Living My Life - Emma Goldman [26]
In May 1940, Emma Goldman died in Canada, where she had gone to settle and to carry on her work now for Spanish refugees. She died from the aftereffects of a stroke she’d suffered some months earlier, her last words to card-playing friends who waited with her for a libertarian meeting to begin, “God damn it, why did you lead that?” (Falk 513). She was bellicose and vigorous to the end, no one having sensed that her health was badly declining. The last few months she had exhausted herself working on behalf of an Italian anarchist in Canada at risk of deportation to Mussolini’s Italy. As her friends and family gathered at her deathbed, disaster was overtaking Europe.
In the last two years of Goldman’s life, Adolf Hitler captured Warsaw, marched into Paris, and began his campaign of genocide against European Jewry. The Russian Jew Emma Goldman was no pacifist, but she responded to anti-Nazi militarism by adhering to positions on warring capitalist states that she had taken in opposition to World War I. “Much as I loathe Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and Franco,” she wrote, “I would not support a war against them and for the democracies which, in the last analysis, are only Fascist in disguise. If I have supported civil war in Spain, it was only because the social revolution was at stake” (Wexler, Emma Goldman in Exile, 236).
Unlike other Jewish anarchist immigrants in Canada and the United States who were outspoken for intervention against German fascism, Goldman believed that Jewish emancipation depended on their joining an international movement like anarchism. Although she supported Jewish rights for asylum in Palestine or in any other country, as she would other refugees, and condemned Britain’s turning away the ship St. Louis filled with desperate Jewish refugees from Nazism, she rejected Jewish nationalism. As an anarchist, she placed no more faith in the goodness of a Jewish state than in any other, since all governments led to repression.
In 1939 and 1940, Emma Goldman was not alone in woefully misunderstanding the nature of Hitler’s war against the Jews, nor alone in failing to predict the scale of the catastrophe about to descend on those still trapped within the charnel house that Europe had become. Like others, she may have assumed Hitler’s anti-Semitism, like Russian pogroms, would fall short of the cataclysmic annihilation planned. Then again, in her mind Europe was already the graveyard of Spanish anarchists, heroes left to perish because of European betrayal or indifference. In 1939 and 1940, these were the deaths she regretted and theirs the wrong she wished to memorialize. Like the complex political realities in Spain that required her to evaluate the worthiness of anarchist principles against the exigencies of immediate conditions, the fateful years at the close of Goldman’s life required a balancing of principles she did not live to undertake. But in 1940, she would not differentiate among the faces of her enemy, nor believe in such distinctions among them that might excuse more violence.
She was laid to rest at Waldheim Cemetery in Chicago, near the graves of the Haymarket martyrs whose deaths had called her into the service of anarchism when she was young. Denied residence for two decades while she was alive, Emma Goldman’s body was brought back to the United States for burial with a Spanish anarchist banner draping her coffin.
8. THE LEGACY OF EMMA GOLDMAN
When Emma Goldman’s friends attended her bedside as she lay dying, they were most struck by her silence. The cerebral hemorrhage had accomplished what no one had been able to do hitherto—Emma Goldman was unable to speak. Speech had been her most formidable political asset. Indeed, as Alexander Berkman had noted, it was “the platform, not the pen” that was her forte (Nowhere at Home, 27). Her oratory was passionate, electric, accusatory, sarcastic, humorous—and delivered with a bulldog determination, all the more remarkable because