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CHAPTER SIX

ALEXANDER BERKMAN: GENERALLY A STRAIGHT SHOOTER

He was born on November 21, 1870, and his parents, Ossip (Joseph) and Yetta, gave him the name Ovsei (Joshua) Osipovich (also sometimes spelled “Ossipovitch”) Berkman, but he soon adopted the more ethnically Russian-sounding Alexander as his first name. Many people, including , his sometime lover and lifelong friend and revolutionary colleague, called him “Sasha.” Others preferred “Alec,” which Berkman spelled “Aleck,” and he signed some of his letters as “Alex.” Some writers – for example, Koenig (1998, 84) – say that Berkman was born in Russia, but technically, he hailed from Lithuania, then part of the old Russian Empire, which included the other Baltic states and most of Poland. Vilna, the Russian name for Vilnius, was the city of his birth, which is today the capi- tal of the independent post-Soviet nation of Lithuania (Nowlin 1980, 10; Walter 1989, vii). Situated in the Pale, an area in which many Jews in Russian-ruled lands were required to reside, Nowlin (12) notes that Vilna served as a cultural capital for many people of that faith and locale, which was to some extent isolated from people of other beliefs. Although they met as adults in New York City, the similarities between the upbringings of Berkman and Emma Goldman are striking. Goldman was also born in Lithuania, in Kovno (which is now generally known by its Lithuanian name, ), and also to a Jewish family (Drinnon 1976, 3; Wenzer 1996, 5; Wexler 1984, 6, 10). Russian insensitivity to cultural differences and attempts to convert some Jewish residents to Christianity were perhaps responsible for what Wexler (1984, 4) terms an “attitude of revolt” among a number of the Pale’s inhabitants, and this may to some extent account for the unwelcoming posture toward government and authority that Berkman and Goldman manifested throughout their lives. However, despite the parallels, both Wexler (1984, 54) and Reichert (1976, 407) note that Berkman’s upbringing was more affluent and more explicitly Russian. Berkman arrived in New York in 1888, three years after Goldman had emigrated and briefly made her home upstate in Rochester before moving to the big city to escape the influence of her old-fashioned father. The next year, they met for the first time in Manhattan at an East Side

PG3298 PG3298 144 chapter six café called Sachs’ that was frequented by radicals, many of them Jewish (Wenzer 1996, 31; Zimmer 2010, 68). Both of them saw this encounter as a profound moment in their lives. In a letter Emma wrote to Sasha from Toronto on May 2, 1927, she remarked that “All sorts of people have been in my life, but your coming into it August 15th, 1889, at Sach’s [sic] restau- rant, has marked the beginning of a friendship – the stirrings of an affec- tion which has only deepened and strengthened with the years” (Berkman 2005a, 339). Likewise, in jail, Berkman recalled with fondness the moment he first met Emma: The memorable scene of our first meeting, in the little café at Sachs’, projects clearly. The room is chilly in the November dusk, as I return from work and secure my accustomed place. … The door opens, and a young woman enters. Well-knit, with the ruddy vigor of youth, she diffuses an atmosphere of strength and vitality. … Somehow I find myself at her table. Without con- straint, we soon converse like old acquaintances, and I learn that she left her home in Rochester to escape the stifling provincial atmosphere. (Berkman [1912] 1970, 235–236) It might be prudent to regard Berkman and Goldman as a single thinker, so intertwined were their revolutionary lives. Indeed, the eminent histo- rian of , Paul Avrich ([1971] 2005, v, ix), twice describes the two of them as being “the leading figure in the American anarchist move- ment.” Just as in Chapter Three, a discourse on necessitated continual reference to her husband, Albert, there can surely be no telling of the Berkman story without frequent mention of Goldman. Up to now, Emma has received the majority of scholars’ attention. Two lengthy and accomplished academic biographies exist, by Richard Drinnon (1976) and Alice Wexler (1984, 1989), Wexler’s effort containing two volumes, as does Goldman’s autobiography, Living My Life (Goldman [1931] 1970). As far as Berkman is concerned, however, Heider (1994, 18–19) complains that he has “lived for the most part in the shadow of his famous companion Emma Goldman,” and Rosenberg (2003, 18) observes that some followers of the anarchist , who had at one time included Sasha and Emma among their number (see also Ashbaugh 1976, 181–182; Wenzer 1996, 15), referred to Berkman as “Goldman and Co.” Richard Drinnon and Anna Maria Drinnon concur: Of primary importance in his own right, has long merited a full-scale biography. The lack of one leaves a big hole in our understanding of modern radicalism and contributes to the regrettable tendency to see him as a mere adjunct to his more ebullient comrade. (Drinnon and Drinnon 1975a, xxv)

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