Journey through the Spanish Civil War

In 1936, when civil war broke out in Spain between Republican and Nationalist forces, thousands of Jews streamed into the country to fight for the elected Republican government. One of these arrivals was S. L. Shneiderman— although he did not come to fight. Shneiderman (1906–1996) was a poet, translator, and literary journalist whose coverage of the Spanish Civil War earned him the moniker “the first Yiddish war reporter.” 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 most influential Yiddish journalists of the century. Almost a century later, his book on the Spanish Civil War, published in 1938 as Krig in shpanyen: hinterland and now 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.