[Marxism] Abe Osheroff

[Louis Proyect]

NY Times, April 11, 2008
Abe Osheroff, Veteran of Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Dies at 92
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Abe Osheroff, a carpenter by trade and leftist provocateur by proclivity 
who was wounded in the Spanish Civil War, then helped keep alive the 
memory of that struggle with two documentary films and thousands of 
speeches, died on April 6 at his home in Seattle. He was 92.

The cause was a heart attack, said Anthony L. Geist, Mr. Osheroff’s 
friend and chairman of Spanish and Portuguese studies at the University 
of Washington.

Mr. Osheroff wove his most enduring legacy from the threads of his life. 
It was a 1974 film, “Dreams and Nightmares,” which told of his journey 
from the streets of Brooklyn to the Spanish battlefields of the 1930s to 
a melancholy return to Spain a generation later.

He used the movie, which won several prizes in Europe, as an entree to 
teaching jobs at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the 
University of Washington, and to countless speaking engagements at 
colleges, high schools and other forums across the nation. He continued 
to work as a union carpenter.

Mr. Osheroff’s last speech was in San Francisco on March 30, when he 
spoke from a wheelchair at the unveiling of a monument to the 3,000 
American volunteers to fight Franco in what came to be called the 
Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Nine hundred were killed.

“The stuff we’re made of never goes away, with or without monuments,” he 
said in the old-time Brooklyn accent he never lost, Mr. Geist and other 
friends said. “Because the bastards will never cease their evil, and the 
decent human beings will never stop their struggle.”

Eleven of the 39 surviving Lincoln Brigade veterans attended the speech. 
On April 7, two more died: Abe Smorodin, 92, of Brooklyn, and Ted 
Veltfort, 92, of Oakland, Calif. Three dozen remain.

Mr. Smorodin ran a candy store for many years and was the last 
secretary-treasurer of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Mr. 
Veltfort went on to teach engineering in Cuba and organize a drive to 
donate ambulances to the leftist government of Nicaragua in the 1980s.

Mr. Osheroff achieved a higher profile among generations of leftists, 
not least because of his gift of gab. His political involvement began at 
12, when he joined the broad protest against the conviction of the 
anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti.

Soon, he was arrested for helping evicted tenants immediately move their 
belongings back into their apartments. He organized coal miners and 
steelworkers and once ran for the New York Legislature as a Communist.

Going to Spain in May 1937, he swam the final two miles to shore after 
his ship was sunk. He fought in four battles before machine-gun fire 
shattered a knee, and he returned home in August 1938.

He even managed the obligatory fistfight with Hemingway, in his case 
over food he admitted he was stealing from the writer.

When Mr. Osheroff arrived in Mississippi in 1964 to build a community 
center during the Freedom Summer of 1964, his car was blown up the night 
he arrived. He aided the leftist government in Nicaragua by organizing a 
team of Americans to build houses for a peasant cooperative.

In 2006, he was still prowling Seattle in a van, criticizing the Iraq 
war over a loudspeaker. The same year, he was arrested for the last time 
at a sit-in protest.

“My ship is slowly sinking, but my cannons keep firing,” Mr. Osheroff 
said in a 2005 interview with Robert Jensen, a University of Texas 
journalism professor. “Or, here’s another way to say it: I have one foot 
in the grave and the other keeps dancing.”

Abraham Osheroff was born in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn in 
October 1915. His mother, a seamstress in a sweatshop, and father, a 
carpenter, were Jews who emigrated from Russia. His first language was 
Yiddish, his second, Russian, and his third, English. He told of being 
so rebellious that he tried to burn down Erasmus Hall High School.

He graduated from the City College of New York, then organized 
industrial workers in Pennsylvania, winning respect with arm-wrestling 
skill. He went to Spain after seeing newsreels of Nazi planes bombing 
the undefended city of Guernica.

His losing run for the Legislature came in 1940, and the next year he 
joined the Army, in which he helped in mop-up operations after D-Day. 
After the war, he moved frequently, to avoid federal investigators 
hunting Communists. He worked on a dude ranch and for a company that 
wrote term papers for college students, among many other jobs.

Mr. Osheroff became disillusioned with the Communist Party in 1956, and 
left it. His later political involvements included fierce opposition to 
the Vietnam War and fighting real estate developers in the Venice 
section of Los Angeles.

In 2000, Mr. Osheroff made another movie, a documentary about posters 
from the Spanish Civil War.

Mr. Osheroff was married three times. He is survived by his companion, 
Gunnel Clark; his daughter, Sarah, of Portland, Ore.; and his sons Dov, 
of Berkeley, Calif., and Nick, of Los Angeles.

Like many other Lincoln Brigade veterans, Mr. Osheroff believed World 
War II could have been prevented if other nations had smashed Franco, 
and his allies, Hitler and Mussolini, in Spain. But he believed that 
struggle itself gave life meaning.

“If you need a victory, you aren’t a fighter,” he said in 2000, “you’re 
an opportunist.”