“When My Life Goes Out …” Biography of the Argentinian Communist Activist Fanny Edelman (1911–2011)

CASOLA NATALIA; VALOBRA ADRIANA

The Palgrave Handbook of Communist Women Activists around the World

Palgrave Macmillan Cham

Año: 2023; p. 643 - 668

On November 24, 2010, at the Teatro Nacional Cervantes, the Communist Party of Argentina (CPA) paid tribute to Fanny Edelman, as Fanny Jacovkis (1911–2011) is publicly known. The CPA could not have chosen a more suitable location to honor its President, who was almost a hundred years old, with seventy-five years of militancy under her belt. She herself said there: “If anymerit can be attributed to me, it is my unwavering loyalty to the Communist Party. The party taught me that you cannot live without a dream and that you cannot live without being part of a liberating collective. Communism is a passion of the brain and the heart.” Fanny Edelman continued that she“remained deeply in love with the revolution” and maintained that her militancy would cease only “when my eyes stop seeing the light, when my life goes out.”1 She dedicated the tribute to her great partner in the fight, and the love of her life, Bernardo Edelman.This short summary hardly conveys the tip of the iceberg of information available in a myriad of documents, which are accessible by virtue the Communist Party’s open policy regarding its historical sources, including magazines like Nuestras Mujeres (Our Women) or Aquí Nosotras (Here We Are). There are also the Party press and Fanny Edelman’s own papers, and other sources kept in different archives, as well as her own published memoirs Banderas, Pasiones, Camaradas (Flags, Passions, Comrades, 1996) or Marxismo y Feminismo: Conversaciones con Claudia Korol (Marxism and Feminism: Conversations with Claudia Korol, 2001), and interviews that Adriana Valobra conducted with her in 2003