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