Mosaic Fictions: Writing Identity in the Spanish Civil War by Emily Robbins Sharpe (review)

Reviewed by: Mosaic Fictions: Writing Identity in the Spanish Civil War by Emily Robbins Sharpe Laura Hartmann-Villalta Mosaic Fictions: Writing Identity in the Spanish Civil War. Emily Robbins Sharpe. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. Pp. 240. $61.00 (cloth); $61.00 (eBook). Emily Sharpe's book is a multi-genre study of North American identity as created in and manufactured through Spanish Civil War literary production, both during and long after the conflict. Sharpe draws insights from Canadian and American literature to enrich transnational modernist studies and Jewish studies, but most importantly, to argue how identity—along the axes of religion, gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality—was discovered and solidified through the war in Spain. The focus of Sharpe's study is mostly Canadian—which is why the book's title is "Mosaic Fictions," after the Canadian multicultural trope of the mosaic—but the text is enriched by Sharpe's inclusion of US writers and activists. Throughout her monograph, Sharpe's focus on Jewish Canadian literature is never far away, but a strength of her book is how her readings play out with non-Jewish writers such as African-American Langston Hughes, treating the reader to transnational connections that would otherwise be overlooked. Sharpe argues that Spanish Civil War literature and modern Jewish Canadian literature are, to a certain degree, mutually constitutive. She problematizes the trope of Canadian identity as mosaic by underscoring how Spain itself has its own "Mosaic fiction:" a Spanish refusal to acknowledge its Jewish and Muslim heritage, which, for some Canadian volunteers, made Spain a possible site of historical reclamation as well as a site of leftist activism against the growing threat of European fascism (17). Sharpe provides ample historical context for the multilayered "mosaic fiction," and its implication in the Spanish war. She begins by highlighting the stigmatization of Jewish immigrants to Canada in early-twentieth-century representations (such as in John Murray Gibbon's Canadian Mosaic: The Making of a Northern Nation [1938]). In 1931, a mere five years before the start of the war in Spain, the Statue of Westminster allowed Canada almost-complete legal independence, and in 1947, the Canadian Citizenship Act would mean that Canadians held Canadian citizenship. In this time of transition to autonomous nationhood, Canadians, Sharpe argues, challenged by the influx of immigrants, were seeking how to be Canadian, and fighting in Spain "would clarify their country's place in the world" (3). Jewish Canadians are at the center of her analysis as she interrogates both this important moment for the construction of a (settler, potentially White-only) Canadian identity and for how North American writers use the Spanish Civil War to experiment with, contest, or celebrate identity. These mosaic fictions of identity are most evident in the first chapter, "Love: Impossible War Romances." Here Sharpe examines the Spanish Civil War novels of Canadian Jewish male writers, which she reads as both invoking and complicating the tropes of colonial conquest which frequently occur in depictions of cross-cultural romance set during the war. In this chapter, the focus is primarily on two novels depicting international romances: Ted Allan's This Time A Better Earth (1939), published recently in a critical edition edited by Bart Vautour, Sharpe's collaborator on Canada and the Spanish Civil War digital humanities project and Charles Yale [End Page 646] Harrison's Meet Me on the Barricades (1938). Sharpe contrasts these two 1930s novels with two novels from the 1950s, Hugh MacLennan's The Watch That Ends the Night (1958) and Mordecai Richler's The Acrobats (1954) and a later Richler novel, Joshua Then and Now (1980). While Sharpe's analyses of these novels are valuable in aiding in the recovery of understudied works, she also uses these analyses to make the larger argument that the crafting of a new, (masculine, Jewish) Canadian identity, forged in the experience of the Spanish Civil War, hinges on a settler-colonial mentality. Sharpe also draws a contrast between the "specific moment of both panic and optimism" represented in Harrison's and Allan's novels of the 1930s, and the distrust over Canadian nationalism, disgust at the lingering antisemitic feminization of the Jewish men, and skepticism at...

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