parents agreed on was that I be fluent in Yiddish. I am grateful for that decision as I love the language and culture. However, Despite being a student of history, particularly Jewish history, I did not know of Jewish participation in the Spanish Civil War. In fact, I had little knowledge of the Spanish Civil War. I had been translating Yiddish Yizkor books (memorial books written by Holocaust survivors after World War II chronicling the histories of their towns and villages), for decades and frequently encountered references to Jews who had fought in the Spanish Civil War.

A former partisan wrote of a comrade: “Moshe could handle a machine gun—he learned in Madrid.” Another wrote: “Duvid knew how to derail trains because of his time in Barcelona.”

I would like to say I found these statements immediately compelling, but I’d be lying. It took several years for me to comprehend what I was reading. Once I did, I was fascinated with the question of why Jews were fighting in Spain from 1936 through 1939—they had enough of their own problems at home.

I knew Spain had expelled its Jews in 1492, the same year Colombus discovered America, and that was the extent of my knowledge. Determined to learn more, I thought a few trips to my local library and Amazon would tell me everything I needed to know. I was wrong. Although there are thousands of English-language books about the Spanish Civil War, there are perhaps twenty pages in the aggregate referencing the Jews who volunteered to fight in Spain. An insignificant amount, considering about thirty percent of the International Brigade volunteers were Jews.

Frustrated, I turned to Yiddish sources. In 2015-2017, I scoured the YIVO Institute’s archives, New York University’s Tamiment Library records, the former Soviet Union’s military archives, and downloaded all Yiddish books digitized by the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA, about the Jewish presence in twentieth century Spain. Florida Atlantic University’s library in Boca Raton, Florida, also yielded a trove of Yiddish language books as did the Ghetto House Museum archives in Israel. I found stories in the Yiddish language Forward newspaper archives and in other Yiddish newspapers and magazines. The Botvin, a Yiddish newspaper published on Spain’s front lines during the Spanish Civil War, was of particular interest.

In 2019, I traveled to Spain and visited the battlefields where Jewish volunteers fought and died. While in northern Spain, my guide, Alan Warren, led me to the graves of Jewish fighters, many of whom were buried in Catholic cemeteries and in hidden groves. While there, Alan asked me to recite Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer for the dead, for these fallen heroes. That was perhaps the first time that prayer was said for them.

I was fortunate to find a pen pal, Jeremi Galdamez, in Warsaw, Poland, who also had an interest in these Jewish fighters. He was kind enough to send me batches of military reports that had been written on the same Yiddish typewriter used to write the Botvin, the frontline newspaper published by the Botwin Company, a specifically Jewish unit that fought in Spain. (I recognized the typewriter because the same keys were missing in these military reports as were missing in the Botvin articles.) With the current rise of antisemitism in Spain and a concomitant lack of knowledge of Jewish aid and support to Republican Spain during those years of revolution, I believe making this history accessible is of paramount importance.

Having retired from practicing law, I now devote my time to translating mid-twentieth century Yiddish history, memoirs, and reportage. Like many survivors’ children, I want to understand the era, the people, and the causes that led to the Holocaust, particularly with the current world-wide resurgence of antisemitism. I believe these stories must be told and people, especially young Jews, need to know that Jewish history does not start and end with the lie that “Jews went like sheep to their slaughter.”

In my research, I have seldom read of a Nazi-occupied town or village that did not have Jewish resistance. I tell those stories, written by the people to whom the events happened, as they happened; not as those stories have been recast to conform to a modern ideology.

My introduction to, and translation of Journey Through the Spanish Civil War: The Hinterlands, published by White Goat Press in July 2024, is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA, and other venues. Journey is a translation of S.L. Shneiderman’s on-site reportage of the Spanish Civil War. The book also contains a lengthy introduction that puts the Spanish Civil War into both a general and Jewish context.

 My Yiddish translations about the Spanish Civil War have appeared in several anthologies. The last two, “The Holy War on Fascism”, and “Letters from the Spanish Civil War: Selected Letters from Memories of a Botwinist” appeared respectively in Jewish Imaginaries of the Spanish Civil War: In Search of Poetic Justice, edited by Cynthia Gabbay (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), and Avrom Avinu Receives a Letter and other Yiddish Correspondence, 2019 Pakn Treger Translation Anthology.