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Delmer Berg, Last Survivor of Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Dies at 100
By SAM ROBERTS
MARCH 2, 2016
Delmer Berg, the last known living veteran of the Abraham Lincoln
Brigade, which vainly fought against Fascism’s advance into Spain in the
late 1930s, died on Sunday at his home in Columbia, Calif. He was 100.
His death was confirmed by Marina Garde, the executive director of the
Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives in New York, who said Mr. Berg was
believed to have been the only survivor left of the nearly 3,000
quixotic young Americans who volunteered for the Spanish Civil War in a
bloody prelude to World War II. About 800 of those who volunteered were
believed to have been killed.
Mr. Berg, an unreconstructed Communist, was a 21-year-old
union-card-carrying hotel dishwasher in 1937 when he spotted a billboard
for the brigade and, through the Young Communist League, enlisted. After
cobbling together bus fare to New York, he boarded the French luxury
liner Champlain for France.
“I was a worker,” Mr. Berg told The Modesto Bee, a California newspaper,
in November. “I was a farmer. I was in support of the Spanish working
people, and I wanted to go to Spain to help them.”
The war was an audition by proxies for World War II, with a
democratically elected leftist government under siege from rebels led by
Gen. Francisco Franco.
Through the Communist Party, the Soviet Union was supporting the
Republicans, or Loyalists. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy fortified
Franco. Franco won the war in 1939 and installed a dictatorship that
endured until his death in 1975. The United States was officially
neutral during the war.
Mr. Berg slipped into Spain in January 1938, crossing the snow-capped
French border. He went on to install communication lines for front-line
antiaircraft artillery near Barcelona, defended the mountain town Teruel
and fought at the Battle of the Ebro, the biggest battle of the Spanish
Civil War.
He was wounded that August when Italian bombers missed a railroad
station and instead struck a monastery where he and others were
billeted. Shrapnel from the bomb remained in his liver for the rest of
his life.
The Munich Pact, which appeased Nazi Germany by allowing Hitler to annex
portions of Czechoslovakia, left many Loyalists demoralized. Mr. Berg
left Spain and returned home early in 1939.
Unlike a number of other starry-eyed recruits to the Abraham Lincoln
Brigade, Mr. Berg never outgrew his devotion to underdogs.
He joined the Communist Party USA in 1943, became a vice president of
his local chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., organized farm workers and
protested the war in Vietnam and nuclear weapons.
Photo
Delmer Berg, standing second from right wearing a beret, with the
Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain around 1938. Credit Abraham Lincoln
Brigade Archives
“He was always attached to just causes,” a friend, Pat Cervelli, said in
an interview.
Delmer Esley Daniel Berg was born in Anaheim, Calif., on Dec. 20, 1915,
of Ukranian, Dutch and Bavarian ancestry. His father was a tenant farmer.
He left high school in Manteca, Calif., as a junior during the
Depression (auspiciously, given his stint in Spain, after studying Latin
and “Don Quixote”) to help support his family in Oregon. He later moved
to Los Angeles, where, tempted by recruiters for the military and the
circus, he joined the National Guard.
He legally bought his way out of the Guard for $120 and got a job
washing dishes at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, when he saw the
billboard advertising for Lincoln Brigade recruits.
After returning from Spain, he was drafted into the Army in 1939 and
assigned to an antiaircraft battery in New Guinea. He was discharged
early in 1942 because of his shrapnel wound from the fighting in Spain.
After the war, he worked as a farm laborer and a landscaper, and started
a cement and stonemasonry business with one of his sons.
He and his wife, June, lived in the Sierra Nevada foothills. She died
last year. Survivors include his sons from an earlier marriage, Ernst
and Tom, and two grandsons.
Asked in 2013 what his proudest moments had been since Spain, he told
the weekly Anderson Valley Advertiser in Mendocino County: “When I was
elected vice president of the local N.A.A.C.P. and when one of my
grandsons was valedictorian at his Oregon high school graduation and
said in a newspaper interview, ‘My grandfather is my inspiration. He’s a
Communist!’”
In 2014, according to the Archives, after the death of John Hovan of
Rhode Island, Mr. Berg became the only known survivor of the Lincoln
Brigade.
Nearly 80 years after the war, as the last torch bearer, he still
considered his mission incomplete. “It bothers me a little that at 99
you’re going to die any minute,” he told The New York Times Magazine in
2015, “because I have a lot of other things I want to do.”
---
Nabil Maleh, Giant of Syrian Cinema, Dies at 79
By KAREN ZRAICK
MARCH 1, 2016
Nabil Maleh, who used social realism to challenge authority and became,
in many critics’ estimation, the father of Syrian cinema, died on Feb.
24 in Dubai. He was 79.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Ebla Maleh, who said he had
recently learned he had lung cancer.
Mr. Maleh’s 1972 film, “The Leopard,” based on a novel by the Syrian
author Haydar Haydar, was the first feature film released by the
state-run National Film Organization and won first prize at the Locarno
Film Festival that year. It tells the story of a lone rebel who defends
his village against corrupt local authorities.
The Dubai International Film Festival honored Mr. Maleh with a lifetime
achievement award in 2006, calling him “one of the first Arab filmmakers
to use experimental techniques, which paved the way for a new
cinematographic language.”
He left Syria in 2011, as a government crackdown on mostly peaceful
protests was intensifying. He never returned to his homeland, which was
the subject and setting of almost all his films.
Besides “The Leopard,” his other well-known film is “The Extras” (1993),
the story of a young couple trying to keep their affair a secret. It was
shot entirely in a small Damascus apartment. In that film, Mr. Maleh
used the themes of surveillance and claustrophobia in a society rigidly
controlled by both the government and strict social mores to make a
larger statement about life in an authoritarian state.
“He made films that were always accessible even if they were profound,”
said Christa Salamandra, an anthropologist at the City University of New
York who specializes in Syrian media and has written about Mr. Maleh.
Mr. Maleh made about 150 films, including shorts and features. He also
worked in television, wrote screenplays and articles, and painted.
His 2006 documentary “The Road to Damascus” was prescient in examining
conditions that led to the 2011 uprising. In it, Mr. Maleh’s crew
travels around the country interviewing ordinary Syrians, who discuss
the poverty and corruption that had resulted in an exodus from rural
Syria to Damascus, with job seekers and their families settling in
ramshackle housing on the city’s outskirts. The film was never shown in
Syria.
Other projects, like “The Holy Crystal” (2008), a 26-minute
documentary-fiction hybrid about the Old City of Damascus, emphasized
Syria’s cultural heritage, beauty and diversity.
“Syria is a condensed museum,” Mr. Maleh said in a 2007 interview in the
Old City. “It is such a mixture and a panorama of history.” He added,
“I’m trying to re-establish a human memory regarding this side of Syria.”
Mr. Maleh was born in Damascus on Sept. 28, 1936, to Ali Mumtaz Maleh, a
doctor, and Samiha Al Ghazi. As a young man he was outspoken
politically, criticizing the government of the Egyptian president, Gamal
Abdel Nasser, which controlled Syria as part of the United Arab
Republic. He studied at Prague Film School — he was said to be his
country’s first graduate of a European film academy — and returned to
Syria in 1964.
Hafez al-Assad took power in Syria in 1971, and “The Leopard” was
released the next year, after the Ministry of the Interior had initially
blocked it. Shown widely in Syria, it included what is considered the
first partial nude scene in Arab cinema, depicting a passionate moment
between the film’s rebel hero, Abu Ali, and his wife, Shafiqa, while
they are on the run from the authorities. She later takes up arms to
help him fight.
Charif Kiwan, a spokesman for Abounaddara, a collective of Syrian
filmmakers who oppose the government, said seeing the film as a
youngster in Syria was a formative experience for him, offering a “first
feeling of freedom.”
“Can you imagine, it was like a mix of political rebellion and also a
naked woman,” he said by phone from Beirut, Lebanon. “We discovered
politics through the naked body.”
Mr. Maleh left Syria in 1981 after he was beaten by a Foreign Ministry
guard when he failed to yield to an official’s car quickly enough. He
taught at the University of Texas, Austin, and the University of
California, Los Angeles, before moving to Switzerland and then to
Greece. He returned to Syria in 1993.
In 2000, Bashar al-Assad took power after the death of his father,
prompting hope of reform. Mr. Maleh held gatherings of dissidents at his
home during what became known as the Damascus Spring, a brief flowering
when many prominent figures called for democratization. The government
answered with mass arrests.
After the start of the protests in 2011, Mr. Maleh proposed a new
television station focused on political dialogue and talk shows. But, he
said in interviews, the government never responded to his proposal. He
supported the principles of the uprising, Professor Salamandra said, but
never joined any political organization, feeling that none fully
represented the Syria he wanted to see.
In addition to his daughter Ebla, he is survived by his wife, Feryal
Abedrabou; two other daughters, Zalfa and Samiha Maleh; two brothers,
Nazih and Mohamed; and a granddaughter. A previous marriage ended in
divorce.
“It affected him deeply, to see his country wounded,” Ebla Maleh said in
an email. “It was very painful for him to watch the news or even speak
about Damascus without it bringing him to tears. A country so delicate,
intricate, so beautiful, full of potential.”
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