coldhearted scientist وداد

Milton Wolff’s 2008 obituary, cut out from Le Monde, was sent to our family and is now one of the tattered pieces of paper I am clearing out. He is very striking in the 1938 Robert Capa photograph that accompanies this obituary (5. II.08, by Robert S. Coale, p. 23). Coale says this photograph immortalized W0lff “dans plusieurs clichés.”

“El Lobo” Wolff was the last commander of the Lincoln Brigade. In our substitute photograph below, he is leaving Spain on foot with his companions. You can see their flag. In the photograph I seek, he looks older.

Here is another well distributed picture of Woolf in Spain, with a beret and a mule, and here is an amazing archive of Washington-Lincoln Brigade photography at NYU.

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Milton Wolff was from Brooklyn. Brooklynites appear to have a great deal of character, and Wolff seems to have been quite jaunty. While on leave in Madrid from the battlefield of Brunete, for instance, he stole a girl from Hemingway. Hemingway was more upset that Wolff had not read him; naturally he wrote about Wolff in his dispatches.

During the Second World War Wolff first worked for the British, recruiting former Lincoln Brigade members for secret missions behind German lines. They were not easily allowed to fight for the United States, since their “premature anti-Fascism” made them suspect — although Wolff did finally manage to join U.S. forces.

After the war, Wolff became an antiwar activist, and after Franco’s death he returned many times to Spain. He met La Pasionaria‘s granddaughter in Madrid in 2001, and commemorated the Battle of the Ebro in 2005. He died in Berkeley at 92, and he is denounced on a U.S. antisemitic site which describes the Spanish Civil War as a battle between Christians or Catholics and Communist Jews.

Wolff’s New York Times obituary is interesting, although not as much fun to read as an actual clipping from a copy of Le Monde bought in Paris. There are more obituaries, including those in the Guardian, Organized Rage (a more detailed text with archival photography, more Commnist, more Jewish and extremely interesting), and the Times UK.

Wolff published an acclaimed autobiographical novel about the war (Illinois 2001, introduction by Cary Nelson), and a memoir about his earlier life in 2005. You can see that I have become quite interested in him. It appears that he was holding a writer’s workshop near my home when I was in graduate school, and I did not know it.

I am reading a set of autobiographical essays, several of whose authors are from Brooklyn. I just had lunch with two ancient colleagues who both went to Brooklyn College long ago. I now want to visit the place as it was, so I suppose I must read Wolff’s memoir.

Axé.