Calle de Max Aub

This street honors Max Aub, born in Paris in 1903 to a German father and a French mother, raised in Valencia, and shaped as a writer in Spanish. The Civil War tore him up by the roots: he defended the Republic, passed through internment camps in France and Algeria, and only the efforts of the novelist John Dos Passos secured him the ship that took him to Mexico, where he died in 1972. Out of that defeat came his major work, the novel cycle El laberinto mágico. Aub had a sense of humor that bordered on forgery. In 1958 he published Jusep Torres Campalans, the biography of a Catalan Cubist painter and friend of Picasso who had never existed. He invented the whole thing, with photos, testimonies, and paintings he made himself, and the hoax went so far that those works were exhibited in galleries in Mexico and New York. The street did not always bear his name. It was once General Dávila, a Francoist military man, and was renamed under the historical memory law.