Somaly Tum
Spain Today: Film and Fiction
Professor Villa, The New School
May Levine Hartzman
Personal Statement
Before this semester, I didn’t know much at all, if anything, about the Spanish Civil War. It was never taught in my previous schools, and it wasn’t until I began my research and watched the 1984 documentary, The Good Fight, that I found out about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and the thousands of other volunteers who traveled to Spain to fight against fascism. In total, there were about 40,000 volunteers from all over the world. While I was looking online at the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA), I came across a single folder from the Frances Patai Papers (Box 3, Folder 2) on May Levine Hartzman. I was drawn to her file because I wanted to learn more about the experiences of women who volunteered in the Spanish Civil War. After reading her biography, I found May Levine’s story to be very compelling and I hope to extend a similar feeling of hope and inspiration to others who are fighting for justice by sharing her legacy.
Essay Narrative
After her parents escaped the repression of Czarist Russia, May Levine was born in New York City on August 19, 1914. She grew up being very class conscious as both of her parents faced unemployment problems and tried to run their own businesses, such as newsstands and candy stores. During this time, May attended a Jewish school sponsored by the International Workers’ Order and helped to take care of her younger brother, Fred, while her parents were working. After high school, May was accepted to nurse’s training school at Lebanon Hospital in New York, but graduated in the midst of the Depression. In 1935, nurses faced a lot of unemployment and co-workers fainted from a lack of food. The following year, the Spanish Civil War began and May announced that she was going to Spain after reading what was happening in the Daily Worker. She applied to the American Medical Bureaus and left for Spain aboard the Normandie on May 17, 1937.
May travelled with a group of nurses from New York and Philadelphia, along with nurses and doctors from Chicago. After they arrived in Le Havre, they took a train to Paris and left on buses towards the Spanish border. Once they got into Spain, they drove to a city known as Benicasim, where a number of villas had been taken over and converted into hospital facilities. These villas used to be owned by wealthy families and one of them was turned into an operating room where May would work as a nurse alongside neurosurgeon Abraham Edelson for about a year. May recalls how some days were very quiet, while others were so loud that it seemed like bombs could drop from a plane at any moment. Overall, however, May felt like she was very lucky to be in Benicasim. In a relatively short time span, she was able to form very close friendships with her coworkers and the local people there and in Murcia.
Because of the large diversity of doctors and nurses who came to volunteer in Spain, the hospitals were previously described as a “League of Nations.” There were doctors from different parts of Europe, such as the Czech Republic and Poland, and a German author named Gustav Regler had also stayed there for a time. May became close to one doctor in particular whom she would speak Yiddish to, since he knew French and Polish and she knew English and Spanish. During this time, the hospital was very busy and they mostly did general surgeries even though they had a neurosurgeon. The nurses had to be very creative because the hospital lacked supplies. May remembered one burn patient who needed to keep his leg off the blanket, so she took a cradle from the autoclave and propped it upside down over his leg.
While she was volunteering, May kept in touch with her family and other nurses she had known in the Bronx. Her mother would send her parcels of instant coffee along with chocolate strudel preserved in cognac, and the nurses would send her peanut butter. In Benicasim, she was also able to meet prominent artists and politicians such as American congressmen Bernand and O’Connell, Singer Paul Robeson, and Filmmaker Herb Klein. May also took care of Abe Osheroff, who was wounded at the time but went on to make the film Dreams and Nightmares in 1974. If patients had severe wounds, however, they had to be transported to a different location. One trip in particular was life changing for May because it was the moment she met her future husband, Jack Hartzman. May vividly recalled meeting Jack, who was one of the ambulance drivers, the day they had to transport 14 patients to Murcia who were all in very bad condition. To help ease the pain, May took some minor pain killing pills and some cognac with her. Several years later, May would reunite with one of the patients she helped that day at an event by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in New York.
When things began to get increasingly bad for the loyalist army, May and other International Brigaders were taken to Barcelona before getting repatriated after three months. When the Normandie docked in New York on September 26, 1938, May was greeted by friends and family who then threw a party at her home. She continued to be very socially engaged and active after her return to the United States. Not only did she work as a private duty nurse, but she also worked at Bellevue Hospital in New York. When World War II broke out, May travelled to Panama and spent some time working in the Canal Zone. In 1946, she moved to Chicago and married Jack Hartzman. They would later move to Los Angeles where both would continue to be active in progressive causes throughout their lives. Jack passed away in December 1995. May passed away in May 1996.
The life of May Levine Hartzman is one of strength, courage, and deep compassion. May left the United States at a young age to support a cause she believed in and continued to do so for the rest of her life. Her efforts during this time deserve to be recognized, especially when a rhetoric of forgetting is being pushed by the Spanish government. If there wasn’t a conscious effort to keep these stories and memories alive, the experiences of volunteers and civilians from the Spanish Civil War could easily be forgotten. By sharing May’s experience in this essay, the impact that she can have on the world grows even larger as her memory continues to live on.
Works Cited
Hartzman, Peter. “May Levine.” Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Spanish Civil War History and Education: May Levine. N.p., n.d. Web.
May Levine. Frances Patai Papers. ALBA #1, Box #3, Folder 2. Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives. NYU.