Written history generally records the lives of important individuals: people who made an impact on society during their lifetime, or whose impact was felt posthumously. So what does it mean when someone appears in the history books, and then vanishes without a trace?
That’s what happened in the case of Catalan writer Elvira Augusta Lewi Salinas. All mention of her suddenly disappears in 1943, even though she was an active and prolific journalist prior to the Spanish Civil War.
Early Life: A Mix of Influences
Lewi was born in 1909 to a Judeo-Germanic family that had relocated to Catalunya. Her Italian-German-Jewish father, Mariano Levi, was a great fan of all things artistic and literary, and he and his wife—Maria Salinas, a Sephardic Jew—were determined that their daughter benefit from a wide-ranging education that included as much culture as possible. They enrolled her at the German School of Barcelona; Lewi later took night courses at the Llotja de Barcelona, or the School of Arts and Crafts, when she grew older. She also took music lessons and studied various languages. Her Spanish and Catalan upbringing mixed with Central European influences, as well as the perspectives shaped by all of her varied studies, would ultimately influence her work when she became a writer.
As a journalist, they helped her to better understand the creative mindset and practical professional concerns of her interview subjects. As a writer of fiction, they gave her a distinct voice—one that mixed pragmatism with impressionist fantasy, intellectualism with pro-Republican political views, a love of art and literature with a concern for history, and a forward-thinking personal philosophy with a broad understanding of cultural context and human psychology. Her unique style and uncommon way of weaving a tale has even led some literary historians to call her a precursor of science fiction in the Catalan literary realm.
Lewi published her first story, L’home de cristall (The Glass Man), in the magazine D’Ací d’Allà in 1929. In the year 1930, she began publishing literary criticisms in the liberal weekly newspaper Mirador; the first two were of young, barely published writers of her own generation, Xavier Benguerel and Maria Teresa Vernet.
She also published a few more short stories in D’Ací i d’Allà, which was aimed at a mostly bourgeois audience. The positive reception of these early works served as a stepping stone to being hired by the daily newspaper La Nau, which put her in charge of the page Les crítiques de la setmana (The Critiques of the Week) within the arts section. This was a huge achievement for a female journalist during that era, as women were not usually singled out to offer cultural commentary; she ran the page with great success in 1931 and 1932.
Elvira Augusta Lewi Salinas, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Carving Her Own Professional Path
During this time, Lewi published several dozen articles, which put her name firmly in the ranks of respected journalists of any gender. She became a recognized authority on interior design, decoration and aesthetics, subjects which were of avid interest to the avant-garde of the bourgeoisie and upper-class at that time; she also became known as a writer committed to the promotion of female figures in the world of culture.
While the literary and cultural clime of pre-war Barcelona wasn’t exactly open to women who wanted to carve a place for themselves in the creative professions, 1931 was the year that the Second Spanish Republic was established—right on the heels of the repressive dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera—and the more liberal atmosphere helped a few determined women forge their own way in predominantly male fields such as journalism and fiction writing. Lewi was not only one of them, but also eager to document other women’s stories and help spread the word about their work.
Unfortunately for Lewi, La Nau experienced a string of financial difficulties and was forced to close its doors in January 1933. But that same month, Lewi began collaborating with La Dona Catalana, a conservative publication primarily aimed at wealthy women. It tended to emphasize the importance of women’s roles in the home and in traditional domestic roles, rather than questioning social boundaries or promoting out-of-the box thinking—much less a feminist agenda. However, while La Dona was less progressive compared to that of La Nau, it did firmly champion the importance of women’s education.
But that didn’t deter the young writer from finding a way of using the platform to make her voice heard in her own way. She started out tamely enough, writing commentary for a section titled L’ornament de la llar, or Home Decorating, but slowly began to insert her own interests into the column. She started interviewing women from the world of art and culture, covering decoration, design, fashion, literature, art and women’s education.
When these articles appeared to be well-received by the magazine’s target audience, Lewi began pushing it to expand its horizons; the results were sections such as La dona en el món de l’art (Women in the World of Art) and La dona de Catalunya i els seus oficis (Catalan Women and Their Trades). She became known as an expert on women in culture and was sought out to write pieces for other publications as well, including L’Avui newspaper (which later merged with El Punt to create El Punt Avui), L’Opinió magazine, Ford Magazine (the Spanish-language publication owned by the American automobile manufacturing brand), Moments magazine and La Rambla magazine.
"Un poeta i dues dones" by Elvira Lewi.
A Writer for the People
Lewi’s journalistic success at a young age was a huge feather in her cap, but it wasn’t her end goal. She had always dreamed of publishing a novel, which she did in 1935. Un poeta i dues dones (A Poet and Two Women) was shortly followed by a collection of short stories, Els habitants del pis 200 (The Inhabitants of the 200th Floor) in 1936. During this time and until 1938, she continued to write for La Dona Catalana, which was her bread and butter while she worked on more artistic pursuits. She ultimately published nearly 200 articles in less than a decade, and was known for her unpretentious, conversational writing style, which was relatable to readers of any socioeconomic status.
In a debate with Agustí Esclasans i Folch—a journalist who was not only male, older and already established when she was just beginning to forge a path for herself—that took place in the pages of the prestigious Catalan-language magazine La Revista de Catalunya on the intellectual state of Catalan society, she made her views clear on the importance of appealing to audiences of every stripe, and the connection between widespread literacy and a well-functioning society: “For the public to get used to reading, it is necessary that everyone in general and without distinction of age or sex, want to enter the field of active culture… The desire, however, to possess a culture that makes the desire to read essential for all, will have to be formed by means of a constant spurring and in small doses, from newspapers and magazines of all kinds. Because culture will not be resurrected in the public like an unforeseen dawn, neither in three centuries nor in twenty.”
Historians often draw parallels between Lewi’s life and career and those of other acclaimed Catalan literary women of the same era, such as Anna Murià, Maria de la Carme Nicolau, or Maria Carratalà, the multi-talented editor-in-chief of La Dona Catalana. (Murià also had works published for the magazine during the same time period as Lewi.) These names, as well as a few others—women novelists including Maria Teresa Vernet, Rosa Maria Arquimbau, Mercè Rodoreda, Aurora Bertrana and Carme Montoriol—were some of the notable voices in Catalunya’s pre-Franco literary landscape. However, Lewi’s work stood out for being uniquely diverse, as it included journalism, narrative fiction, social activism, cultural commentary as well as translation—for example, of some of the letters exchanged between famed German poets Friedrich Hölderlin and Rainer Maria Rilke, which were published in La Revista in 1931.
For a few short years, Lewi and her fellow female authors and journalists worked hard and flourished, but the restrictive social mores of the Franco regime would put an end to the careers of these pioneering women, whose modern themes and progressive attitudes weren’t considered to be “appropriate” under the dictatorship.
Pre-Franco Feminism
Today, no one bats an eye at a well-known journalist using her name to further a cause she believes in, or at a female celebrity who overtly supports feminist causes. But this wasn’t in the case in pre-Civil War Spain, which is another reason Lewi is considered to be a social pioneer.
Outside of her professional life, Lewi also participated in initiatives that defended women’s rights and emphasized the importance of their participation in every facet of society—not only in a domestic setting. She was a member of the feminist cultural association, the Lyceum Club, founded in 1931—fellow writer Aurora Bertrana was the founding president, and Maria Carratalà was president when Lewi joined in 1934—and used her influence to encourage other women to offer critical commentary on society, literature and art.
Gone Without a Trace
In spite of the impact that Elvira Augusta Lewi Salinas made on her contemporaries during nine years of distinguished work as an author and journalist, she seems to have disappeared in 1939. No record of her exists after this time.
Was she killed? Driven into hiding or exile? Did she continue to write, even if it was in secret? Did she emigrate to another country with the intention to return—but never did? Did she get married and have a family somewhere? Did she suffer some kind of accident? There was some speculation that she may have traveled to the country of her father’s family (Germany) just before the outbreak of World World II, which could have meant a tragic end for a young woman with Jewish roots.
In 1943, a version of her novel Un poeta i dues dones was published in Spanish—the original having been written in Catalan—by the Hymsa publishing company, under the name Elvira L. Salinas, with her Jewish surname notably absent. However, no one knows whether the author had anything to do with its translation and publishing, or if she authorized its release at all.