Living My Life - Emma Goldman [174]
Jack London was not the only one who condemned while praising. There were others, even in our own ranks, among them S. Yanofsky,1 the editor of the Freie Arbeiter Stimme. He was one of the speakers at the banquet given to celebrate the appearance of Sasha’s book. He was the only one of the five hundred guests who interjected a discordant note into the otherwise beautifully harmonious evening. Yanofsky paid high tribute to Sasha’s Memoirs as the “mature product of a mature mind,” but he “regretted the useless and futile act of a silly boy.” I felt outraged by the man’s denouncing the Attentat on the occasion of the birth of Sasha’s book, a work conceived in that heroic moment of July 1892 and nourished by tears and blood throughout the dark and terrible years that followed. When I was called upon to speak, I turned upon the man who presumed to represent a great ideal and yet who was lacking in the least understanding of one so truly the idealist.
“To you the impressionable youth of Alexander Berkman appears silly,” I said, “and his Attentat futile. [ ... ] His act was the protest of a sensitive spirit that would rather perish for his ideal than continue for a lifetime as a smug inhabitant of a complaisant and callous world. If our comrade did not perish, it was certainly not due to the mercy of those who had openly declared he should not survive his living grave. It was due entirely to the same traits that inspired Alexander Berkman’s act: his unwavering purpose, his indomitable will, and his faith in the ultimate triumph of his ideal. These elements have gone into the making of the ‘silly’ youth, into his act and into his martyrdom of fourteen years. It is these same elements that have inspired the creation of Prison Memoirs. Whatever greatness and humanity the book possesses, they are woven of these elements. There is no gap between the silly youth and the mature man. There is a continuous flow, a red thread that winds like a leitmotif throughout the entire life of Alexander Berkman.”
November II, 1887—November 11, 1912! Twenty-five years, an infinitesimal fraction of time in the upward march of the race, but an eternity for him who dies many deaths in the course of his life. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the Chicago martyrdom intensified my feeling for the men I had never personally known, but who by their death had become the most decisive influence in my existence. [ ... ]
I was one of the many speakers eager to pay tribute to our precious dead and to recall once more the valour and heroism of their lives. I awaited my turn, stirred to the roots by the historic occasion, its great social significance and personal meaning to me. Memories of the distant past flitted through my mind—Rochester and a woman’s voice ringing like music in my ears: “You will love our men when you learn to know them, and you will make their cause your own!” In times of ascent to heights, in days of faint-heartedness and doubt, in hours of prison isolation, of antagonism and censure from one’s own kind, in failure of love, in friendships broken and betrayed—always their cause was mine, their sacrifice my support. [ ... ]
The effect on Ben of his San Diego experience proved to be stronger and more lasting than any of us had expected. He remained in the throes of those harrowing days and he became a victim of the idée fixe that he must return there. He followed his activities with even more than his wonted energy, working as if driven by furies and driving everybody else in turn. I became to him a means rather than an end, the end being meetings, meetings, meetings, and plans for more meetings. But I saw that he did not really live in his work, or in our love. His whole being was centred on San Diego, and it became almost a hallucination with him. He taxed my powers of endurance, and often my affection, by his constant insistence on starting for the Coast. His restlessness kept increasing and he was not content until we were finally on our way.
Our Los Angeles friends were strongly opposed to our returning to San Diego. They