Living My Life - Emma Goldman [41]
CHAPTER III
Helen Minkin was away at work. Anna was out of a job just then. She prepared tea, and we sat down to talk. Berkman inquired about my plans for work, for activity in the movement. Would I like to visit the Freiheit office? Could he be of help in any way? He was free to take me about, he said; he had left his job after a fight with the foreman. “A slave-driver,” he commented; “he never dared drive me, but it was my duty to stand up for the others in the shop.” It was rather slack now in the cigar-making trade, he informed us, but as an anarchist he could not stop to consider his own job. Nothing personal mattered. Only the Cause mattered. Fighting injustice and exploitation mattered.
How strong he was, I thought; how wonderful in his revolutionary zeal! Just like our martyred comrades in Chicago.
I had to go to West Forty-second Street to get my sewing-machine out of the baggage-room. Berkman offered to accompany me. He suggested that on our way back we might ride down to Brooklyn Bridge on the Elevated and then walk over to William Street, where the Freiheit office was located.
I asked him whether I could hope to establish myself in New York as a dressmaker. I wanted so much to free myself from the dreadful grind and slavery of the shop. I wanted to have time for reading, and later I hoped to realize my dream of a cooperative shop. “Something like Vera’s venture in What’s to be Done?” I explained.1 “You have read Chernishevsky?” Berkman inquired, in surprise; “surely not in Rochester?” “Surely not,” I replied, laughing; “besides my sister Helena, I found no one there who would read such books. No, not in that dull town. In St. Petersburg.” He looked at me doubtfully. “Chernishevsky was a Nihilist,” he remarked, “and his works are prohibited in Russia. Were you connected with the Nihilists? They are the only ones who could have given you the book.” I felt indignant. How dared he doubt my word! I repeated angrily that I had read the forbidden book and other similar works, such as Turgeniev’s Fathers and Sons, and Obriv (The Precipice) by Gontcharov.2 My sister had got them from students and she let me read them. “I am sorry if I hurt you,” Berkman said in a soft tone. “I did not really doubt your word. I was only surprised to find a girl so young who had read such books.” [ . . . ]
In an old building, up two dark and creaking flights, was the office of the Freiheit. Several men were in the first room setting type. In the next we found Johann Most standing at a high desk, writing. With a side-glance he invited us to sit down. “My damned torturers there are squeezing the blood out of me,” he declared querulously. “Copy, copy, copy! That’s all they know! Ask them to write a line—not they. They are too stupid and too lazy.” A burst of good-natured laughter from the composing-room greeted Most’s outburst. His gruff voice, his twisted jaw, which had so repelled me on my first meeting him, recalled to me the caricatures of Most in the Rochester papers. I could not reconcile the angry man before me with the inspired speaker of the previous evening whose oratory had so carried me away.
Berkman noticed my confused and frightened look. He whispered in Russian not to mind Most, that he was always in such a mood when at work. I got up to inspect the books which covered the shelves from floor to ceiling, row upon row. How few of them I had read, I mused. [ . . . ]
Most approached me. His deep blue eyes looked searchingly into mine. “Well, young lady,” he said, “have you found anything you want to read? Or don’t you read German and English?” The harshness of his voice had changed to a warm, kindly texture. “Not English,” I said, soothed and emboldened by his tone, “German.” He told me I could have any book I wanted. [ ... ] I was deeply touched by the interest of this man in me, a perfect stranger. I explained that New York had lured me because it was the centre of the anarchist movement, and because I had