Si me quieres escribir, ya sabes mi paradero

It's difficult to know what to say about a lost comrade, and I've already talked about the death of my great-uncle Milt Wolff in more private fora. But I see his loss reverberating in other areas of the internet, and I want to pay tribute to him here as well.

I left a comment on his editor's blog that went on longer than I expected, and I'll repeat it:

Milt was my great-uncle (by marriage to my grandmother's sister) and friend--and a great friend indeed for a young activist in a troubling world. You probably saw him much more often than I did, though, and you've described him very well.

He had a warm heart and an artistic temperament, and he helped to teach me not to take crap from anybody. My occasional attempts to get avuncular advice from him had results that were sometimes hilarious and sometimes touching, but almost never anything like an answer to my questions. He would far rather sing "There's a Valley in Spain called Jarama" than try to dispense pearls of elder-statesman wisdom. The present, too, was always important to him. I might try to draw him out on the nature of youth activism in the 1930s, and he would ask: "Are you getting these emails from MoveOn.org?"

He never stopped wanting to learn, argue, create and opine. When I saw him in hospice the day after Christmas, the energy and affection in the room made it impossible to take a somber tone. Several more friends came through while my family was there. The social worker who came to check on him was probably a little baffled; Milt was holding court with four visitors at once, all of us friendly to the new arrival and none of us close enough relatives to provide useful information on Milt's condition. (Milt, of course, greeted him with "Who're YOU? What? What's he talkin' about?" and then, "Okay, whatever, as long as I don't have to do any interviews. I don't do interviews any more.")


I never knew Milt as a young man, only as the example of elderly hell-raising-ness that he has been all my life. My friends knew him by reputation as the cantankerous activist uncle who sent me wonderful capslock-filled emails, which I would sometimes pass along with the advice that they were best appreciated if read aloud in the voice of an old New York Jewish guy who's A LITTLE HARD OF HEARING.

A lot of other people around the world, especially in Spain, where he kept strong ties all his life, also knew him as a friend and a fighter, a lifelong activist, "Una gran persona, una persona admirable." There was something in him that drew in new and loyal friends at every stage of his life, even when the courageous battles of his youth for which he was best known were long behind him.

Milt appears in the recent documentary about the International Brigade, Souls Without Borders (Almas Sin Fronteras), and I smiled at first to see his interview clips, imagining how long the interviewer must have kept the tape rolling while trying to get a reminiscence or a good sound-bite of opinion out of him. We do hear him reflecting on the war briefly, in his inimitably ornery way; we also see a clip of him in public at a ceremony in Spain in 2005, paying tribute to the friends he buried there seven decades ago, who never stopped being close to his heart. But the clips that are the most Milt-like to me are the ones that make up most of his solo screen time: He sits in his living room singing in Spanish, and later--probably while the filmmakers are waiting patiently for him to answer a question about the war--he draws a sketch of the interviewer on camera, flashing an infectious smile.

Milt was impossible to sum up (and often was just plain impossible, as those who knew and loved him can attest). When I found the tribute to him on that Madrid blog, I employed my limited, hopefully-still-vaguely-grammatical Spanish to stop and say hello. Maybe it is enough to say this:

Milt fue mi tío abuelo y mi amigo.
En paz descanse.



"tall as Lincoln, gaunt as Lincoln, and as brave and as good a soldier as any that commanded battalions at Gettysburg."
- Ernest Hemingway