Living My Life - Emma Goldman [30]
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A Note on the Text
Emma Goldman was concerned that the length of her autobiography placed it beyond the reach of the pocketbooks of most readers during the Depression year of 1931. She would have been pleased by an abridgment of her original two-volume, one-thousand-page work if a wider audience of readers became acquainted with her life’s story. In shaping a condensation as faithful as possible in tone and substance to Goldman’s original, this editor has been careful to retain its basic architecture: her foundational years in Russia, which laid the basis, she believed, for her lifelong crusade against sexual repression and political tyranny; her awakening to the political ideal of anarchism in her early youth, inseparable from her romantic friendship with Alexander Berkman, with whom she planned the assassination of the steel baron Henry Clay Frick; the accounts of her trials and imprisonments; her passionate relationship with her longtime lover Ben Reitman; her political work against the draft during World War I, leading to her deportation, to her travels in the Soviet Union, and to her exile in Europe. In its condensation this abridgment has also endeavored to retain as much as possible Goldman’s kaleidoscopic commentary as she traveled as a lecturer for anarchism, appraising the liberal reformers, Marxist and Leninist revolutionaries, and free-love advocates who were sometimes political allies. When the interests of a condensed text demanded exclusions, every attempt was made to confine omissions to redundancies in narrative or to commentary on meetings with political comrades no longer familiar to contemporary readers. While some color and flavor of Goldman’s tumultuous life are unfortunately lost in the omissions, great care has been taken to render the abridgment as true as possible to the shape and spirit of the original work.
In Appreciation
Suggestions that I write my memoirs came to me when I had barely begun to live, and continued all through the years. But I never paid heed to the proposal. I was living my life intensely—what need to write about it? Another reason for my reluctance was the conviction I entertained that one should write about one’s life only when one had ceased to stand in the very torrent of it. “When one has reached a good philosophic age,” I used to tell my friends, “capable of viewing the tragedies and comedies of life impersonally and detachedly—particularly one’s own life—one is likely to create an autobiography worth while.” Still feeling adolescently young in spite of advancing years, I did not consider myself competent to undertake such a task. Moreover, I always lacked the necessary leisure