A Distant Heartbeat: A War, a Disappearance, and a Family's Secrets

by Eunice Lipton

Overview

On May 20, 1938, a young man from the Bronx informs his parents that he is leaving for the Catskills to begin his new job as a waiter. Instead, he sails for Europe to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, the opening round in the fight against Hitler and Mussolini. The man, Dave Lipton—the author’s uncle—sends letter after letter home detailing his hopes and begging for forgiveness. He never receives a reply.

Decades later, Eunice Lipton stumbles upon clues for this silence, uncovering details of Dave’s exhilarating political life in New York, his shuttered romantic life, and his deep friendship with another volunteer. A Distant Heartbeat tells a tale of passion and heroism, centered on a fierce competition between brothers, a packet of missing letters, and the unforeseen results of family betrayal.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826356598
Publisher:	University of New Mexico Press
Publication date:	04/01/2016
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Eunice Lipton is the author of Alias Olympia: A Woman's Search for Manet's Notorious Model and Her Own Desire and, more recently, French Seduction: An American's Encounter with France, Her Father, and the Holocaust. She lives in New York and Paris.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

1 How Do We Know Who They Were? 1

2 Moving Picture 11

3 Dave in the Archive 33

4 Bronx Calls 55

5 Bill 79

6 Why? 93

7 Guesswork 105

8 Reunion 119

9 In the Balance 141

Acknowledgments 153

Notes 157

Suggested Reading 163

Editorial Reviews

The very best stories are human ones, told with a compelling candor, offering insight into the human condition, and revealing what it truly means to live a life during 'interesting times.' Such is the case with A Distant Heartbeat: A War, a Disappearance, and a Family's Secrets.
—Midwest Book Review

A true pleasure.
—Jewish Currents

A true pleasure.
—Jewish Currents

Anyone interested in the barbed landscape of families and the awkward, painful, jerry-rigged nature of family relationships will find A Distant Heartbeat a rich and weighty book. There are mysteries here, and a deep, dark betrayal. But A Distant Heartbeat is less about surprises than about unwieldy sorrows and joys at the heart of what we call family life.
—patricktreardon.com

An art historian's account of the research she undertook to understand the life of a mysterious uncle. . . . Well-researched and . . . stirring.
—Kirkus Reviews

Eunice Lipton's A Distant Heartbeat is an intriguing memoir about an uncle she never met, set within the much broader context of the international brigades who fought against Fascism in the Spanish Civil War. A well-told tale of idealism, diaspora, and both personal and political heartbreak, it draws the reader into the author's lively (and dysfunctional) immigrant family until Uncle Dave's fate resonates with us too.
—Lucy R. Lippard, author of Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West

Eunice Lipton goes beyond memoir to explore the subliminal legacies of a traumatic event, showing how history survives almost invisibly to affect future generations. Like a jeweler turning a stone, she reveals various facets of a family story that illuminates both past and present.
—Peter N. Carroll, author of From Guernica to Human Rights: Essays on the Spanish Civil War

A beautifully conceived quest-driven family memoir subtly intertwined with a cultural and political history of Jewish-immigrant New York City in the decades preceding World War II. Given its stylistic clarity, vivid approach, and its 'detective story' qualities, readers will be unable to put it down.
—Leo Spitzer, Vernon Professor of History Emeritus, Dartmouth College, author of Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism

The protagonist of A Distant Heartbeat is a man Eunice Lipton never met who died in a war being fought before she was born. Yet both the man and the war have haunted her throughout her life. Out of that dreamlike experience Lipton has fashioned an unusual and compelling memoir in which the actual and the imagined are vividly braided together.
—Vivian Gornick, author of The Odd Woman and the City: A Memoir

A heartfelt, eloquent book, and a most unusual addition to the literature on the Spanish Civil War.
—Adam Hochschild, author of To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

From the Publisher

2016-01-26
An art historian's account of the research she undertook to understand the life of a mysterious uncle. Lipton (French Seduction: An American's Encounter with France, Her Father, and the Holocaust, 2007, etc.) had always known that her father, Louis, had singled her out as his favorite and the one who would bear the memories of his younger brother, Dave. "He baited my curiosity," she writes, with stories of an elusive young man whose life "could have gone almost anywhere" but who decided to dedicate himself to leftist politics and a conflict—the Spanish Civil War—that eventually killed him. The impulse to know her uncle, however, did not emerge until she was well into adulthood. As she questioned the father from whom she found herself periodically estranged, she was confronted with Louis' inexplicable rage over letters that Dave had sent home from Spain. Determined to discover the truth about her uncle's life and her father's family, Lipton began to research the part he played in the war at museums and veterans' societies in New York and Boston. Her work eventually unearthed the names of fellow soldiers who knew Dave and attested to his "gentleness and commitment…[and] mildness of manner." She also learned about the expatriates like her uncle who chose to fight for Spain: passion drove them, but so did a burning desire to "[b]ecome part of something" greater than themselves. Their stories and testimonials allowed Lipton to imagine her uncle, his world, and her father and eventually uncover a bitter family truth. Louis—a man who had "made money…[and] forgot [his] idealism"—had been jealous enough of Dave to want to make their parents believe that their beloved youngest child never loved them enough to write from Spain. That Lipton never elaborates on the complications that arose between herself and her father lessens the emotional impact of the book, but the abiding love she reveals for the uncle she never met is heartfelt. Flawed but well-researched and often stirring.

Kirkus Reviews