Thank you for honoring my beloved Moe. The NYT reprint contains an error: Moe was not a high school dropout. He graduated from Stuyvesant High School. He dropped out of City College for financial reasons, largely.

August 12, 2007
Moe Fishman Dies at 92; Fought in Lincoln Brigade
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Moe Fishman, who as a 21-year-old from Astoria, Queens, fought Fascists in Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and was severely wounded, then led veterans of that unit in fighting efforts to brand them as Communist subversives, died on Aug. 6 in Manhattan. He was 92.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Peter Carroll, chief of the board of governors of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.

Mr. Carroll said that about 40 of about 3,000 American veterans of the Spanish Civil War volunteers are living. It had been the job of Mr. Fishman, as executive secretary-treasurer of the veterans, to announce deaths.

At times he was almost alone in keeping the group going, Mr. Carroll said, particularly during the long, ultimately successful legal battle to remove the group’s subversive label. Mr. Fishman put out a newsletter, kept scrupulous books, ran the office daily and spoke widely.

In an interview with Esquire magazine in 1962, he said: “I’m the organization. If there’s something to decide, I talk it over with the guys and then decide what I’m going to do. Cockeyed, but that’s the way it is.”

The Spanish Civil War began in 1936 after Gen. Francisco Franco set out to overthrow the newly elected leftist government. Americans soon volunteered to fight Franco in what came to be called the Lincoln Brigade.

It was actually a battalion. Officially, Americans joined it or the Washington Battalion. The two American battalions, which informally have come to be known as the Lincoln Brigade, joined with four other battalions of volunteers from other countries to form the XV International Brigade.

In 1937, Mr. Fishman was a high-school dropout working in a laundry and driving a truck. He was also a member of the Young Communist League, having joined partly to meet like-minded young women at dances the organization sponsored, he said in an interview with The New York Times in 2004.

He also liked how the Communists responded when a family behind on the rent was evicted and thrown on the streets with its furniture. He told The Times that party members would use an ax or hammer to break the lock on the door and put the family back in.

Many believe that at least half of the volunteers for the Lincoln Brigade were Communists, but Mr. Fishman’s reasons for joining were more complex, he told The Times in 1969.

“Why did I go?” he said. “That’s hard to say. That’s a key question. I was active in trade union work. I wanted to travel. I belonged to the 92nd Street Y.M.H.A., and we were very anti-Fascist, much opposed to Hitler, Franco.”

He was born Moses Fishman on Sept. 28, 1915, and grew up in Astoria. On the day he was to depart for Spain, he left for work at the usual time to deceive his parents. Halfway down the stairs, he realized he had forgotten his toothbrush, returned for it and broke it in half so it would fit in his pocket. (It was the only thing he brought back from Spain, he told The Hartford Courant in 2000.)Mr. Fishman called his parents when he got off the subway near the dock, and they cried when he told them his plans. His mother had never seen his father cry. He himself was unafraid. “When you’re 21, there’s no bullet meant for you,” he told The Times in 2000.

On July 5, 1937, during the Brunete offensive west of Madrid, a sniper hit Mr. Fishman’s thigh, leaving 32 pieces of bone and metal. He spent a year in Spanish hospitals, and a pin was put into his leg. At one point the leg became infected, he told The Courant. He was then in and out of hospitals in the United States for two years.

During World War II, Mr. Fishman was in the merchant marine. Afterward, he and other Lincoln veterans became involved in aiding refugees from Franco’s Spain. President Harry S. Truman’s attorney general labeled the veterans group subversive. In 1950, when such organizations had to register with the government, the entire executive committee of the Lincoln Brigade veterans resigned. Mr. Fishman stepped in to become secretary-treasurer.

After a federal court removed the subversive label in the 1970s, Mr. Fishman wrote a colleague that the change might not be good. He wryly suggested doing something subversive so as not to appear irrelevant to rebellious youth. (Mr. Fishman later dropped his party membership, Mr. Carroll said.)

Mr. Fishman is survived by his partner, Georgia Wever, of Manhattan, and his sisters Lilly Litsky, of Santa Cruz, Calif., and Pearl Fishman, of Yonkers.

He never tired of a lively demonstration. But he came to prefer sitting in a folding chair, as he did in 2004, when he hailed protesters at the Republican National Convention in Manhattan. When they saw his Lincoln Brigade banner, they applauded back. In an interview with The Villager, a neighborhood newspaper, he said, “They come up — these young girls — they want you to take a picture with them and they kiss you.”

Other late-life adjustments were harder. In 2001, an article in The Economist recounted how he stumbled over the word “globalization” at a protest against globalization. “It was so much easier to say when we called it imperialism,” he was reported to have said.

Obituary

Chelsea Now

http://www.chelseanow.com/cn_47/moefishman92.html

Moe Fishman, 92, Abraham Lincoln Brigade leader

By Albert Amateau

The indomitable Moe Fishman, leader of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the group of Americans who fought against Franco in the 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War, died Aug. 6 at the age of 92.

He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a year ago, according to Georgia Wever, a longtime friend and fellow resident of Penn South.

Active in progressive causes until the end of his life, Moe Fishman was a leading member of Veterans For Peace New York City Chapter 34, the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, and United for Peace and Justice.

A limp from a wound he received in 1937 at the Battle of Brunete near Madrid lasted the rest of his life but did not stop him from joining protests over the years. He fought against the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s, U.S. aide to the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s, and the Navy’s use of Vieques off Puerto Rico as a bombing range until 2003. He marched in protests against the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq.

In August 2004, Moe and a friend carried a Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade banner in a protest at Madison Sq. Garden against the 2004 Republican National Convention. He told a reporter for Chelsea Now’s sister paper The Villager, who covering the protest, that he was surprised that young people were still aware of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

“They read about us on the Internet. They come up—these young girls—they want you to take a picture with them and they kiss you,” he told the reporter with a smile and a twinkle in the eye.

This past spring, Moe appeared on Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now program, spoke to a high school class on the West Side and shared a podium with Harry Belafonte, according to Peter Carroll, custodian of The Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.

Moses Fishman was born in 1915 in Astoria, Queens, graduated from Stuyvesant High School at the age of 16 and went to work in his father’s laundry business.

He joined a Young Zionists group after another prospective employer told him, “We don’t want any sheenies here,” and later joined the Young Communist League. In an interview with The Villager six years ago, he proudly told a reporter that he helped organize a large laundry—not his father’s—whose employees got a weekly pay increase from $12 to $14 in their first contract.

When General Francisco Franco’s troops, with its Moroccan columns, attacked the Spanish Republic in 1936, Moe tried to sign up with the Loyalists. Rejected at first for lack of military experience—he had never even fired a rifle—he was accepted a second time because of the skill he had learned driving laundry trucks.

He arrived in Spain in February 1937 and trained as an infantry soldier in April. He was injured later that year in his first battle and spent about a year in a Spanish hospital.

He estimated that 60 percent of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade volunteers were in the Young Communist League or the Communist Party. “The rest were trade union members, Zionists, Socialists—we had Wobblies [Industrial Workers of the World], Trotskyites, Left Democrats. We even had a stock broker who had made trips to Spain and loved the Spanish people,” he told The Villager.

Outnumbered by Franco, who had German and Italian help, the Spanish Republic saw the writing on the wall in 1938. Moe recalled the October 1938 speech by “La Passionara,” a charismatic Spanish Deputy (“We considered her our mother,” Fishman once said) bidding farewell to international volunteers from 57 countries who fought for the Loyalists.

When Moe returned to New York, he worked in a warehouse of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee and became a licensed radio operator. After the U.S. entered World War II, Moe went into the Merchant Marine as a radio operator.

After the war, he went back to work for the Refugee Committee and was a leading light in Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

In 1946, the House Un-American Activities Committee branded the Refugee Committee and V.A.L.B. as subversive. Subsequently, the U.S. Attorney General and the Subversive Activities Control Board put the Brigade veterans on a list of proscribed organizations. In 1954, Moe Fishman and Milton Wolff, another Brigade veteran, defended the organization, and their appeals led to a court ruling in the 1970s declaring the listing unconstitutional.

Through it all, Moe Fishman kept the V.A.L.B. running, produced dozens of The Volunteer, the Brigade’s newsletter, rallied support for leftists on trials, and was never at a loss for words in public appearances.

In 1986, about 10 years after the death of Franco, several pro-Loyalists groups invited International Brigade members to Spain. “We were treated royally,” Moe told The Villager, “But in 1996, when we went again, there was a sea-change. Thousands of young people, even children of Franco supporters, treated us like heroes, carried our luggage. They wouldn’t even let us lift up a bag.”

A memorial, date to be announced later, for Moe Fishman is being organized by New York University’s Tamiment Library, custodian since 2003 of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade archives.

i HAVE A WONDERFUL PHOTO OF MOE AND MY FATHER RETURNING FROM SPAIN.
MOE WAS THE KINDEST PERSON IO EVER MET.