Living My Life - Emma Goldman [95]
The day of my arrival offered no chance for communion with Helena. In the evening, when the children were asleep and the office closed, we could talk. She would not pry into my life; what I told her she accepted with understanding and affection. She herself spoke mostly about the children, hers and Lena’s, and of the hard life of our parents. I knew well enough her reasons for constantly dwelling on the difficulties of our father. She strove to bring me closer to him and to help to a better understanding. She had suffered greatly because of our mutual antagonism, which in me had developed into hatred. She had been horrified at the message I had sent her three years previously when she had notified me that Father was near Death’s door. He had undergone a dangerous operation on his throat, and Helena had called me to his bedside. “He should have died long ago,” I had wired back. Since then she had tried repeatedly to change my attitude towards the man whose harshness had marred the childhood of all of us.
The memory of our sad past had made Helena more kind and generous. It was her beautiful spirit and my own development that gradually healed me of the bitterness I bore my father. I came to understand that it is ignorance rather than cruelty that makes parents do so many dreadful things to their helpless children. During my short stay in Rochester in 1894, I had seen my father for the first time in five years. I still felt estranged, but no longer so hostile. On that visit I found Father physically broken, a mere shadow of his former strong and energetic self. His condition was constantly growing worse. Ten hours’ work in the shop on dry food were destructive to his weakened and nervous state of health, aggravated by the taunts and indignities he had to endure. He was the only Jew, a man of nearly fifty, a foreigner not familiar with the language of the country. Most of the youngsters who worked with him were of foreign parents, but they had acquired the worst American traits without any of the fine qualities. They were crude, coarse, and heartless. They throve on the pranks and tricks they played on the “sheeny.” Repeatedly they had so molested and harassed him as to cause him to faint. He would be brought home, only to compel himself to go back the next day. He could not afford to lose the job that paid him ten dollars a week.
The sight of Father so ill and worn softened the last vestige of my animosity towards him. I began to regard him as one of the mass of the exploited and enslaved for whom I was living and working.
In our talks Helena had always argued that Father’s violence in his youth had been due to his exceptional energy, which found no adequate outlet in such a small place as Popelan. He had been ambitious for himself and his family, dreaming of the large city and the big things he could do there. The peasants eked out a poor existence on their land; but most of the Jews, with practically every profession closed to them, lived upon the peasants. Father was too honest for such methods, and his pride smarted under daily indignities from the officials he had to deal with. The failure of his life, the lack of opportunity to put his abilities to good use, had embittered him and made him ill-natured and hard towards his own. [ ... ]
I saw a great deal of my sister Lena and her family on this visit. [ ... ] The only joy Lena had was her children. The most radiant of the four was little Stella, who had always been my sunbeam in grey Rochester. [ ... ] “I hate the people who are mean to my Tante Emma,” Stella wrote when she was barely seven. “When I grow up, I will fight for her.”
There was also my brother Yegor. Until the age of fourteen he was, like most American boys, crude and wild. He loved Helena because she had been so devoted to him. I had evidently not so impressed myself on his mind. I was