Actually, no. Isadore Lebowitz, 26, got on the boat with the other Lincolns in 1937 and made it as far as Rotterdam. There he was arrested by authorities and placed on another ship returning to the United States. It seems his Aunt Nanye, who ran the Brooklyn bakery where he.... https://twitter.com/casa_de_davila/status/1293895335316795393

...worked, had raced to her borough alderman waving the note that Isadore had left his young wife saying he had gone to kill fascists. Even though Isadore, as a lefty, had been involved in organizing the Teamsters against his aunt’s management of the Standard Bakery on....

...Wythe Street, no nephew of hers was going to go back to Europe and get himself killed if she could help it. With the alderman’s help, Nanye swore out a warrant claiming that Isadore had stolen several thousand dollars from the bakery....

...He was detained by the Dutch until the next ship to New York could repatriate him to face his crime. Nanye dropped the charges once he was returned and Isadore never forgave her. The rest of his shipmates crossed the Pyrenees to fight, with Spain in their hearts....

....as his parents had died and Nanye considered herself his guardian of sorts, this constitutes one of the most overreaching examples of Jewish mothering on record. I have a photo of my cousin on the deck of the ship on the return voyage, looking miserable. But you are....

...half-correct. His shipmates did go to Spain and many of them did suffer and die, though to read every account of the Lincolns, they did so knowing why and that fascism would be revealed as the wrong side of history. By 1945, it surely was.

A small postscript to all this: I was first in Spain at a film festival in Asturias and was asked in an interview whether I had any family there and I told this story of a cousin who once tried to visit. The journalist, Toni Garcia, also asked me if there anything I hoped to do..

..on that first visit. I mentioned a few things, but remarked that I had screwed up by not attempting to make a reservation at one of the world's finest restaurants, El Cellar de Can Rocca, months in advance so my own fault, I had shut myself out...

...After the interview ran, the Rocca family forwarded a lunch seating in Girona. So the first glass of cava was of course a toast to Isadore Lebowitz, a shard of whose spirit had somehow made it to Spain. The second was to the Lincolns who truly got there.

My cousin, on his return voyage, displeased.