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By Root 2371 0

had taken me off my guard. The whole world had repudiated the monstrous possibility that Sacco and Vanzetti would be denied a new trial or that the sentence of death would be carried out. I had been influenced by it and had done little to help stay the hangman’s hand reaching out for these two beautiful lives. Only after I had come to Canada did I fully realize my mistake. Talking seemed inconsequential and futile. Yet it was all I could do to call attention to the black deed about to be committed across the border, after the seven years’ purgatory suffered by the two persecuted men. Alas, my feeble voice, like that of millions, cried in vain. America remained deaf.

My comrades organized a memorial meeting. I consented to speak, though I knew that no pæan of their valour and nobility could raise them to greater glory in the eyes of posterity than Vanzetti’s own beautiful song or Sacco’s last simple and heroic words. [ ... ]

In January 1928 I delivered my final talk in a series of twenty, embracing various problems of our time. The last evening, on which I discussed Ben Lindsey’s Companionate Marriage, brought out an audience equalling the total attendance of four other meetings. I was assured that I had performed a feat no public speaker had ever attempted in Toronto before. I had come as a stranger without funds or a manager. Within a year I had created enough interest to secure audiences twice a week for eight months. [ ... ]

The call to arms for “E.G.’s Life” had not brought battalions to the fore, Van ruefully reported; no more than a thousand dollars had come in, though he had bombarded everyone within reach. His face lit up when he learned that the comrades of the Freie Arbeiter Stimme had, through the efforts of its editor, Joseph Cohen, B. Axler, and Sarah Gruber, raised nearly as much, and that Toronto and Montreal had not lagged behind. [ ... ] In fifteen months I had raised over thirteen hundred dollars for the political fund, some money for the fight to rescue Sacco and Vanzetti and for similar causes. I had paid my debts, amounting to twelve hundred dollars, and I had enough left to cover my return passage, aside from the new fund for my autobiography.

I was returning to France, to lovely Saint-Tropez and my enchanting little cottage to write my life. My life—I had lived in its heights and its depths, in bitter sorrow and ecstatic joy, in black despair and fervent hope. I had drunk the cup to the last drop. I had lived my life. Would I had the gift to paint the life I had lived!

Notes

CHAPTER I

1 Johann Most (1846-1906): prominent German social democrat legislator, became American anarchist lecturer and publisher.

2 Hillel Solotaroff (1865-1921): Russian-born physician and anarchist lecturer and writer.

3 Alexander “Sasha” Berkman (1870-1936): Russian-born anarchist, publisher, and writer. Berkman had been in the United States for two years when he met Goldman in New York.

4 My sister Lena: Goldman’s half-sister Lena, two years older than she, had preceded her to America.

CHAPTER II

1 Stella Comyn (Cominsky) Ballantyne (1886-1961): daughter of EG’s older half-sister Lena; remained close to EG throughout her lifetime.

CHAPTER III

1 Vera’s venture in What’s [sic] to Be Done?: The widely influential novel What Is to Be Done? was published by the Russian intellectual Nikolai Chernyshevsky in 1863. His reform-minded, gentry-born heroine refuses the traditional safeguards of conventional marriage in order to work, study, and organize cooperative enterprises.

2 Turgeniev’s Fathers and Sons, and Obriv (The Precipice): Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818- 1883) published Fathers and Sons in 1862, a love story embedded in timely, social issues. Ivan Alexandrovich Gontcharov (1812-1891) published The Precipice in 1869.

3 Modest “Fedya” Stein (1871-1958) was Alexander Berkman’s cousin. An artist and later a successful illustrator, Stein was a major financial supporter of EG and Berkman in their exile.

4 Sophia Perovskaya (1853-1881) and Andrei Zhelyabov (1850-1881): Russian revolutionary