Alix Kates Shulman - To the Barricades: The Anarchist Life of Emma Goldman

To the Barricades

The Anarchist Life of Emma Goldman

Alix Kates Shulman

To Polly

Preface

Though nowadays few people have heard of Emma Goldman, in her day she was known as the most dangerous woman in the world. Small children were told, If youre not good, Emma Goldman will get you. All she had to do was show up in a city or town and she was likely to be arrestedsometimes, as the police told her, just because youre Emma Goldman. She was considered such a menace that finally the United States Government took away her citizenship and deported her.

Why did this one little woman strike such terror into the hearts of citizens, police forces, governments? Because Emma Goldman was an anarchist and a revolutionary. Jailed for conspiracy, for inciting to riot, for advertising birth control, for obstructing the draft, she dared to attack every authority that tried to put fences around the human spirit and make people go on doing the things they hate to do, living the lives they loathe to live. No matter what the authorities did to her, nothing could stop her from fighting for a revolution to change all this, up until the day she died.

Now, in the 1970s, new generations of radicals are taking up Emma Goldmans fight. Like her, they are willing to face jail, exile, and even death because they believe that the world must be made over according to a new vision.

Emma Goldmans ideals and spirit are now very much alive. It is time that her story was heard again.

Contents

Off to a Bad Start

Life is the biggest bargain; you get it for nothing.

Y IDDISH PROVERB

Emma Goldmans story begins just over a hundred years ago and many thousands of miles away in the country of Russia. In those days Russia seemed to be a storybook land, with its onion-shaped steeples on village churches and its deep, snowy forests of birch and pine. But in reality the life was harsh and the people were often cruel. There, in 1869, Emma Goldman was born with four curses. She was born Russian, Jewish, female, and unloved.

The very first thing Emma learned when she was old enough to talk and understand was that she had not been wanted. Her father never tired of telling her how disappointed he was that she had been born a girl. You cant be my child, he would tease her. You dont look like me or your mother; you dont act like us! Darkhaired and dark-eyed, Abraham Goldman wondered where Emma had got her blue eyes and blonde hair, so unusual in a Jewish child. They must have come, he said, from the pigs market, where Jews were not permitted to go because their religion forbids them to eat pork. The pig lady had cheated him, he would tell Emma with a bitter laugh, by giving him a girl-child instead of a boy.

Abraham Goldman had reason to be bitter; there was no sweetness in his life. Even his beautiful young wife Taube, whom he had married a year before Emma was born, had no love for him. She had loved a man only once, the young man she had married when she was fifteen. But he had fallen ill and died. When her first husband died, leaving her two small daughters, Lena and Helena, Taube buried with him all the love she would ever feel for a man. When she was barely out of mourning, her family arranged for her to marry Abraham Goldman. Like any good daughter in those times, she married the man her family selected for her, even though she did not love him. Marriage was a practical matter. And a widow with two small children, even a young and beautiful widow like Taube, was lucky to get any husband at all. But the loveless Goldman match was bad from the start.

Taubes first husband had left a little money when he died which Taube brought as a dowry to her new marriage. Abraham promptly invested it in a business. Almost immediately the business failed. When Taube became pregnant, the family had nothing to live on, and Emmas birth on June 27, 1869, was more of a curse than a blessing.

For most people in those days life in Russia was painfully hard. A handful of rich nobles owned all the land. Their huge estates were tended by great masses of poor, illiterate peasants called serfs. Until 1861, when a law was passed setting them free, these serfs had been owned as slaves by the nobles. After 1861 they could no longer be bought and sold or legally flogged, but otherwise they were hardly better off than slaves. While the nobles led fancy lives in their fine city houses in the winters and on their great country estates in the summers, the peasants led a wretched existence. They huddled together the year round in their crude huts, living on the ancient diet of black bread and tea. Into the short summers they tried to cram the backbreaking work of an entire year.

The kings of Russia, the czars, had ruled as tyrants for many centuries. The czars every whim became law. His laws were carried out by a huge, cumbersome network of corrupt local officials. These bureaucrats grew fat filling their pockets with bribes. Everyone, even the poorest peasant, had to pay.

Bad as life was for most Russians, it was even more miserable for the Russian Jews. In the province of Kovno, where Emma was born, and in the surrounding provinces, lived great numbers of Jews. These solemn, religious people, darker in hair and skin than the Russians around them, had clung together as a separate people for many generations. Long hated by Christians, even those Jews who were not religious had kept their own Yiddish language, their own style of dress, and their own ancient customs. As a group apart, they were despised by almost everyone in Russia. As long as there were few Jews in Russia, they managed to live unobtrusively. But when the land around Kovno with its large Jewish population was conquered for the czar about seventy years before Emma was born, the Jews became a special problem.

Seeing no easy way to get rid of the Jews, the czars issued special laws to keep them separate from other Russians. Jews could live only in certain provinces, then only in certain towns. For a while all rural villages were closed to them. In the towns and the cities they were often herded into special streets and sections called ghettos, which were sometimes walled off and locked at night.

Even in the few places where Jews could live, they were never left in peace. By law they could do only certain kinds of work, which kept them poor. Out of the meager livings they managed to earn, they had to pay special Jewish taxes to the czar and extra bribes to the officials. There were laws restricting whom they could hire, how they could dress, when and where they could travel, where they could build their synagogues, and even when they could marry. Life was so unsettled in the ghettos, and Jews were so hemmed in by rules, that it was all they could do just to survive.

Then, during Emmas childhood, something happened to threaten even their survival. A wave of pogroms broke out, terrorizing every Jewish heart in Russia. Originally pogrom meant riot in Russian. But after a while it came to mean a bloody attack on a community of Jews. In the middle of the day or night, without warning or reason, a band of armed, mounted raiders would ride down on a Jewish village to loot and murder. As soon as the horses were spotted in the distance, the cry would go through the streets and from house to house, pogrom! pogrom! and the defenseless Jews would hide until the raid was over. In tall boots and fur hats, waving swords high over their heads, the furious Cossacks would gallop into a ghetto, taking everything in sight. No Jew was safe, child or adult, woman or man. To a Russian raider, a Jew was not really a persona Jew was simply a Jew, as a dog was a dog. No one ever knew how the pogroms were started. Some said they were ordered by the czar himself to take the minds of the Russian people off their misery.