Mika Etchebéhère

Micaela Feldman de Etchebéhère (nick-named Mica or Mika: signed her writing as Mika Etchebéhère) born in Moisésville, Santa Fe province, Argentina 14/3/1902 – died Paris, France 7/7/1992

Odontologist, reform-minded student activist, political journalist, anarchist activist, later left communist and Trotskyist, fought in the POUM ranks in the Spanish Civil War

Her Russian Jewish parents arrived in Argentina after fleeing from pogroms a few years before she was born. By that point, her father was teaching Yiddish in Moisésville, a colony that had been founded in Santa Fe province with the support of Baron Hirsch. A few years after that, the family relocated to Rosario where they were fortunate enough to open a small restaurant. As a girl, Mika would listen to the tales of revolutionaries who had escaped from Siberia or from Russian prisons. At the age of fourteen, impressed by the reports reaching her of the Great War, she joined an anarchist group whilst attending the National College in Rosario.

Two further events from the time helped mould her political awareness: the 1917 Russian Revolution and, a year later, the eruption of the University Reform crisis in Córdoba. In 1920 Mika moved to Buenos Aires to study odontology at Buenos Aires University. She played an active role within Insurrexit, the left wing of the University Reform campaign, which is where she met her partner Hipólito Etchebéhère. Insurrexit was a bunch of anarchist students supportive of the Russian Revolution and University Reform from a libertarian vantage-point. Besides Mika and Hipólito Etchebéhère, Insurrexit members included law students Héctor Raurich and Francisco Rinesi, architecture student Alberto Astudillo, technician José Paniale, the writers Herminia Brumana, Eduardo González Lanuza, Francisco Piñeiro, Ángel Rosemblat and Nicolas Olivari, plus others. They would get together on Saturday nights on the premises of the Shopworkers’ Federation and they produced the review Insurrexit (Buenos Aires, 1920-1921) which had contributors such as José Ingenieros, Julio R. Barcos, Horacio Quiroga and Alfonsina Storni.

Between 1923 and 1924, she and Eva Vivé, Juana Pauna, Sara Yacoub and Haydée de Bonachera joined the Buenos Aires-based ‘Louise Michel’ Women’s Grouping, with encouragement from the anarcho-bolsheviks of the ALA (Argentinean Libertarian Alliance).

In 1923 one part of Insurrexit – Mika, Hipólito and Raurich – joined the newly founded Communist Party of Argentina (PCA) in order to boost its “leftist” wing, the wing that opposed offering a minimum program like the socialist parties did and which intended to confine any parliamentary activity to making revolutionary propaganda. In which connection she engaged in intense activity as an activist and speaker.

In 1924 Mika joined the Women’s Communist Committee, involved as a public speaker in the campaign around the labour laws affecting women and minors as well as appearing on various rostrums erected on the occasion of the International Working Woman’s Day in 1925.  Mika, Hipólito and the rest of the ‘leftists’ were eventually kicked out of the party at the stormy VII congress of the Workers’ Communist Party on 26-28 December 1925: in January 1926, they launched the PCO/Workers’ Communist Party and came to be known as “chispitas”, since they were producing the newspaper La Chispa (Buenos Aires, 1926-1929) under the editorship of Angélica Mendoza. Together with Delfina Torres Cabrera, Mika was elected to head the Propaganda Committee directed at women, as well as joining the La Chispa editorial board as a translator.  

But Mika and Hipólito were around only for the beginnings of this new experience, as they took off on a tour of Patagonia in Argentina with a roving practice. – Mika being an odontologist and Hipólito a dental technician, having studied dental prosthesis. On arrival in Paso Ibáñez, in Santa Cruz province, they gathered testimonies from survivors of the shootings that had brought the strikes in Patagonia to a bloody end eight years earlier.

In 1931, on the back of the cash raised through their odontology practice, the couple set off on their travels to Europe. Initially they arrived in Spain, barely two months after the proclamation of the Republic [1931]. Right after that they moved on to Paris where they connected with René Lefeuvre, the inspiration behind the left wing of the ‘Monde Group’ that was led by Henri Barbusse. In October 1932 they moved on to Berlin, lured by the prospects of revolution in Germany. There they made a connection with the German Communist Party’s leftwing anti-stalinist wing, headed by Kurt Landau.

In face of the rise of Adolf Hitler, the pair set off for Paris again in May 1933. They lived in an attic in Paris and joined the leftist Que Faire? Group that published a review of the same name. Mika and Hipólito struck up a deep friendship with the Trotskyist activist couple Alfred and Marguerite Rosmer who had anarcho-syndicalist backgrounds. When the miner’s revolt in Asturias erupted in October 1934, they attempted – unsuccessfully – to get back to Spain. In 1935 Hipólito’s health collapsed and he had to spend six months in the Labrouyère Liancourt sanatorium (Oise department) on the outskirts of the city whilst Mika supported herself by giving Spanish lessons in Paris. 

One year later, shortly before the Spanish Civil War broke out, the couple headed off to Spain, Hipólito arriving that May and Mika in July. They applied to the POUM for front-line combat assignments. One month later, Hipólito was killed in action whilst commanding a 150-strong motorized column of POUM fighters – he was struck in the heart by an enemy bullet – on the Sigüenza front.

Mika stayed on the front lines, roundly refusing to withdraw into the rearguard to take on nursing, educational or cleaning duties.  She played an active part in the battle for Sigüenza, where she fought her way out of an enemy encirclement and escaped the noose thrown around the cathedral in the city.

She arrived in Madrid and returned from there to Paris for a while but made up her mind to resume her combat assignment. Mika was then entrusted with command of No 2 Company and was made a captain. Her men were to occupy a trench in Moncloa, withstanding relentless attacks and shelling. Later they were to relieve troops holding the trenches in Pinar de Humera and finally they were chosen, along with other units, to oust the Francoists from the Cerro del Águila, in which assault a lot of POUM militians lost their lives.

With the ranks of the POUMist military depleted, Mika became an officer of the CNT-supporting 14th Division commanded by Cipriano Mera. She fought on until June 1938, at which point the CNT reassigned her to a Madrid hospital to handle training and educational efforts. 

When the “Nationalists” entered Madrid on 28 March 1939, Mika had to go to ground but carried on resisting. After she was detained by a Francoist patrol, she found asylum for six months in a French lycée, as she was a French passport-holder, being Etchebéhère’s widow. Thanks to lobbying carried out by her friends outside the Foreign Affairs Ministry there, a car from Madrid’s French consulate dropped her off on the opposite side of the Pyrenees at the border crossing in Irún and she was able to make it back to Paris shortly after that. 

From there, she made her way back to Argentina in 1940. In 1943 she was working in Buenos Aires as a journalist with the Argentina Libre newspaper, run by Luis Koiffman. She dropped in at the editorial offices of Sur, where she was received by the writer José Pepe Bianco, with whom she struck up a close friendship. 

In mid-1946 she returned to Paris, which at the time was a city devastated by war, food shortages, black-marketeering and speculation, as she described in a long series of articles in the review Sur (Buenos Aires, 1946-1947). In the French capital she met up again with her old friends, the activists Pierre Rimbert, René Lefeuvre, Pavel Thalman, the Rosmers and Katia Landau (Kurt Landau having been murdered by Stalinists in Spain).  Together with many of these she set up a group – the Zimmerwald Circle – called after the Swiss town where, back in 1915, those few uncompromising revolutionaries who, following the collapse of the Second International, still spoke out against war and for revolution had used to meet.

In Paris she earned her living as a translator. She struck up a deep friendship with Julio Cortázar. At the age of 66, she joined the students in Paris during the events of May 1968. A decade after that, she took part in the marches held in Paris at noon on Thursdays outside the Argentinean Embassy on the Rue Cimarosa, protesting at the crimes of the military dictatorship.

In 1976 she published her memoirs from her militia days, Ma guerre d’Espagne à moi (Paris, Denoël 1976). A Spanish-language version was to appear in Barcelona as Mi Guerra de España (Barcelona, Plaza y Janés 1976). A German version would follow.

She died in her adoptive city of Paris on 7 July 1992, aged ninety. At her request her friends scattered her ashes into the river Seine.

Her archives are held by the CeDInCI [Centro de Documentacion e Investigación de la cultura de Izquierdas].

Entry by Horacio Tarcus (2023) under “Etchebéhère, Mika” in Diccionario biográfico de las izquierdas latinoamericanas, accessible at https://diccionario.cedinci.org 

[Archives: See Fondo Mika e Hipólito Etchebéhère https://archivos.cedinci.org/index.php/fondo-mika-e-hipolito-etchebehere]

 

Translated by: Paul Sharkey.