Researcher: Jack Rafferty, Stuyvesant '27

Isiah “Sol” Lerner was born on August 23rd, 1912 in New York City. He was a middle child, with an older brother Nathan, born in 1910, and younger sister Annie, born in 1914. He was the son of Joseph Lerner and Fannie Tischer Lerner. His father Joseph was born in 1885 in Kishinef, which at that time was part of Russia. Kishinef is infamous for a massacre of Jewish citizens on April 8th, 1903. Joseph was the first of his siblings to move to the United States, possibly due to the violent antisemitism and possibly searching for opportunity and a better life. He was part of the massive surge of Jewish immigration during the period. While he first landed in 1900, he would officially get naturalized in 1906 and moved to NY permanently. His siblings followed suit within a few years. In 1909, he married Fannie, who was from Austria.


Sol’s early life would prove to be difficult. His mother would die young, passing away from heart troubles in February of 1918. In March, his father put Sol and his older brother Nathan into the Hebrew Orphan Asylum for the City of New York. This was a common practice at the time for families facing crisis. He and his brother remained there for 6 months until his father took him out of the orphanage on September 17th of the same year. Tragedy was not done with young Sol, however. His father passed away in March of 1919.


Sol was then placed in another and very different Jewish orphanage. The Hebrew Guardian Sheltering Society was innovative and progressive for the time. Whereas the Hebrew Orphan Asylum would have been a crowded, urban institution, his new location was in a bucolic, park-like setting in Pleasantville that backed up onto a reservoir and provided cottages for its children. This must have seemed like a whole other world compared to the grimy streets of Great Depression era Brooklyn. By the time Sol was released from the program in 1925, he had spent half his life there.


Sol then went back to New York City to live with an uncle in the Bronx. He initially went to Morris High School, located on 166th Street and Boston Road. After this, he switched to District Evening High School, attending at night while he worked as a librarian for the New York Public Library. He went to college for a year, then moved to 1169, 52nd Street in Brooklyn, which would become his permanent residence.


By this time, the United States had fallen into the Great Depression. In 1934, wanting to make a difference, Sol joined the Young Communist League. The civil unrest in Spain was front-page news, after all, and the Fascists were the enemy. As Adam Hochschild put it in “Spain In Our Hearts”, “There seemed a moral clarity about the crisis in Spain. Rapidly advancing fascism cried out for defiance; if not here, where? This is why so many men from around the world volunteered to fight”. Sol made the decision to go fight. He successfully got his passport on January 25th, 1937, and almost immediately departed, landing on Spanish soil on February 11th of the same year.


Upon landing in Spain, he joined up with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Morata, where he was almost immediately thrust into one of the bloodiest battles of the war; the Battle of Jarama. This battle was infamous for its extremely high death count, estimated to be anywhere from 6,000 to 25,000 casualties on each side. After surviving this conflict, he would go on to be a photographer for the Brigade. He would be captured, however, during early April of 1938 while at the battle of Gandesa, over a year after he first arrived in Spain to start fighting for the Republic. He was held as a hostage by the Nationalists in San Pedro de Cardeña, a former monastery which was being used as a concentration camp specifically for international volunteers. A full year later, on April 22nd, 1939, Sol regained his freedom in a prisoner exchange alongside 70 other Americans. He returned home in May on the Ile de France, a luxury ocean liner later converted into a prison boat. Returning to civilian life, he joined the Works Progress Administration created by FDR.


Sol enlisted in the US Army on July 15th, 1942. He would serve in the Pacific Theatre, not returning to the United States until 1950. One can only imagine how great the feeling of winning would’ve been after being on the losing side of the Spanish Civil War. Settling down back in Brooklyn, he got a job in Railroad Operations as a train brakeman. He met a Mrs. Natalie Leible Mahon, and the two got married on September 13th, 1952. They tried for a child, and conceived little Paula Joan Lerner in 1956. Unfortunately for the Lerners, their child died only 3 years later, in 1959. Sol continued working as a train brakeman until he retired. His brother Nathan passed away at age 68, in 1978. Sol died on October 24th, 1985.

Sources

“Lerner, Sol”. Jewish Virtual Library. Accessed July 9th, 2026. https://jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jews-who-served-in-the-international-brigade-in-the-spanish-civil-war#american
“Lerner, Sol”. SIDBRINT. Accessed July 9th, 2026. https://sidbrint.puntzero.cat/brigadista/lerner-sol
“Isiah (Sol) Lerner”. Ancestry. Accessed July 10th, 2026. https://www.ancestry.com/family-tree/person/tree/79920799/person/48408429481/gallery?galleryPage=1&tab=gallery&sort=-created
“Lerner, Sol”. Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives. Accessed July 9th, 2026. https://alba-valb.org/volunteers/sol-lerner/
Spain In Our Hearts. Accessed July 10th, 2026. https://www.amazon.com/Spain-Our-Hearts-Americans-1936-1939/dp/0544947231