103 lines
5.7 KiB
Plaintext
103 lines
5.7 KiB
Plaintext
Emma Goldman in Exile
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From the Russian Revolution to the Spanish Civil War
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By Alice Wexler
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Illustrated. 301 pages. Beacon Press. $24.95
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By HERBERT MITGANG
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c.1989 N.Y. Times News Service
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At the height of the red scare in 1919, the American anarchist
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Emma Goldman was imprisoned on Ellis Island, put on a ship with 246
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men and two other women who were branded radicals, and deported to
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the Soviet Union.
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The roundup was engineered by J. Edgar Hoover, then head of the
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Justice Department's Radical Division, and started him on the road
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to prominence. Gen. Leonard Wood, a veteran of the Spanish-American
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War, said the radicals ``should be put on a ship of stone with
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sails of lead and their first stopping place should be hell.''
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In darkness, a military transport with a detachment of armed
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marines sailed past the Statue of Liberty. Eventually, the ship
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reached a port in Finland, where the radicals entrained and crossed
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the border into revolutionary Russia.
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Greeted by the wife of Maxim Gorky and listening to a Soviet
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military band playing the Internationale, an emotional Emma Goldman
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said: ``This is the greatest day in my life. I once found political
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freedom in America. Now the doors are closed to free thinkers, and
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the enemies of capitalism find once more sanctuary in Russia.''
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As Alice Wexler points out in ``Emma Goldman in Exile,'' a
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well-researched and readable biography, her enthusiasm for the new
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Union of Soviet Socialist Republics quickly waned. The struggle for
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leadership and internal conflicts of the revolution altered the
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supposed dictatorship of the proletariat into a dictatorship of the
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Communist Party apparatus.
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Emma Goldman, a revolutionist of international stature, found
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herself a pariah in the United States -- which she continued to
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love, even in exile -- and a thorn in the side of the Soviet Union.
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She lived there with her fellow-deportee and lover, Alexander
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Berkman, for less than two years.
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By 1923 she had written ``My Two Years in Russia'' (to her
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surprise, the publisher, Doubleday & Page, changed the title to
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``My Disillusionment in Russia'') and by 1925 she was giving
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speeches in England on ``The Bolshevik Myth and the Condition of
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the Political Prisoners.''
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In her book, she told how she came to believe that the
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inequality, repression and especially the terror were politically
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caused and an inevitable result of Bolshevik ideology.
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``Emma Goldman in Exile'' covers the last 20 years of her life
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and follows Miss Wexler's ``Emma Goldman in America'' (also
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published by Beacon Press). Together they form an authoritative
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biography of a vibrant and influential personality.
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She was a character in E.. Doctorow's novel ``Ragtime'' and in
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Warren Beatty's movie ``Reds.'' Her two-volume autobiography,
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``Living My Life,'' was published in 1931 and is still in print
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(Dover Books). Writing about ``Living My Life'' in a current book
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about American autobiography called ``Fabricating Lives,'' Herbert
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Liebowitz saw fit to describe it as garrulous and exhausting,
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overlooking its significance not as artful writing but as social
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history.
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Emma Goldman (1869-1940) was born in Russia and moved to the
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United States in 1886. She was soon caught up in a swirl of
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movements -- feminism, birth control, pacificism, anarchism. Despite
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the fears of the Red hunters, she was a bomb thrower only in her
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speeches and pamphlets. She is studied today for the very
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principles that put her in jail and caused her deportation.
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``For nearly 30 years, she had taunted conservative Americans
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with her outspoken attacks on government, big business and war,''
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Miss Wexler writes. ``On her freewheeling coast-to-coast lecture
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tours she defended everything from free speech to free love, from
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the rights of striking workers to the rights of homosexuals.
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``Her name became a household word, synonymous with everything
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subversive and demonic, but also symbolic of the `new woman' and of
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the radical labor movement that blossomed in the years before World
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War I. To the public she was America's arch revolutionary, both
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frightening and fascinating.
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``She flaunted her lovers, talked back to the police, smoked in
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public and marched off to prison carrying James Joyce's `Portrait
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of the Artist' under her arm.''
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In exile, Emma Goldman lived in France, visited England and
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Canada on lecture tours and continued to speak out and write about
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her beliefs. Her anti-Bolshevism was not universally admired on the
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democratic left. For example, Harold Laski initially offered to
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assist a campaign for Russian political prisoners, but he and other
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members of the British Labor Party concluded that her main interest
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was attacking Bolshevism.
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Miss Wexler, who treats the subject of her biography candidly,
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describes how Emma Goldman could be so adamant that she lost
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colleagues in general sympathy with her beliefs.
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The Spanish Civil War drew her back into the international
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struggle against fascism. In Barcelona, she worked with the
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anarchists in defense of the Spanish Republic.
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In ``Homage to Catalonia,'' of course, George Orwell has written
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at length about the role of the anarchists and their clash with the
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communists while both were fighting Franco's forces.
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``Emma Goldman in Exile'' helps to flesh out the story of the
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internal disputes among the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War.
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Miss Wexler concludes that it is strange that Emma Goldman has
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been honored for her attacks on Soviet Russia rather than for ``her
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lifelong sense of exile to fight for a new world in which all
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people might feel at home, a world without boundaries or borders,
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where no one would be deported for dissident opinions and all would
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share freely in the wealth of the earth.''
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