Living My Life - Emma Goldman [21]
Alexander Berkman was not alone in finding an essential womanliness in the autobiography. The New York Herald Tribune called the book “a great woman’s story” (ibid., 154). Less favorably, the Boston Transcript said of Goldman that she “is lovable even where she is unintelligent—and frequently she seems so wrongheaded as to be laughable” (Nov. 21, 1931, 3). Perhaps the writer who was most able to receive both the confessional and intellectual dimensions of the autobiography as they had been intended was Nation reviewer Freda Kirchwey, who wrote:
Her personal affairs and emotions should in no way be segregated from her more public ones. Emma Goldman displays a complete incapacity for disinterest in the usual sorts of differentiation. The emotion that drove her was a single force, whether it was directed against the might of government of Russia or toward the fulfillment of personal passion. The excitement of a mass meeting was akin to the thrill of an embrace.... Herein lies her undeniable power. Her emotion is both intense and universal; her expression of it in words and action—unrestrained, her courage completely instinctive. She is contemptuous of any intellectualizing that stands in the way of faith and action. Always she feels first and thinks later. (Nation, 614)
Goldman thought Kirchwey’s the best of the reviews written, although she bridled at the suggestion that her feelings impaired her thinking clearly. She preferred the compliment of a friend who told her she was “among the few women who can think without having lost anything of [her] femininity” (Nowhere at Home, 101).
Although the reviews were favorable, the published work did less well at the bookstores than Goldman hoped. She had quarreled with Knopf over its length, wanting to conclude her chronicle with her deportation to Russia. When Knopf insisted that she narrate the events of her life up to the present moment, the book swelled to more than a thousand pages, coming out in two volumes for $7-50, a price greater than Goldman had originally agreed upon and one, she feared, that would place the book beyond the buying power of many readers in the Depression economy of 1931. Goldman considered her work to have been a failure because of the disappointing sales. But in fact, judged by library demands, the book was read widely, passed from hand to hand.
Disappointments from the publication aside, Goldman was soon distracted by the tumultuous turn of European politics. In 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor in Germany, and with him commenced the fateful challenge of fascism to democracy that would lead to World War II. Emma Goldman had always been granted dubious welcome in the countries she visited or in which she tentatively resided, her visits often preceded by clandestine warnings from the United States government that she should be considered a grave risk to security. But now with Nazism insurgent in Germany, she was subject to real threats and expulsion when she visited there. “The whole world is a prison and most people have turned into jailors,” she wrote to a friend (Falk 400). In Berlin, thugs on the street threatened her with the fate of the murdered revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. Holland, fearful of antagonizing its near neighbor, had permitted her entry under condition she not speak