Love and Revolutionary Greetings

Description:
Love and Revolutionary Greetings: An Ohio Boy in the Spanish Civil War is the story of Sam Levinger, a young man who went to Spain in 1937 to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Civil war raged in Spain as the fascist army of Francisco Franco sought to overthrow the democratically elected Republic. Levinger, a dedicated idealist, made the commitment to go to a foreign country to fight fascism. Love and Revolutionary Greetings is placed in the historical context of the 1930s, when freedom everywhere was threatened by Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini.
The book is based on Sam Levinger's letters, poems, and stories that he sent home from Spain, interspersed with those of his mother, Elma Levinger. Told in the words of a soldier son and his mother, as well as other members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the book offers an eyewitness account of the hardships and the politics of the times. Men and women from all over the world went to Spain to fight with the International Brigade to defend Spanish democracy. Twenty-eight hundred men and women from the United States joined the International Brigade. Sam Levinger was one of them. Sam died in Spain when he was twenty years old. The author, Sam Levinger's niece, traveled to Spain to search for his unmarked grave. Love and Revolutionary Greetings tells the emotional and political story of American involvement in the Spanish Civil War in the language of people who lived it.


Endorsements:
""The story of the 2,800 Americans who defended the Spanish Republic against fascism in the 1930s has sparked many compelling accounts, but few as moving as this one. Laurie Levinger has unearthed a cache of stunningly powerful testimony, most of which has never been published, and carefully crafted a . . . multi-voiced tapestry that takes us from the Depression years in Columbus, Ohio, to the Spanish trenches.""
--Sebastiaan Faber
Chair, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives

""Levinger's book is a compelling collage in which love and memory illuminate fascinating fragments of American social history. It tells of twenty-year-old Sam Levinger, who died in 1937 fighting Franco's Nazi-backed rebels in Spain . . . Sam, the gifted, writerly boy who lives again now in Levinger's book through his letters home-their crystalline prose, shot through with wry humour, hints too at the sparse intensity of a soldier's experience.""
-Helen Graham
Author of The War and Its Shadow


About the Contributor(s):
Laurie Levinger is a freelance writer. She is the author of two books, What War? Testimonies of Maya Survivors and Just a Dropped Stitch.