Ana Lomidze
HONS 2011J
Hunter College-CUNY
Professor María Hernández-Ojeda
Children and Young Adults in the Spanish Civil War
Personal Statement
In the first week of classes, we were assigned to read Sam Levinger’s last letter to his parents. It was a short letter, but the words he used had a huge impact. The part that stuck to me, as well as to the rest of my class was when he said, “Certainly I am not enthusiastic about dying. I’ve gotten a good bit of fun out of my first twenty years despite the fact that except for the last six months they were pretty useless. I suppose I would have enjoyed my next twenty just as much. I wanted to write this letter, however, to make clear that there is absolutely nothing to regret” (Love and Revolutionary Greetings: An Ohio Boy in the Spanish Civil War 158). Because of this one paragraph, my class’s hour and fifteen minutes were spent discussing, “what makes one’s life meaningful?” This question and my class’s discussion stayed with me. I kept thinking about what would be the answer to such a complex question.
A few weeks later, we started a unit about children during the Spanish Civil War. I constantly looked back at my childhood and thought of what I used to be like. Being a child has so many blessings. The blissful ignorance about the world, the imagination, no fear holding us back. I’m currently a young adult, and yet, there are moments where I still feel like a child, and I wonder whether this feeling will ever go away. So when we started learning about children during the Spanish Civil War, I had a strong emotional reaction to the material we were discussing. For some reason, I was reminded of Sam throughout this unit. We kept talking about the imagination of a child and the power it holds, and I started to see a connection between what Sam said in his last letter and the things we were learning in class. I wanted to know more about Sam at first, to see if the connections I was making were correct. So I decided to write this paper about him to learn more about his story and to add my take on his narrative.
Children
One of the things that motivated me to write about Sam Levinger is my class’s discussion about children during the Spanish Civil War. This unit changed the way that I view many things in life. We watched the movie Pan’s Labyrinth directed by Guillermo del Toro. The film takes place in 1944 Francoist Spain. It follows a ten-year-old girl named Ofelia who tries to escape the hardships of reality through a fantastical world that she is either making up or is real, that is for the viewer to decide. The movie has many layers. There are many parallels between the world Ofelia has a desire to live in and reality. I could write a whole paper about the multiple meanings of this film. However, the main thing that I want to talk about is Ofleia’s fighting characteristic. She defied the Francoist reality by believing in the “fantasy world,” but she also fought against her Francoist stepfather in real life.
We also discussed the novel The Ravine by Nivaia Tejera. This book is an autobiography of Tejera and tells her story of when she was a little girl finding out about war, having her father taken away from her because of this war, and how she had to instantly grow up due to the situation. Right on the first page of the novel, it states, “I feel like I got years older all at once” (Tejera 3), and again later in the chapter, “And now I won’t grow. I feel as if I’ve already grown up. A war can arrest children. Even though children don’t fight and don’t go to prison and last longer. Children can wait” (Tejera 13). I obviously can’t fully relate to this feeling, but having been a child, and being a young adult now – but still feeling like a child – it hurt me to read this. It is painful to watch a child not be able to behave or act like a child because of outside causes.
About Sam Levinger
Ever since Sam Levinger was young, he seemed to have a very brave approach to his actions. He knew exactly what he wanted to do. In Love and Revolutionary Greetings: An Ohio Boy in the Spanish Civil War by Laurie Levinger, Sam states “When I grow up, maybe, I’ll be a revolutionist if I have time” (Love and Revolutionary Greetings: An Ohio Boy in the Spanish Civil War 8). While reading this, I felt as if he was meant to go to Spain. It was as if something in him was telling him that he was going to do something very important with his life.
He was also a very adventurous person. “Sometimes Samuel would take the long way home through the woods along the Brandywine” (Love and Revolutionary Greetings: An Ohio Boy in the Spanish Civil War 9). This quote reminded me of myself. On days when I wanted to clear my head, I would take the long way home from school. This started to worry his parents, so they decided to take him to the doctor to make sure there was nothing wrong with him, to which the doctor replied, “The boy needs adventure, plenty of it” (Love and Revolutionary Greetings: An Ohio Boy in the Spanish Civil War 9). It was fascinating reading about this part of his life since I could feel through the pages how badly he was restless to do something. Due to his restlessness and the doctor’s advice, his parents decided to travel to give him some of the adventures that he had been craving. It is stated in the book that, “In Munich, Samuel put on his Boy Scout uniform and went to the Brown House, where he asked but they wouldn’t let him meet Hitler” (Love and Revolutionary Greetings: An Ohio Boy in the Spanish Civil War 10). Even from a young age, he was a daring fighter.
He also went on a strike alongside coal miners – even though he wasn’t a coal miner – who were asking for better working conditions, where he got arrested. After being released, he still couldn’t stop thinking about what could be done to help the coal miners: “the strikers who have had no charges placed against them are still in [jail], as they have been for over a week. Cambridge today is hardly a place for one who believed in a strict interpretation of the laws of the Land of Liberty” (Love and Revolutionary Greetings: An Ohio Boy in the Spanish Civil War 13). Learning about all of these things that he had done at such a young age, it became clear that he was a fighter, and he would always pick fighting over staying silent. It didn’t surprise me that this is what his childhood and teenage years looked like. However, even though I suspected such bravery from him, I was still astounded by it. I know that is very contradictory, but it is honestly how I felt. His courage is truly admirable.
Why did Sam Levinger go to Spain?
Now that I had learned more about Sam, why did he decide to go to Spain? I interviewed Sam’s niece, also the writer of Love and Revolutionary Greetings: An Ohio Boy in the Spanish Civil War, Laurie Levinger to see why she thought he went to Spain. She stated, “He joined the volunteers to try to stop Fascism… He was reading in the Times about Spain and it changed his life” (Levinger). This is why many of the volunteers went to Spain. They wanted to help fight against Fascism.
I don’t doubt this reason. I think there is sufficient evidence to support it, but I want to add something new to Sam’s narrative. He knew that fighting in the Spanish Civil War was the right thing to do, but I also think that this is when he became an adult, like how Tejera described it in The Ravine. Even though Sam was in his late teens, when things became serious, he decided to be an adult, make an important decision, and go.
Throughout all his life he felt like he was doing useless things. When I interviewed Laurie Levinger, she herself said, “He was a freshman at Ohio State, and he just thought everything he had done was just kind of silly” (Levinger). But when he made the decision of going to Spain, he decided to take his future into his own hands, just like Ofelia from Pan’s Labyrinth did. It was such a fantastical decision, it may have even seemed insane, but he was doing it to escape the current reality he was in. How does one escape that reality? By changing it.
Conclusion
Sam’s decisions reminded me of a lot of the children that we had learned about in class. They ended up changing the world, even though they may not have known it. He had no regrets about going to war, and he started to feel indifferent towards death. He wrote a poem that states, “I do not fear that blankness that men call death” (Love and Revolutionary Greetings: An Ohio Boy in the Spanish Civil War 100). He also said in his last letter that most of his life was “pretty useless.” What makes one’s life useless? What makes one’s life purposeful? He says at the end of the quote that there is “nothing to regret,” about going to Spain. Since this is the first thing I read by Sam Levinger, I felt like he was happy to be in Spain and be fighting for something he believed in, which was what gave his life purpose. But now that I have also read Love and Revolutionary Greetings: An Ohio Boy in the Spanish Civil War he not only did something that was right, he also did it because he wanted to. It wasn’t forced. It came from the heart. He escaped the harsh reality of the world by trying to make a change in it. He was truly an extraordinary person and I hope to be more like him.
Work Cited
Levinger, Laurie E. Love and Revolutionary Greetings: An Ohio Boy in the Spanish Civil War.
Eugene, Oregon: Resource Publications, 2012.
Levinger, Laurie E. Personal Interview. Conducted by Ana Lomidze, 25 November 2020.
Pan’s Labyrinth. Dir. Guillermo del Toro. PictureHouse – Telecinco – Estudios Picasso Tequila
Gang Esperanto Filmo, 2006. New Line Home Entertainment, 2007. DVD.
Tejera, Nivaria. The Ravine. Translated by Carol Maier. State University of New York Press,
2012.