Emma Goldman in Exile: From the Russian Revolution to the Spanish Civil War

by Alice Wexler

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807070041
• ISBN13: 9780807070048
• Release Date: January 1989
• Publisher: Beacon Press (MA)
• Length: 301 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A tragedy in its classical terms

Driven -- that sums up Emma Goldman's life. Driven to accomplish an ideal. So driven that she seemed to care not what nor whom she scrambled over in order to achieve it. She was not polite about it, nor suave in her arguments. Bluntness she considered her form of honesty. Unfortunately for her, she did not succeed. The obstacles in her path were insurmountable.Her goal was world anarchism. Because her membership in an anarchist organization was illegal under the terms of the later discredited Immigration Act of 1918, she was swept up in the Palmer Raids, that shameful law which was spawned by war hysteria and a corrupted notion of patriotism. "Red Emma", as the press often referred to her, was then culled out of the population and imprisoned with 248 others on Ellis Island, waiting for an ocean vessel to ship them out of the United States, not because they committed crimes but because they were not native born and because they publicly disagreed with the government. For Emma, this was a final crushing blow -- to be torn away from her home -- for she had just been released after having spent two years in prison because she spoke out against the draft and the United States' entry into World War I.It was there, on that bitter winter night of 1919, that Alice Wexler begins her well-written narrative of Emma Goldman's tragic odyssey: that of a 50-year-old matronly woman, a high-profile anarchist, a fiery lecturer, being sent, against her will to Russia -- though she was born in Lithuania -- but because she once had lived in St. Petersburg. This is tragedy in its classical terms, because Emma, after having spent more than half her life in the U.S., was more American than Russian. Classic tragedy because she was never to return.When she arrived in Russia, Emma and her sometimes lover and fellow anarchist Alexander Berkman then fell out with the Communists who had just begun to rule Russia following the October Revolution. So she had to move on. She could not send down roots anywhere else, not in France, nor in England, nor in Canada because, according to Ms. Wexler, Emma yearned for an ultimate return to America.Because Emma gave herself so completely to an unworkable ideal, she was unable to find contentment anywhere or with any person. Her love affairs were all one-sided. She gave more than she could ever hope to receive from those weak men whom she was able to dominate; her commitment to her ideals were the same, she gave them more than she ever received.To read about Emma Goldman is an interesting experience and Ms. Wexler's even-handed and well-researched view is recommended for any one interested in a study of thwarted ambitions and in the radical movement in American history. Especially important is the glaring lesson in these uncertain times of how gross injustices occur when hysteria disguised as patriotism so grossly abuse civil rights.