Notes on Emma Goldman ("E.G.")

by Karen Ruoff Kramer

Emma Goldman (1869-1940), or "E.G." as she called herself, was a fighter for and against a great many things—for free speech, against tyranny; for free love, against Puritanical morality; for birth control, against conscription; for anarchism, against plutocracy and oligarchy. She was Jewish & atheist; Russian & American; feminist, yet often in love with men: with her contemporary, Sasha (Alexander) Berkman, the communist anarchist whom she stood by for 50 years; with his cousin, the artist Modest Stein, called "Fedya"; with her spiritual mentor & father-figure, Johann Most, the German immigrant anarchist, journalist / orator; with the Austrian Ed Brady, who would have liked to make her a wife and mother—his; and with Dr. Ben L. Reitman, ten years younger than she and self-styled "King of the Hoboes." Emma Goldman had always been a spontaneous, perseverant, rebellious Woman. Shortly after her 1885-86 emigration to the United States, where she worked as a seamstress in a sweatshop, she experienced the Haymarket Trial. This event was, as Emma herself put it, her political "birth." Emma Goldman was nowhere—and thus in a certain sense everywhere—at home; born in Russia, she attended a German school in Königsberg for a few years, when she was thrown out of school for disobedience and poor "deportment." About to be forced to marry at age fifteen, she emigrated to the U.S. where, over 30 years, she would be arrested, again and again. Her crime: an open plea in "the land of the free" for complete personal liberty, which she found best described by the word "anarchism.

Our musical portrait, which draws extensively from her actual words, images and recorded thoughts, is set in St. Tropez, summer of 1933. Emma, who has just turned 64, is trying to obtain permission to visit the USA for a few months, to see her friends, to state her opinions publicly, which, as before, do not blend in well with the scenery. She is old and alone, homesick for the homeland which keeps her at a distance. She needs a visa, and does that which she had never in her life been willing to do: submit herself to bureaucracy. Sitting at her desk, she tries desperately to fit her turbulent life into the tight application form.

Paper is patient; Emma Goldman is not.