In his celebrated study of bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway singles out one practitioner—Sidney Franklin—as “a better, more scientific, more intelligent, and more finished matador than all but about six of the full matadors in Spain today.” Erol Araf describes Franklin’s career:
Hemingway intensely admired Sidney Franklin, a sublime bullfighter who was born in Brooklyn, New York to Orthodox Jewish parents. . . . When the Spanish Civil War erupted, Franklin sided with Francisco Franco, who was also among his admirers, and under whose aegis he continued to perform. Before the result of the war was determined, he tagged along as a paid interpreter while Hemingway and the director Joris Ivens filmed the classic documentary [of the war], The Spanish Earth.
He eventually fell out with Hemingway [after] casting his lot with [Franco’s] Phalange, [which] was simply reprehensible to the author. . . .
After the war, his days as a matador behind him, Franklin appeared in a few films in the U.S. and Mexico. . . . He wrote an autobiography, Bullfighter from Brooklyn, and he also was a close friend of the American actor and legend James Dean. . . . The “matador of the Torah,” as he was known in Spain, died in obscurity in a nursing home in New York in 1976.
Read more on Jerusalem Post: https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Hemingways-Jewish-bullfighter-571011