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About a year ago, in a review of an anthology of pieces from
the Little Review, I was startled by the critic's
characterization of Emma Goldman (some of whose letters from
prison were reprinted in the book) as "that so different
rebel." What startled me was the grotesqueness—to me, at
least—of the understatement. The occasional reappearances of
Emma in my later life always unnerve me, because she was a
major and horrifying figure that cast a shadow over my
childhood on Providence Street, in Worcester, Massachusetts.
The epithet applied to her there by my elders was so lethal,
so searing, that it seemed to me impossible then that anyone
could survive it—and yet Emma did. Some years ago, when I
met Alla Nazimova at a party, she startled me even more than
the understatement of the book review did by her calm
declaration that she would like to do a play about Emma
Goldman and play the part of Emma. My face must have
registered my shock, because Miss Nazimova at once asked me
whether I thought her idea was bad. I then had to explain to
her that my dismay at her plan transcended any question of
theatrical practicality; my reaction to it was in another
realm entirely. It was, I told her, as if she had quietly
announced her intention of playing Anti-Christ—or, more
strictly, Anti-God—and I tried to convey to her the aura, at
once mephitic and seductive, that surrounded Emma during my
childhood.
One day, when I was still very young, Providence Street
began to come alive with rumors and horrid allegations about
the proprietors of a new ice-cream parlor that had been
opened in our neighborhood. We children were forbidden to
patronize the anathematized parlor, and it was a long time
before I dared to defy the ban. Since the new entrepreneurs
were Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman (whom Miss Goldman
called Sasha), some people might have disapproved of them on
political grounds; the hatred of the Providence Street
parents was founded on religious ones. A dread word was
applied to Miss Goldman—for somehow most of the vituperation
focussed on her instead of on her consort and partner,
Berkman, to whom, Providence Street whispered, she was not
married! Some idea of the virulence of the term used to
describe Miss Goldman may be gathered from the fact that
after the utterance of it the other accusation—that she and
Berkman were not married—took on an aspect not so much of
derogation as of amiable gossip. The epithet was the word "apikorista,"
a word that to my elders connoted the ultimate in human
depravity. An apikoros—apikorista was the
feminine Yiddish form of this Hebrew word—was a renegade
from the Jewish religion, but the word had the even deeper
and more sinister connotation of treachery not merely to the
Jewish religion but to God himself. That there existed such
a person as an apikorista scarcely bore thinking
about, and I remember distinctly the horror I felt when I
heard the word used to describe a tangible, visible person
who actually lived and was doing business in our midst. I
knew that there must he people who had defied God, because
how otherwise could the word have come into existence, but
here it was applied to a person whom one saw on the streets
and who actually had a store within walking distance of one
of the stricter synagogues. I remember telling Miss Nazimova
that after thirty years or so I could not suppress a feeling
of dismay that anyone, even an actress as boldly vital as
she was, should express the wish, of her own free will and
in public, to portray an out-and-out apikorista!
Although the word "apikoros" is Hebrew, it comes from
the Greek "Epikouros." This is, of course, the name
of the philosopher Epicurus, so that etymologically Emma was
merely an Epicurean, which is not, in more liberal circles,
a fighting word. It still takes considerable effort for me
to realize that an apikorista is, after all, only a
lady freethinker or skeptic. But these last are agreeable
words; "freethinker" even has an implication of independence
that is admirable. There must be a fierce history behind the
assimilation into Hebrew of the Greek word, stemming from
the ancient days when many Jews were seduced by the
blandishments of the Greek philosophy of hedonism. The
misinterpretation of Epicureanism as a philosophy of
unbridled license no doubt led to a further identification
of it with a defiance of God, and thus to the Hebrew
religious formalists the word "apikoros" eventually
became a symbol of the ultimate sin—atheism. Therefore, to
be an apikorista was no laughing matter; the word
carried such a weight of obloquy that it was applied only to
those guilty of the most monstrous of human delinquencies.
Providence Street first heard merely that Miss Goldman was
an Anarchist, and we children repeated the news with
scoffing ribaldry. I did not know what "Anarchist" meant,
exactly, and to me the word had no more than a pleasant
reverberation of wickedness. Even to my elders, it seemed to
make Emma simply a figure of fun, for as a cult Anarchism
had no adherents on Providence Street. But now my elders
were calling her an apikorista as well, and where God
was involved, the orthodox of Providence Street permitted no
latitude.
I remember that before I ever saw Miss Goldman, I used to
lie awake at night thinking about her fearfully and trying
to imagine her appearance, which I am sure I must have
invested with the traditional properties of diabolism. The
thought that I might one day see her—pass her in the
street—filled me with terror; I hoped that such a disastrous
accident would not occur. She was an acute bogy, and even
after she and Berkman left Worcester, impelled by their
solemn decision to shoot Henry Clay Frick (which Emma
describes in her autobiography, "Living My Life," with that
extraordinary, humorless intensity characteristic of saints
and fanatics), her legend was perpetuated. The Providence
Street parents cited her to us constantly, using her name
somewhat as English parents used Napoleon's in the first
decades of the nineteenth century, to frighten and to
admonish. For the orthodox elders of the Providence Street
synagogues, Alexander Berkman's attempt to assassinate Frick
was a miraculous piece of luck. "What could you expect?"
they demanded of us children, as if we were somehow subtly
involved in the attentat, and as if they took it for
granted we were all potential agnostics. ("Attentat"
is a favorite word of Emma's, by the way, and it recurs
throughout her autobiography. Webster defines it as "an
attempt, especially an unsuccessful one, to commit a crime
of violence.") "What could you expect of people who don't
believe in God?" said our elders. "Naturally, such people
are murderers!"
Finally, I met Emma Goldman. All my life I have told the
same story of how it happened, and I told it that night to
Alla Nazimova:
One day when I was grubbing in the cinders of the empty lot
next to the Crompton & Knowles factory, on Winter Street,
where I used to hunt for bits of glass and metal, I was
picked up and walked home by Allie London. He was several
years older than I, and I trudged along happily beside him.
"Where do you think I've been?" said Allie, with a kind of
glowing, suppressed bravado.
I guessed the lake. I guessed Bancroft Tower.
Allie smiled at these conventional guesses. "I have just had
a college ice"—late-nineteenth-century for sundae—"at Emma
Goldman's," he announced sturdily.
I was aghast. I couldn't believe it. I stared at Allie,
expecting that his appearance would have been somehow
altered by the dread contact. Had there been incipient horns
sprouting from his forehead, I would not have been
surprised. But Allie looked about the same.
"How was it?" I finally managed to stammer.
"Wonderful!" said Allie enthusiastically. "She gives you a
double helping for the same money. I'm not going to Pop
Webster's any more."
"But I mean"—I could not bring myself to say the name—"she?"
Allie, an extrovert and already emancipated from orthodoxy,
was impatient. "I tell you she gives you double. I asked for
vanilla and she put on a scoop of strawberry, too. Same
money."
I walked along beside Allie in a turmoil, convinced that by
the necromancy of the extra scoop Emma had already begun to
draw him into her coils.
"Did you see her?" I asked finally.
"Sure I saw her. She served me. Saw her feller, too. They
had a fight. I could hear 'em in the back room. They're not
married, you know. They had a whale of a fight."
This startled me. Up to then, I had thought that only
married people fought. Under the circumstances, it seemed
almost unfair for the Goldman-Berkman ménage to assume this
prerogative of respectability.
A few days later, Allie again interrupted my excavations in
Crompton & Knowles' cinder yard. "Want a treat?" he shouted
cheerily.
Of course I did, but as I trotted along beside him, I was
suddenly assailed by fear. "You taking me to Webster's?" I
asked hopefully.
"Not using Webster's any more, I told you. I'm taking you to
Goldman's. She gives you double. Don't know how she makes it
pay, but that's her lookout."
It was also mine. I felt that my immortal soul hung in the
balance. I whimpered, "Suppose my folks hear about it?"
"You don't believe that stuff, do you?" said Allie
masterfully.
I have carried all my life a vivid impression of the
subsequent scene in the ice-cream parlor. Berkman I do not
seem to remember at all except for his voice, but I have
always retained a clear picture of Miss Goldman—of her look
of ineluctable benevolence, of her great mop of unruly
red-blond hair, of her smile, and of her eyes, which I have
always been sure were blue. I remember the shock of
discovering that she was not frightening; it was my
introduction, I have always believed, to the tangled world
of reality, in which even the despised, the criminal, the
fanatically wrongheaded, the hopelessly perverted may yet
have a certain charm.
The counter was neat, and the blowzy-headed, benevolent
deity stood behind it. When Allie asked me what I wanted, I
was tongue-tied; I fully expected some emanation from the
apikorista to pulverize me. Did she say, to temper
Allie's impatience, "Take your time, my boy, there's no
hurry"? I have always believed so. I managed finally to
articulate a desire for chocolate. When it came—double
scoop, twice what you would have got at Pop Webster's—Allie
gave me the triumphant side glance of the successful
prospector.
Miss Goldman left us, and we sat at the counter and ate.
Soon, from the back room, came the lifted voices—Emma's and
Berkman's. Allie looked at me significantly. "Fighting
again," he whispered.
I have always flattered myself that I was more discerning
than Allie that day. Though the voices were lifted, I sensed
that it was not in anger or recrimination. The language they
spoke was neither English nor Yiddish; the Yiddish I spoke
at home and the English I spoke on the streets and in school
were the two languages I knew, so I could not know that
those loud words were Russian. But I sensed that there was
no anger in the intonation; the discussion had the volume
and the intensity of a quarrel but no animus. It was even
sorrowful. I wondered. I wondered deeply.
When I got home, my sense of guilt was so profound that I
was sure my mother would immediately see that I had done
something wrong. But she didn't. I went to sleep that night
with the pleasurable, lawless feeling that this was, after
all, a world in which crime could go undetected. After that,
I went to Emma's whenever Allie asked me. There were few
excursions that could satisfy, simultaneously and so fully,
a boy's natural instincts for the illicit and for the
wholesome. It was like comfortably spooning up delicious ice
cream in the Inferno. Nickels didn't come my way very often,
and when I was not invited by Allie, I fell into the habit
of wandering by the forbidden ice-cream parlor in the hope
that something would turn up. Nothing ever did. I even
remember wondering whether, since Emma gave you a double
scoop for one nickel, she might not be so quixotic as to
give you one scoop for nothing. I never tested it out.
But whenever I did go into Emma's baleful precincts, I
always heard the eternal chain argument from the back room.
It went on and on, the voices rising and falling, intense
without bitterness, violent without anger. One day, I got a
nickel of my own, the gift of a prodigal uncle, and with it
clutched in my palm I made at once for Emma's. To my
consternation, the place was closed. I peered inside. The
room was dismantled—chairs heaped one on top of the other.
The kindly Devil and her voluble consort were gone. I turned
away disconsolate. Without Mme. Mephistopheles, Worcester
seemed less like Heaven than usual.
I discussed the vanished couple with Allie. His uncle was a
friend of their landlord. Allie told me that to the landlord
the sudden decision of his tenants to give up the parlor had
seemed an act of pure insanity, for the place had been doing
a land-office business in spite of the disapproval of
Providence Street. Evidently the double scoops of ice cream
had paid off, for the profits were fabulous; they sometimes,
said the landlord, came to fifty dollars a week. (The
standards of affluence in those days were fairly modest; I
remember that an uncle of mine who was not on speaking terms
with one of his brothers denounced him to me one day,
capping his long complaint with the bitter remark "And with
all this he is a Gvir [a Croesus]!" This surprised me; the
Gvir seemed as shabby and ineffectual as my other uncles. I
expressed my doubt. "Why," shouted my uncle, "in the real
estate alone he has four hundred dollars!") To give up a
thriving business for no reason, in the full tide of
success, was unheard of on Providence Street. "But what can
you expect?" the landlord said to Allie's uncle in final
summary, shrugging his shoulders. "What can you expect of an
apikorista who isn't even married?"
Everything about Emma's legend was shocking, but the
greatest shock of all was to come when, after telling Miss
Nazimova my story, which all my life I had devoutly
believed, I was impelled to read Emma's autobiography. From
it I discovered that Emma had been in business in Worcester
in 1892, in the months immediately preceding the shooting of
Frick, and that just prior to the attempted assassination
she and Berkman had left Worcester, never to return. Now, I
have always written in my passport applications that I was
born in 1893, but it is a factitious date, because I have
never known my actual birth date. The reason for this
lamentable ignorance is as follows: My father entered all
our births as they occurred—my two brothers', my sister's,
and mine—in Hebrew on the inside back cover of one of his
volumes of the Talmud. Since he figured our births according
to the Hebrew calendar, this automatically gave me a
three-thousand-year jump on my contemporaries. Even as a
child, this made me feel superannuated, but there wasn't
much I could do about it. I let it pass; the task of
translating the date into a more contemporary system was too
complicated. There came a day, though, when this archaic
computation of my father's was to cause me acute
embarrassment. It happened during class at the Providence
Street School, when our teacher, probably because she was
unable to find my age in her records, took it into her head
to ask me suddenly when I was born. I discovered, equally
suddenly, that didn't know. I didn't answer, and she
repeated the question, somewhat sharply. I couldn't risk
telling the truth—that I didn't know my birthday. I was
ashamed to confess it before the whole class, so I quickly
improvised one. "June," I heard myself saying. "June what? "
the teacher demanded. "June 9th," I said. The teacher must
have felt that she was dealing with a congenital idiot. "The
year?" she said wearily. "Do you mind telling me the year?"
"Eighteen-ninety-three," I stammered, picking what seemed
Ike a good one.
This improvisation became fixed; it has served as well as
any other, and until I read Emma Goldman's autobiography it
did not trouble me that it made little pretension to
accuracy. I have long since forgotten the Hebrew date of my
birth, and my father's many-volume Talmud was long ago given
away, so I cannot look up that recording and translate it
into a date in our calendar. I have made several attempts to
get the official date of my birth from the City of
Worcester, but without success; there is no record there of
my ever having been born. But common sense tells me that
1893 must be reasonably close. I graduated from high school
in 1911, and if I had been born early enough to remember
visiting Emma Goldman's ice-cream parlor, I would have been
well over twenty when I graduated. This seems unlikely,
since I always appeared to be about the same age as my
classmates. I can only regretfully conclude that my meeting
with Emma never happened. My older brothers certainly grew
up sniffing the effluvium of Emma's reputation, and it seems
probable that I appropriated their memories of her for my
own. Did I materialize the lurid gossip about Emma, which
threaded Providence Street like a contaminated brook long
after she had left Worcester, into a personal experience and
annex the apikorista into my private mythology? It
seems probable. I certainly dreamed about her—a female Devil
without horns but with suitably flaming hair. My memory of
her is so vivid that I still see that tousled head, hear
that argument, and taste that double chocolate. But I now
reluctantly accept the fact that all these years I must have
been experiencing these things at second hand.
It was only when I read Emma's autobiography that I
discovered that she and Berkman gave up their ice-cream
business in Worcester not because they were skeptics but
because they were fanatical believers. I nurtured for years
the little mystery of the high-voiced arguments in the back
room; when I came to read Emma's autobiography, I solved it.
Emma and Sasha had decided that America was too
materialistic for the revolution; it became clear to them
that by accelerating a revolution in Russia they might
create a model for one here. To get the money for the trip
to Russia, they drifted to Worcester and set up the
ice-cream parlor. Business flourished; they were practically
on their way. One day, a customer, while eating his ice
cream, was reading a paper. Emma's roving eye caught the
headline: "LATEST DEVELOPMENTS IN HOMESTEAD—FAMILIES OF
STRIKERS EVICTED FROM THE COMPANY HOUSES—WOMAN IN
CONFINEMENT CARRIED OUT INTO STREET BY SHERIFFS." Emma, as
she herself tells it, made an instant deal with the man. She
told him that he could have his ice cream free if he would
let her read his paper. Then she ran to Sasha with the news.
The project to go to Russia was abandoned; it was supplanted
by the more immediate necessity of getting rid of the tyrant
of Homestead—Henry Clay Frick. There follows Emma's
description of a protracted argument: Should she go
or should he go? There was no doubt in Beckman's mind
that he should go; Emma agreed to this but insisted that she
must accompany him. No, said Sasha; she had a gift for
words, a knack for propaganda. He must go to Pittsburgh and
deal with Frick personally, and Emma must remain behind to
tell about it. The argument went on for a long time, and
Emma sorrowfully describes how she lost it.
Emma then describes the astonishment of the landlord,
Allie's uncle's friend, when she told him they were giving
up the business. They gave him that day's receipts as a
settlement for back rent—seventy-five dollars—and took the
next train to New York. The subsequent events are grimly and
fantastically farcical, though Emma appears to have had no
glimmering of that. They at once set about manufacturing a
bomb. On this task, Sasha promptly wasted forty dollars,
because he appears to have had no knack for bomb-making. But
the impulse for a rendezvous with Mr. Frick was so imperious
that Sasha left for Pittsburgh anyway. Emma remained behind
in New York, and decided that in order to aid Sasha with
money she would become a streetwalker—an avocation for which
she seems to have had as little aptitude as Sasha had for
bomb-making. The only man who picked her up was an elderly
intellectual, who gave her ten dollars and ran away at her
suggestion that perhaps she ought to earn it. Meanwhile, in
Pittsburgh, Berkman had managed to buy a cheap revolver. Gun
in hand, he strolled into Frick's private office (how
accessible those early tycoons must have been!) and shot
him. He failed to kill him, but he wounded him seriously.
Emma immediately started organizing mass meetings to
celebrate the attentat. But when Frick refused to
die, there was much sneering and headshaking in Anarchist
circles in New York. Emma's inspiration in Anarchy had been
a well-known revolutionary editor of the time named Johann
Most. In fact, Emma writes that it was from Most's book
"Science of Revolutionary Warfare" that Sasha, a tyro, had
got his first shy hints about bomb-making. It "was a good
textbook," says Emma. Now, to Emma's profound disgust,
Most's paper, Freiheit, came out with an article
denouncing the attack on Frick. Aspersions were cast on
Berkman's motives. There was even a suggestion that he had
shot Frick with a toy revolver and that that was why Frick
was still alive. This slander arouses Emma's fierce
indignation:
I was stung to the quick. I knew that Sasha had never
had much practice in shooting. Occasionally, at German
picnics, he would take part in target-shooting, but was
that sufficient? I was sure that Sasha's failure to kill
Frick was due to the cheap quality of his revolver—he
had lacked enough money to buy a good one.
She has another explanation to cover Sasha's inefficiency:
Perhaps Frick was recovering because of the attention he
was getting? The greatest surgeons of America had been
called to his bedside. Yes, it must be that; after all,
three bullets from Sasha's revolver had lodged in
Frick's body. It was Frick's wealth that was enabling
him to recover. I tried to explain this to the comrades,
but most of them remained unconvinced. Some even hinted
that Sasha was at liberty. I was frantic—how dared they
doubt Sasha? I would write him! I would ask him to send
me word that would stop the horrible rumors about him.
In any case, by not dying Frick blurred the impact of
Berkman's act.
Emma has the engaging habit, in her autobiography, of
putting a summarizing running head at the top of each page.
These beads are extremely diverting and various; by merely
following them, without reading the text beneath, you may
quickly get a running record of a lively career. For
example:
I Divorce My Husband
I Remarry Kershner [her husband] and Leave Him Again
My Doubts About Nihilism Disappear
Johann Most: Preceptor
I Dedicate Myself to Most's Happiness
I Advocate Free Love
Am Drawn to Sasha
I Give Myself to Sasha
I Respond to Fedya
The last two heads run on facing pages. Then come:
I Belong Entirely to Sasha
I Plan My First Lecture Tour
Most Confesses Love for Me
Most Wants Merely the Female
Sasha Plus Most Equals Fedya
I Refuse to Bear Children
Most Stirs Me Profoundly
"Love, Love—There Is Only Sex!"
Blackwell's Island Claims Most
Sasha Plans an Attentat
—and Insists on Executing It Alone
I Find Love in the Arms of Ed
Ed Shows a Conservative Streak
I Leave Ed
My Reactions to Procreation Among the Poor
The President [McKinley] Dies. Am I Sorry?
We Must Try to Help Czolgosz
I Long for Ben Reitman
Despite His Defects, I Love Ben
I Worry About My Face
Billy Sunday Nauseates Me
And so on and on. The page on which Emma describes her
disillusion with Most's attitude about Berkman's sacrifice
is headed simply "I Horsewhip Johann Most."
In 1919, Emma and Sasha were deported for criminal Anarchy.
Thanks to the insistent courtesy of the United States
government, they had free passage to their beloved Russia.
Just before entering Russia, after crossing Finland locked
in a train, with sentries with fixed bayonets inside the
cars and on the platforms, Emma writes, "My heart trembled
with anticipation and fervent hope." Almost as soon as she
and Sasha reached Moscow and got the hang of things in their
utopia, their disenchantment began. In swift montage, Emma's
headings give a capsule history of her Russian visit:
We Are Dazzled by the Results in Russia
I Begin to Wonder
Jack Reed Bursts in on Me
I Will Not Believe What See
Tyranny in Russia
Lenin Sends for Sasha and Me
Lenin Talks to Us
Russia Lies Fallow
I Clash with Soviet Officials
We Get Comrades out of Jail
Misery in the Factories
Suspicious Bertrand Russell
Lenin, the False Messiah
My Disillusionment Persists
"The Revolution, What Has Become of It?"
Respect for Human Life: A Rarity
The Bolshevik Myth
Emma left Russia on December 1, 1921. On the train, she
writes, "My dreams crushed, my faith broken, my heart like a
stone. Matuska Rossiya [Mother Russia] bleeding from a
thousand wounds, her soil strewn with the dead. I clutch the
bar at the frozen windowpane and grit my teeth to suppress
my sobs."
Emma must have been among the first in the long procession
of the disillusioned. |
