When she first arrived in New York City on the overnight train from Rochester, Emma Goldman was 20 years old. It was August 15, 1889—a Sunday morning—and after an exhausting day spent wandering the streets of the unfamiliar city, she wound up at Sachs’s café on the Lower East Side, where all the anarchists in the city liked to gather. Within her first hour there, she met Alexander Berkman, who would became the most important person in her life. That same evening, Berkman invited Emma to hear a speech by Johann Most, the editor of the German-language anarchist paper Die Freiheit, and the man who would launch her apprenticeship as a public speaker.
The speed with which Emma Goldman found a home in the communal life of the young would-be revolutionaries milling around lower Manhattan in the 1890s—all immigrants, all speaking Russian or German or Yiddish—was actually unremarkable, given the time and place. Throughout the world, radicalism was exploding, and their counterparts in Europe were gathering in ever-growing numbers in much the same way. Emma and her friends could have been living in Paris or Petersburg, Zurich or Budapest, London or Berlin; citizenship had no meaning for them. Wherever they landed, they ate, drank and slept revolution. The jobs they held—driving trucks, sewing clothes, baking bread—were “day jobs” in every sense of the phrase. Revolution was who they were and what they did.
When America entered the First World War in 1917, it soon became illegal to speak against it; Emma and Berkman did nothing but. After three decades in the United States, the pair were brought to trial on charges of sedition, sent to prison for two years and then deported to the Soviet Union. Grief-stricken as she was at her expulsion from the United States, the only country she had ever loved, Emma was intensely excited at the thought of joining the Russian Revolution, which she considered an event destined to recover humankind’s lost nobility. Within the year, however, both she and Berkman were painfully disillusioned. Twenty-three months after their arrival, they left the Soviet Union. For Emma, exposing the revolution’s betrayal at the hands of the Bolsheviks would become a lifelong obsession—one that ultimately dismayed friends and foes alike.
In the United States, every agency that had a stake in their never setting foot in America again—the immigration service, the Justice Department, even the military—seemed to become unhinged upon learning that Emma and Berkman were no longer in the USSR. J. Edgar Hoover himself alerted every intelligence agency in Europe to the danger of giving these world-famous terrorists asylum, and he had their photographs sent to officials at every border and port of entry throughout the West.