Frumkin Family

Sidney Franklin was born on July 11, 1903 and raised in Park Slope, Brooklyn, by Russian Orthodox Jewish parents, Abram and Lubba Frumpkin. His father was a patrolman for the New York Police Department. Sidney attended P.S. 10 and three years at Commercial High School in Brooklyn, before dropping out. While in school he was attracted to visual and performance arts. He dabbled in acting and took on the last name Franklin, after Benjamin Franklin, as his stage name, allegedly in order to skirt his disapproving father’s attention. The Frumpkin family seems to have eventually dropped the “p” and become Frumkin.

In 1922, after a violent dispute with his father, Franklin ran away to Mexico City, where within a year the well-known Mexican matador, Rodolfo Gaona, was grooming Franklin for the bullring. Franklin’s debut bullfight was in September 1923 in Mexico City. His Spanish debut was in June 1929. Franklin, known as “El Yanqui,” was at the height of his bullfighting career in the early 1930s and in the years following World War II, making appearances at bullrings in Spain, Portugal, Mexico, Colombia and Panama. He survived a number of gorings; the last goring, in Juarez, Mexico, in 1959, brought his ring performances to an end.

Ernest Hemingway and Franklin met in August 1929, quickly developing a close friendship which would last until a falling out in 1937 while they traveled in Spain as correspondents for the North American News Alliance during the Spanish Civil War. Franklin was a subject in and source for Hemingway's non-fiction book on bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon .

In the 1950s Franklin led a bullfighting school outside of Seville and managed a café in Seville. After an automobile registration violation which landed him in jail for nine months, he returned to the United States in 1958. As far as his personal life is concerned, according to his biographer, Bart Paul, Franklin led a closeted gay life. Following 1958 he resided in Texas and Mexico, until spending the last seven years of his life in the Village Nursing Home in Manhattan, where he died on April 26, 1976.

References

Ivry, Benjamin. "‘Ai No Corrida’ Sidney Franklin, the Brooklyn Bullfighter." The Forward . February 17, 2010. Accessed May 10, 2010 from: http://www.forward.com/articles/125887/

Paul, Bart. Double-Edged Sword: The Many Lives of Hemingway's Friend, the American Matador Sidney Franklin. University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, 2009.

Ross, Lillian. “El Unico Matador III.” The New Yorker . March 26, 1949, p. 32-56.

“Sidney Franklin, 72, Dies; Matador from Brooklyn.” New York Times. May 2, 1976. Box 1, Folder 3.

From the guide to the Sidney Franklin Collection, 1922-1976, 2001-2010 (bulk 1922-1958), (American Jewish Historical Society)