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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/nyregion/12fishman.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries&oref=slogin
Moe Fishman Dies at 92; Fought in Lincoln Brigade
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By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: August 12, 2007
Moe Fishman, who as a 21-year-old from Astoria, Queens, fought
Fascists in Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and was severely
wounded, then led veterans of that unit in fighting efforts to brand
them as Communist subversives, died on Aug. 6 in Manhattan. He was 92.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Peter Carroll, chief of the
board of governors of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.
Mr. Carroll said that about 40 of about 3,000 American veterans of the
Spanish Civil War volunteers are living. It had been the job of Mr.
Fishman, as executive secretary-treasurer of the veterans, to announce
deaths.
At times he was almost alone in keeping the group going, Mr. Carroll
said, particularly during the long, ultimately successful legal battle
to remove the group's subversive label. Mr. Fishman put out a
newsletter, kept scrupulous books, ran the office daily and spoke
widely.
In an interview with Esquire magazine in 1962, he said: "I'm the
organization. If there's something to decide, I talk it over with the
guys and then decide what I'm going to do. Cockeyed, but that's the
way it is."
The Spanish Civil War began in 1936 after Gen. Francisco Franco set
out to overthrow the newly elected leftist government. Americans soon
volunteered to fight Franco in what came to be called the Lincoln
Brigade.
It was actually a battalion. Officially, Americans joined it or the
Washington Battalion. The two American battalions, which informally
have come to be known as the Lincoln Brigade, joined with four other
battalions of volunteers from other countries to form the XV
International Brigade.
In 1937, Mr. Fishman was a high-school dropout working in a laundry
and driving a truck. He was also a member of the Young Communist
League, having joined partly to meet like-minded young women at dances
the organization sponsored, he said in an interview with The New York
Times in 2004.
He also liked how the Communists responded when a family behind on the
rent was evicted and thrown on the streets with its furniture. He told
The Times that party members would use an ax or hammer to break the
lock on the door and put the family back in.
Many believe that at least half of the volunteers for the Lincoln
Brigade were Communists, but Mr. Fishman's reasons for joining were
more complex, he told The Times in 1969.
"Why did I go?" he said. "That's hard to say. That's a key question. I
was active in trade union work. I wanted to travel. I belonged to the
92nd Street Y.M.H.A., and we were very anti-Fascist, much opposed to
Hitler, Franco."
He was born Moses Fishman on Sept. 28, 1915, and grew up in Astoria.
On the day he was to depart for Spain, he left for work at the usual
time to deceive his parents. Halfway down the stairs, he realized he
had forgotten his toothbrush, returned for it and broke it in half so
it would fit in his pocket. (It was the only thing he brought back
from Spain, he told The Hartford Courant in 2000.)Mr. Fishman called
his parents when he got off the subway near the dock, and they cried
when he told them his plans. His mother had never seen his father cry.
He himself was unafraid. "When you're 21, there's no bullet meant for
you," he told The Times in 2000.
On July 5, 1937, during the Brunete offensive west of Madrid, a sniper
hit Mr. Fishman's thigh, leaving 32 pieces of bone and metal. He spent
a year in Spanish hospitals, and a pin was put into his leg. At one
point the leg became infected, he told The Courant. He was then in and
out of hospitals in the United States for two years.
During World War II, Mr. Fishman was in the merchant marine.
Afterward, he and other Lincoln veterans became involved in aiding
refugees from Franco's Spain. President Harry S. Truman's attorney
general labeled the veterans group subversive. In 1950, when such
organizations had to register with the government, the entire
executive committee of the Lincoln Brigade veterans resigned. Mr.
Fishman stepped in to become secretary-treasurer.
After a federal court removed the subversive label in the 1970s, Mr.
Fishman wrote a colleague that the change might not be good. He wryly
suggested doing something subversive so as not to appear irrelevant to
rebellious youth. (Mr. Fishman later dropped his party membership, Mr.
Carroll said.)
Mr. Fishman is survived by his partner, Georgia Wever, of Manhattan,
and his sisters Lilly Litsky, of Santa Cruz, Calif., and Pearl
Fishman, of Yonkers.
He never tired of a lively demonstration. But he came to prefer
sitting in a folding chair, as he did in 2004, when he hailed
protesters at the Republican National Convention in Manhattan. When
they saw his Lincoln Brigade banner, they applauded back. In an
interview with The Villager, a neighborhood newspaper, he said, "They
come up - these young girls - they want you to take a picture with
them and they kiss you."
Other late-life adjustments were harder. In 2001, an article in The
Economist recounted how he stumbled over the word "globalization" at a
protest against globalization. "It was so much easier to say when we
called it imperialism," he was reported to have said.

 Moe Fishman
hai dimenticato: nemici dal naso adunco.