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In 1920, a year after the first pogrom against Jews in Argentina (an event known as “The Tragic Week”), Feldman applied to the dental school in Buenos Aires. In the framework of the University Reform, she became involved with the prominent leftist intellectual group Insurrexit; its eponymous revolutionary magazine (1920–1921) had a significant impact across Latin America. Feldman contributed her first agit-props (political art and literature created to mobilize support for an ideological cause) under the name Mica Felman. In one piece, she called on women, “[with their love and limitless capacity for enduring suffering],” to join the Revolution; in another, she denounced women’s suffrage as a tool of the bourgeois capitalist system.

Within this context, Feldman met her future husband, Hipólito Etchebehere, the son of a Christian bourgeois family who embraced social revolution out of sympathy for the victims of the 1919 pogrom. In 1923, Feldman and Etchebehere joined the Communist Party. The following year, Feldman co-founded the anarcho-feminist collective Luisa Michel, named after Louise Michel, the leading revolutionary and feminist writer of the Paris Commune (1871). The group published the journal Nosotras [Us Women]. Feldman became known for her fiery factory speeches, her leadership among women workers, and her anarchist ideas. These positions ultimately led to her expulsion, from the Communist Party in late 1925; her comrades were soon to follow the same destiny. 

In early 1926, Feldman and her circle co-founded the Communist Workers Party [Partido Comunista Obrero], which, contrary to the hierarchic model of the Communist Party, emphasized workers’ power and self-governance. The new party launched the journal La chispa, inspired by the Bolshevik Iskra [The Spark]. Feldman joined the publishing committee as a translator and co-directed the Women’s Propaganda Committee. 

Around 1927, Feldman and Etchebehere traveled to Patagonia to investigate the H. Yrigoyen government’s 1920-1922 massacre of anarcho-unionists of La Patagonia rebelde [the Rebel Patagonia]. For three or four years, they moved between Patagonian towns in a van that doubled as a dental clinic. Feldman kept a travelogue in which she recorded the persecution and killings of workers and indigenous day laborers (Maggiori 2012, 167–182, 197–217). 

Feldman and Etchebehere dreamed of taking part in the Revolution they believed was on the verge of erupting in Europe—in Spain, Germany, or perhaps France. In 1931, they briefly arrived in the new Republic of Spain but soon settled in Paris, where they joined René Lefeuvre (publisher of Spartacus Editions) and Henri Barbusse in their circle the Amis de Monde [Friends of World, a critical Marxist and anti-authoritarian journal], studying Marxism and economics. From November 1932 through May 1933, they lived in Berlin, where they became active in Kurt Landau’s Trotskyist group, attended German-language classes offered by the Communist Party, and witnessed firsthand the Communists’ weakening against the growing Nazi movement. In her diary, Feldman described the persecution of Orthodox Jews. In this context, her family name could have endangered her life. 

As tensions in Germany escalated, Feldman and Etchebehere fled back to Paris, where they published an account of what they had witnessed in Germany under the shared pseudonym Juan Rústico—a name Mica used again in 1937 as a military journalist during the Spanish Civil War. They were busy expanding their revolutionary network, especially with newcomers and refugees. They seemingly falsified documents to help Eastern European Jews and persecuted communists escape. They also helped to found the group Que faire ? (What is to be done?), a dissident communist collective that worked clandestinely within the Communist Party to reclaim Leninism while publicly denouncing Stalinism. Between 1934 and 1936, Feldman was responsible for distributing its Revue marxiste.

When Etchebehere fell gravely ill and was hospitalized, Feldman took refuge under a Christian Basque-French identity, marrying him (on May 14, 1935) and adopting the name Michelle Etchebéhère, which allowed her to visit him during his long convalescence and, beginning in July 1936, to move unconcernedly across revolutionary Spain. There, her Jewish origins remained hidden.

The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) drew Feldman far beyond what was expected of a woman—even a revolutionary woman—at the time. Through her dissident struggle and her role as captain in a P.O.U.M. (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, or Workers’ Marxist Unification Party) militia, Feldman acquired the historical aura of a liberating Jeanne d’Arc, a resistant Louise Michel, a contemporary counterpart of Emma Goldman, or an emancipating Juana Azurduy. Feldman initially provided health care to the P.O.U.M. militia led by Etchebehere. After he was killed in battle on August 16, 1936, at the front of Sigüenza, Feldman took up arms herself. When the captain of the 2nd company, Antonio Guerrero, was wounded, the militia chose Feldman (now known as Mika Etchebehere) as their captain. She went on to lead 150 fighters in several successful battles on the Madrid front.

When Spanish Communists, by then strongly influenced by Stalin, took control of the Republican side, they began a purge of dissidents, targeting independent militias. In February 1937, Feldman’s militia was dissolved. After a comrade triggered a brawl with communist militants, she was imprisoned for two weeks; Communists officials, directed by the Soviets, identified her as a dissident and harshly threatened her with being “purged.” The anarchist commander Cipriano Mera, head of the 14th Division, secured her release and appointed her second-in-command of his 38th company in the 4th Brigade. 

In addition to leading combat, Feldman created a ambulatory library to teach reading and writing to her fighters in the trenches. On November 3, 1937, she joined the International Anti-Fascist Solidarity (SIA) in Madrid. She worked in an ambulance, rescuing wounded Republican fighters at the front. In June 1938, she was reassigned to the rearguard and worked in a military hospital, where she undertook educational tasks for the remainder of the war. In Barcelona, she joined the anarchist women’s organization Mujeres libres [Free Women], publishing her first autofictions about her experiences as a woman leading male fighters in their magazine (1938). She was also photographed by war photographer Agustí Centelles in the most iconic image of her: a militiawoman, armed, with a defiant look in her eyes. 

When the fascists seized full control of Spain in 1939, Feldman—by then a French citizen through her husband—found refuge at the Institut Français de Madrid [French Institute of Madrid], where she lived from April through October 1939 under threat of Franco’s persecution. Directors of the Institut and her Trotskyst friends in France eventually intervened to bring her to Paris, where she saw many of her Jewish revolutionary friends fleeing the continent. 

On December 22, 1939, Feldman renewed her Argentine passport. Officially she appeared as “Micaela Feldman viuda de [widow of] Etchebehere,” yet she signed as Michelle Etchebehere—a signature that, like her identity, would continue to shift. With few options left, she returned to Buenos Aires in early 1940—six months before the Nazis entered Paris.

Arriving in Buenos Aires after a decade of absence, Feldman entered a period of internal exile (insilio). She reconnected with her anti-authoritarian and dissident communist friends. Immersed in grief for her husband and the militiamen lost in battle, mourning both the tragedy of the failed Revolution and a world devastated by Nazism and fascism, she began to see peace as a necessary path. 

Her correspondence with Marguerite and Alfred Rosmer, who had fled to New York—while their friend Leon Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico City on August 21, 1940—remains the most direct testimony of Mika’s state of mind and deep sorrow. In this context, she withdrew from active political life, though never from her revolutionary cause. Between 1940 and 1945, she worked closely with Samuel Kaplan, of the publishing house Imán, and was surrounded by a circle of Republican exiles and refugees from the Spanish War and fascism. Among other tasks, she translated German and French novels and essays by Jewish authors. 

From 1941 to 1943, Feldman worked as a journalist for the newspaper Argentina Libre. Signing now as Mika Etchebehere, she developed a distinctive voice covering Spain under dictatorship, the corruption of the capitalist war economy, the spread of fascism in Argentina, the antifascist struggle in Italy, and resistance to Nazism in Germany.

At the same time, Feldman experimented with literary form, searching among journalistic and literary genres for a way to transmit her lived experience. A 1942 article in Argentina Libre (“Madrid, 18 de julio de 1936”) rehearsed her testimony in the form of a chronicle. In 1944 she returned to the genre of autofiction with “El guerrillero niño” [The Militiachild], published in Sur, Latin America’s most important literary magazine. 

Feldman’s letters from this period testify to her eagerness and anxiety about returning to Paris, her “lost paradise,” and her hope of witnessing Europe’s reconstruction. Yet events in Argentina also pressed on her imagination. The June 1943 coup d’état, which put an end to the Infamous Decade (1930–1943)—a period marked by electoral fraud, corruption, and conservative rule after the coup that overthrew Hipólito Yrigoyen—brought nationalist forces to power, reshaping, particularly with Juan Domingo Perón’s protagonism, the country’s political landscape. Feldman remained distrustful of what already looked like populist politics. 

In October 1944, Feldman accepted a position in Montevideo, Uruguay, as broadcasting chief at the new Bureau Central d’Inspection et de Direction de l’Information française [Central Inspection and French Information Desk], whose main purpose was to produce French propaganda in Spanish and to advance cultural diplomacy in Latin America, seeking to replace the country’s image under Vichy’s collaborationist regime with a republican narrative. She also wrote and broadcast Latin American news in French, transmitted daily to both local Francophone communities and the continental French audience. 

In March 1946, Feldman returned to Paris as correspondent for the Latin American news magazine Qué! (Qué sucedió en siete días) [What! (What happened in seven days) and the Buenos Aires literary journal Sur. In a letter to the Spanish writer Guillermo de Torre, then exiled in Buenos Aires, she  expressed her joy at being “back home” (April 7, 1946). She was determined never to leave again.

Feldman soon established the genre and ethos of her series of aguafuertes [etchings], an Argentine literary form consisting of chronicles that capture the spirit of a city or political moment through the narrator’s wandering perspective. She set out to traverse postwar Paris as a wandering woman with an active, interrogating gaze—at once wounded and searching, reparative, dialogic, and feminist. She interviewed Parisian women and portrayed the intimate, everyday life of the city of lights. Her series Itinerario de postguerra [Postwar Itinerary] was published in Sur between May 1946 and March 1947. In her first aguafuerte, she bore witness—for the first and last time in her writing—to Jewish refugees, survivors of the Shoah.

From June 1948 to October 1950, Feldman assumed a new pseudonym, Anna Lía Cárdenas Rivière, and published another series of etchings, this time in Portuguese, in O Jornal (Rio de Janeiro), under the title Um instante de Paris [An Instant from Paris]. 

Feldman continued her own work as a full-time freelance translator. She lived between Paris and Périgny, the site of the 1938 founding conference of the Fourth International, a dissident Trotskyist international communist organization opposed to the Stalinist Communist movement. She joined the Zimmerwald Circle for Peace, a group loyal to the ideals of the Fourth International but now advocating peace, freedom, and socialism. Though she kept a lower political profile, she regularly attended meetings of the Spanish P.O.U.M. exile community in Paris.

The decolonization of North Africa and the war in Vietnam reignited debates around Marxism and socialism in Europe. Against this backdrop, the Spanish Republican struggle—still unresolved under Franco’s dictatorship—resurfaced in public consciousness. In response, Feldman published a short historical portrait of Hipólito Etchebéhère in La Batalla, the P.O.U.M. journal, in 1965.

When Paris erupted in student and workers’ revolt against capitalism in May 1968, Feldman, then 66 years old, again took to the streets. She is said to have taught students how to lift cobblestones using gloves, so as not to dirty their hands and be identified by police.

Around 1970, the Women’s Liberation Movement (MLF) entered French public debate with unprecedented force. Although Feldman did not participate directly in the MLF’s public scene, this moment—set in the context of the intense political debates of the 1960s and 1970s—opened the path for a new relationship with her own past. She chose autofiction as the genre through which to reconstruct her path as a revolutionary woman militia captain in Spain. She consulted the notes she had carried in the trenches, where she wrote down everything she witnessed in small notebooks. Unfortunately, some of her most important notebooks were seized by Franco’s rebel army.

In 1974, Feldman supported the formation of the revolutionary political party the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, the French section of the Fourth International. Feldman had become a local iconic model for Latin American leftist militants in Paris and for struggles against dictatorships across Latin America from the 1960s to the 1980s. She contributed to a collective project led by Julio Cortázar, published as Chili: Le Dossier Noir (1974), aimed at showing the French public the atrocities, killings, and kidnappings that followed Pinochet’s coup in Chile, and personally organized demonstrations and marches against Latin American dictatorships.

Chili: Le Dossier Noir encouraged Feldman to understand not only her own deeds during the Spanish Civil War, but also the failures and atrocities into which armed revolution can devolve. Her feminist perspective, she realized, had gained an even greater significance and had to be made available to new generations of revolutionaries, men and women. If her writings had remained silent about Spain for so many years, it was because the loss and defeat had been profoundly traumatic. 

Feldman’s Mi guerra de España [My Spanish War] was self-translated into French as Ma guerre d’Espagne à moi and published in December 1975; the original Spanish version appeared in Spain a few months later, most likely having had to wait for the arrival of democracy there. Both versions were signed “Mika Etchebéhère / Etchebehere.” This autofiction—long misclassified as a memoir—brought her, for the first time since the Spanish Civil War, back into the public eye. When she participated in a literary and war history panel in Bernard Pivot’s famous program Apostrophes in French TV she was the only woman and the only lifelong revolutionary on stage.

While Mi guerra de España recounts the author’s personal story, very few episodes from her earlier life appear within it. The text works against the conventions of autobiography and memoirs: it begins in medias res, covers only eight months of the Spanish war, and reduces to a minimum the use of flashbacks that might otherwise have reconstructed the author’s identity. The narrating voice remains invisible, creating an opaque autobiographical construction (hence its denomination as autofiction rather than memoir) in which the author’s historical, social, and individual identity remains unspecified. The female narrator’s voice unfolds as a continuous, evolving consciousness that transcends its immediate historical context rather than remaining confined to it: her feminist discourse becomes universal.

By invisibilizing her own personality—distinct from her voice, which is omnipresent—Feldman foregrounded both her feminist revolution and her method of deconstructing the relationship with militiamen: caring for them without subjecting herself. Mi guerra de España preserved not only her historical actions but also her reflections on dismantling traditional roles of women in revolution and redefining relationships with her male fellows-in-arms. 

While Feldman had many revolutionary and politically engaged friends across France and Europe, as a reader and lover of visual arts she also moved in Parisian artistic circles, particularly among the surrealists. Her closest friends Guy Prévan [Lecrot] and Ded Dinouart preserved part of her archive and later donated it to CeDInCI, the Center for Documentation and Research on the Cultures of the Left, in Buenos Aires.

Feldman’s transnational life left traces across international archives in the Americas, Europe, and Israel. In a 1988 Spanish TV interview, she declared that she and her friends, the Rosmers, had burned their personal archives containing information on Trotskyism and their internationalist activities. Just as she avoided informing her texts with self-references, the aura of mystery or uncertainty she created around her own history and individuality appears as a silence, a deliberate blurring of her identity. Feldman’s archive is thus fragmented, full of gaps, and many questions remain open; the plurality of signatures and pseudonyms she used throughout her writings and documents—Neje / Micaela / Mica / Mika / Michèle / Michelle / Felman / Feldman / Etchebehere / Etchebéhère / Rústico / Ana Lía Cárdenas Rivière / Esemberger / Hesebenger / Mme Gebo—acquires greater significance.

Assuming non-heterosexual love as the choice for the last decades of her life, Feldman, most known as Mika Etchebehere, died in Antony, France, on July 7, 1992, as Michelle Feldman.

Texts in Insurrexit, 1920.

Rústico, Juan (pseudonym of H. Etchebéhère & M. Feldman). 1933: La tragédie du proletariat allemand. Défaite sans combat, victoire sans péril. Paris: Spartacus, [1933] 1981.

Short stories in Mujeres Libres, Barcelona, 1938.

Articles and chronicles in Argentina libre 1941—1943.

Texts in Sur, Buenos Aires, 1944-1947.

Collectif (several authors). Chili, le dossier noir. Paris: Gallimard, 1974.

Ma guerre d’Espagne à moi. Paris: Denoël, 1975.

Mi guerra de España. Barcelona: Plaza Janés, 1976.

Mi guerra de España. Oviedo: Cambalache, 2014.