Emma Goldman: An Exceedingly Dangerous Woman Page #8

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must have been

in her life the most devastating

personal loss she ever had

I don't think that

I know that

Two months after

Berkman's death

friends came to see Goldman

in St. Tropez

They found her distraught

even, they thought

on the verge of a nervous breakdown

One friend saw her walking alone

in the garden at Bon Esprit

calling out softly

"Sasha, where are you?"

With the loss of

Sasha Berkman

Goldman wrote that the

largest part of her life

had followed him

to his grave

During two decades

of exile

she returned

to the United States only once

following the publication of her

thousand-page autobiography

Throughout her visit

the 64-year-old activist

was dogged by the F.B.I

Even so, she lamented

at the end of her stay

she would have

returned to America

if she'd had

the choice

Emma Goldman spent the last few months

of her life in Canada

On February 17th

she'd been sitting

with two friends

laughing and talking

playing bridge

Suddenly

she collapsed in her chair

She suffers a stroke

An ambulance is called

friends arrive

And one of them

Arne Thorn

remembers her

on a stretcher being taken out

And the only gesture she could manage

was to pull her skirt down

over her knee

To be silenced and

to lay there unable to speak

And no one else could

do that to her

Not a government in the world

could do that to her

Not a government

in the world could

nd she must lay there

I think it's unbearably sad

On May 14th

Emma Goldman died

Denied entry into the United States

for so many years

she was finally permitted, in death

to cross the border

She was buried in

Chicago's Waldheim Cemetery

near the graves

of the Haymarket martyrs

She raised people's

consciousness

And she

transformed people's thinking

She made them questions

Question their own lives

and their political assumptions

and she spoke back

to power

Emma Goldman

is recognizable

to me

because

of the attitude

the chutzpah

the sense of humor

the energy

which is always boundless

And also her soulfulness

which is so very Russian

Her ability to dive into great emotion

but also to emerge out of them

There's something comforting

about this persona

there's something reliable

about Emma Goldman

It's hard to imagine

how the human heart

can sustain

that level of passion

And intense concentration

on the possibility of change

that becomes

their heartbeat

we're so sort of stuck

in the gray middle

And you read her and

she really lived her life on fire

nd there's something

utterly thrilling about that

If we look everything

that she did

The fight for

free speech

the fight for women

to have control over their bodies

the fight...the fight against

state intrusion in our life

the fight against totalitarianism

becoming the nettle of our conscience

she didn't do it for wealth

she didn't do it for money

she didn't do it for

personal gain

She did it

for all of us

And she's awkward, and she's ornery

and she's a pain

Great!

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