No Regrets: A Life in Catalonia

I've written a book!  It's a memoir that begins when, at age 52, I moved from the Bay Area to Barcelona and then goes on to recount further moves and adventures.  First to Tarragona. once a Roman capital.  I was living in Tarragona when I read Maguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian and could look out my window and see the old town atop the Roman wall where he would have walked. I lived outside L'Ametlla de Mar, a small fishing village near the Ebro River, and finally Figueres, near the French border and hometown of Salvador Dali.  After the sagas of getting a phone and city gas installed, I go on to talk about Catalan culture, learning to speak Catalan, getting a Spanish divorce, getting a Spanish driver's license, adopting pets, making friends, and participating in the Catalan independence movement.  In other words, more adventures than I initially expected.

The book is titled No Regrets: A Life in Catalonia and is available at Amazon (all the Amazon sites, not just the US), Barnes & Noble, Book Depository, other online retailers, as well as your favorite brick and mortar bookshop.

Amazon.com link

Book Depository link

Barnes & Noble link

The Forgotten Soldiers

In his day, Robert Capa was said to be the best war photographer in the world. His first published photograph was of Leon Trotsky making a speech in Copenhagen. His first war work was during the Spanish Civil War where he spent some of his time traveling with Ernest Hemingway, who was working as a journalist, and who later wrote the book For Whom the Bell Tolls about that experience.

Capa was born Endre Ernő Friedmann to a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary on October 22, 1913. He fled Hungary at the age of 18 when he was accused of being a communist, and he later fled Berlin when the Nazis came to power.

I recently went to the Memorial Museum of Exile in La Jonquera to see the Robert Capa exposition titled 18 March 1939, The Forgotten Army at the Camp of Argelers. This refers to the soldiers in exile who had been fighting for the Spanish republic against the Franco insurrectionists who had overthrown the elected government. One of the French internment camps was in Argelers, a small beach-side community in the south of France, just 37 kilometers (23 miles) from the Spanish-French border. Some of these men stayed in this and other French detention camps for a year or more. Some were sent to be killed in German camps, and some left or escaped and joined the French resistance.

A mother visits her son

Prisoners made their own shelters

Prisoners cooked their own food

Musicians from the Barcelona Philharmonic

Farewell to the volunteers of the International Brigades
Barcelona, October 28, 1938
Photographs by Robert Capa

Capa was the only civilian photographer who landed with the troops on Omaha Beach on D-Day. General Eisenhower awarded him the Medal of Freedom in 1947 for his work photographing World War II and that same year he founded Magnum Photos in Paris. He died at age 40 on May 25, 1954 when he stepped on a landmine in Vietnam.