Mosaic Fictions: Writing Identity in the Spanish Civil War by Emily Robins Sharpe

Reviewed by: Mosaic Fictions: Writing Identity in the Spanish Civil War by Emily Robins Sharpe Stacey Guill Mosaic Fictions: Writing Identity in the Spanish Civil War. By Emily Robins Sharpe, Toronto P, 2020. 223 pp. Hard cover $58.00. Emily Robins Sharpe's Mosaic Fictions: Writing Identity in the Spanish Civil War is an informational and deeply analytical study of Canadian literature about the Spanish Civil War. The author explains that her intention is to provide an examination of the complexities of incorporating marginalized ethnic and racial groups within the ever-evolving Canadian identity. Sharpe sets out to achieve this with a comprehensive overview of how Jewish Canadian writers presented their country's participation in the Spanish Civil War and integrating these writings with overlapping North American writers through [End Page 113] the perspective of race, religion, gender, nationality, and political affiliations. I appreciate Sharpe's breadth of knowledge on the subject which allows her to reveal interesting and unexpected intersections between these vastly disparate works. Within these connections her goal is to construct a "mosaic" of the changing concept of Canadian identity as it is impacted by the country's participation in a foreign war waged to preserve freedom and social justice. That said, Sharpe's choice to include such a broad range of subject matter appears to preclude a thorough analyses of some of her texts and occasionally leads her to make unsupported generalizations. Explaining the background of the social, economic and political issues that led up to the Spanish Civil War and the progression of the three-year conflict is a daunting undertaking. Nevertheless, Sharpe provides an intelligent overview with specific emphasis on how Jewish Canadian writers interpreted the war as both a transnational conflict and at the same time cognizant of its local impact. As part of a marginalized community within their own country in the 1930s and 1940s, these early writers viewed the Spanish people's fight for freedom and social justice through their own aspirations for legal and social inclusion within Canada. The majority of the 1700 Canadian volunteers who were fighting for these values in Spain also belonged to various undervalued and often excluded ethnic and religious populations. By focusing on these "Canadian heroes for Spain," the Jewish Canadian writers recognized the opportunity to forge a new, more inclusive national identity, and at the same time highlight the multicultural and multinational patriotism elements of the war. As Sharpe explains, "The literature I analyse (sic) speaks at once to the need to support the Spanish Republic and stop European fascism and simultaneously to the necessity of reframing citizenship in North America to include immigrants, Jews, and other marginalized groups" (Sharpe 24). Mosaic Fictions includes discussions of fiction, plays, and poetry written about the Spanish Civil War during the conflict as well as contemporary works on the topic. Chapters are organized around the themes Sharpe has traced across these texts: Love, Sympathy, Community, Inclusion and Remembrance. Throughout each chapter Sharpe places these poets, journalists, and fiction writers in conversations as they interpret these themes. As an example, in Chapter 1, "Love: Impossible War Romances," the author considers the similarities between the male-authored patriotic romantic fictions of both Canadian and American Spanish Civil War novels. The author concludes that both depict "international love" as inevitably disastrous wherein the "white, gentile [End Page 114] North American male protagonist travels to Spain as a volunteer and enters into a doomed relationship with a woman from another country" (Sharpe 30). Sharpe's examples include Canadian authors Charles Yale Harrison's Meet Me on the Barricades (1938) and Hugh MacLennan's The Watch the Ends the Night (1938), and American authors John dos Passos' Adventures of a Young Man (1938) and Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Unfortunately, here is an instance when I question Sharpe's broad conclusions as she cites Hemingway's novel as "typical of the genre" that is characterized by the following formulaic pattern: Their growing romance prevents him from fully committing to his leftist politics, but rather than reject her, he escapes the relationship through a deus ex machina: injury (his), death (hers), or some other war-related catastrophe. Freed of...

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