Margarita Nelken: Writer, Deputy, Art Critic, Spy. Navigating Jewishness, Feminism, and Anti-fascism in Spain and Mexico (1931-1945)

• In Event: New Crossroads in Iberian and Jewish Studies I: Re-encounters, Returns, and Recoveries in the Iberian Peninsula and the Atlantic World

Abstract

This paper centers on the life and times of Spanish writer and politician Margarita Nelken. Born to a Jewish family in Madrid in 1894, Nelken began publishing fiction and political essays (many of them dedicated to women’s and workers’ rights) at a young age. She also was one of the most prominent politicians of Spain’s Second Republic, and served as a representative in parliament. Exiled in Mexico after the Spanish Civil War, Nelken’s relationship with the Communist Party she had joined in 1936 became increasingly thorny, and she was forced to make a number of difficult choices, including assisting the FBI with the surveillance of members of the exile community in Mexico (among them German writer Anna Seghers). Analyzing Nelken’s literary and political biography will reveal how sentiments towards Jewishness and feminism shifted in Spain and Mexico in the period. Her opponents in Spain used antisemitic and misogynist rhetoric in their attempt to discredit her and what she stood for; Nelken became interested in Jewish topics in the post-World War II period, as she published a number of texts centering on the confluence of the Jewish and Hispanic worlds.

Author

• Tabea Linhard, Washington University in St. Louis