Home So Far Away, the Back Story (the Craft vs. the Muse)

I didn’t know what my book – my first novel - was about until I decided on the title. The manuscript had passed through several incarnations, from a bulky, self- published tome called simply Camarada Klara through a ruthlessly chopped-down version which I translated into Spanish and which the editors titled Diario de la Camarada Clara: Una enfermera de las Brigadas Internacionales. The English version of the slimmer volume was the one I submitted to She Writes Press, who accepted the task, providing me with careful and sensitive editing, which included toning down the graphic sexual details – not what this book was about. What did I know – I had never written fiction before and a friend had just published two murder mysteries with SWP that contained frank sexuality.

My husband Cy has a t-shirt with an image of Shakespeare and the motto “This sh__ writes itself!” I am tempted to borrow the motto for my debut work of historical fiction. I was just an academic (Spanish language and literature and world cultures), a card-carrying translator (medical and legal), hausfrau, mom and grandmother, former classical guitarist, tour guide, choral singer, and peace activist, dedicated to snooping into my family tree and into the trees of others. I had uncovered my relationship to the Philipsborn family by opening the box containing a bracelet my aunt had given me. Her handwritten note inside read Onyx and gold bracelet from Clara Philipsborn (Father’s sister). I had vague memories of that family name and put out a search on the internet, turning up the Chicago-based Philipsborn company, founded by Max Philipsborn, married to my great-aunt, Clara Gattmann. Their grandson, Tom Philipsborn, then, is my second cousin and he was thrilled that we had found each other. He was as obsessed as I – perhaps even more – with genealogy and told me he had been collecting information for years on the family. He assigned me to ”find everyone.” That search morphed into a narrated genealogy, which I self-published as From the Family Store to the House of Lords: the Jewish Philipsborn Family of Bentschen/Zbąszyń and their Descendants.

Along the way I came across an article, in German, by Thomas Pusch, titled “Spaniens Himmel” that mentioned a Klara Philipsborn as the only woman from the state of Schleswig-Holstein among anti-fascist volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. I had long been fascinated by that event, perhaps because I was born on the last day of that war, March 31, 1939. Pusch’s article identified a town where Klara had served as a translator and a nurse as “Okania,” a German transcription of the town of Ocaña. Soon in my hands was the little book titled Penal de Ocaña by María Josefa Canellada: a novel of testimony about a student of the humanities volunteering in a hospital. And on page 134 was a passage beginning “Se llamaba Clarita” – a vignette of my Klara! - definitely one of some very clear messages that I was to pursue this plan.

Details on that page led to research into historic figures of the Spanish Civil War and into Facebook contacts with scholars and descendants of combatants, who have become my friends and collaborators. A major source of information was facilitated by the son of an Abraham Lincoln Brigade volunteer, in the link to RGASPI, the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History, a repository of many of the records of the International Brigades.

RGASPI documents provided much information about Klara, revealing political enemies and personal allies. And I devoured articles about topics entirely new to me: the progress of untreated pneumonia, anti-aircraft guns, Hitler’s Anschluss of Austria, the fates of Franco’s victims. Other connections poured my way. Klara’s employment at the Madrid School of Medicine took place at the location of the pioneering Residencia de Señoritas. I looked into that story and noticed that the name of one of the very few female medical students sounded familiar. On checking with a friend, I learned that this student was the mother of a neurologist who had come to Stanford University to study at the Sleep Medicine center while I was an instructor there, in the 1970’s! (We are still close friends and she now has a copy of the Spanish translation.)

Queries of family members brought conflicting information: Klara’s nephew, (called “Putzi” in the book), described her to me in an email as a “firebrand” and stated that she had visited him in England from Spain in 1939, and departed, never to be heard from again. He was sure that she had been killed in Spain. But other family members reported that their parents had received letters from Klara from “one of those Latin American countries” insisting that they raise their children to be Communists.

All these disconnected pieces, swirling around one human being! Klara needed a voice. I would write her diary. But I had never written fiction. I never took a “creative writing” class. I had never belonged to a “book club” or a “writing group.” My models of fiction-writing were Cervantes and Toni Morrison. A diary? Maybe Anne Frank, but she was a child. Klara was a mature woman who lived her passion, her Causa, and needed it to go public. I knew how to write an academic essay, formulate and substantiate a thesis, analyze a piece of literature, document my sources, I had done jazz arrangements, and I had been well educated by members of the windfall of professors escaping Franco’s Spain for American universities … but write someone else’s diary, based on fragments of fiction, scathing exposés from secret organizations, and contradictory family stories? So I just started writing, freed (at last!) from the constraints of academia, alone with those sketchy reports, summoning Klara’s voice. Her political inspirations (Rosa Luxemburg, Marx, Trotsky, Rosario “la dinamitera”), her doubts (the Soviet Union, her Jewishness, her loyalty to Germany), her sexual attractions (the young student, Comandante Carlos, the tank-driver from Hamburg): what was this story about? After many rewrites and possible titles, I finally put my trust in the Muse to direct me to the German article. The title, “Spaniens Himmel,” is taken from the first line of the anthem of the Thaelmann Battalion, whose refrain begins “Die Heimat ist weit…” – “The homeland is far away…” A line from the film, The Mexican Suitcase, “¿A qué país pertenece el exiliado?” – “To what country does the exile belong?” and the fact that there is no real answer, confirmed for me that, with all the issues contained in Klara’s diary, embracing the question, letting the sh__ write itself, rather than imposing an answer, was all I needed.