Today in labor history April 28, 1896: Tristan Tzara was born. He was a Romanian-French poet, journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, film director. He co-founded the anti-establishment Dada movement. During Hitler’s rise to power, he participated in the anti-fascist movement and the French Communist Party. In 1934, Tzara organized a mock trial of Salvador Dalí because of his fawning over Hitler and Franco. The surrealists Andre Breton, Paul Éluard and René Crevel helped run the trial. In the 1940s, Tzara lived in Marseilles with a large group of anti-fascist artists and writers, under the protection of American diplomat Varian Fry. These included Victor Serge, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Andre Breton and Max Ernst. Later he joined the French Resistance, writing propaganda and running their pirate radio station. After the Liberation of Paris, he wrote for L'Éternelle Revue, a communist newspaper edited by Jean-Paul Sartre. Other contributors to the newspaper included Louis Aragon, Éluard, Jacques Prévert and Pablo Picasso. Varian Fry, and his communal home for radicals in hiding, was portrayed in the historical drama series “Transatlantic.”

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