Living My Life by Emma Goldman

Author:Emma Goldman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781101007358
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-12-30T19:09:32+00:00

CHAPTER XXXVII

May 18, the day of Sasha’s resurrection, remained graven on my heart, although my yearly tours had always prevented my being with him on the anniversary of his release. In a spiritual sense, however, neither space nor time could separate me from Sasha or make me forget the day I had longed and worked for throughout the years of his imprisonment. On May 18 this year a telegram from him found me in Los Angeles. It filled me with great joy, for it brought the news that he had determined to begin his prison memoirs. I had often urged him to write them, believing that if he could re-create his prison life on paper, it might help him to get rid of the phantoms that were making his readjustment to life so difficult. Now he had decided it at last, on Our Day, the day that represented the most significant moment in both our lives. I immediately notified him that I would soon return to relieve him in the Mother Earth office, and that I would devote myself for the rest of the summer to his needs. [ ... ]

Sasha and I went out to the little farm. We loved the beauty and restfulness of the place. He pitched a tent on one of the highest hills, which gave him a gorgeous view over the Hudson. I was occupied in setting the house in order. Meanwhile Sasha began to write.

Notwithstanding the many police raids I had suffered since Sasha had gone to Pittsburgh in 1892, I had managed to rescue some copies of “The Prison Blossoms,” which he had published sub rosa in the penitentiary. Carl Nold, Henry Bauer, and several other friends also had kept copies. They were helpful to Sasha, but they were insignificant in comparison with the memory of what he had lived through in that house of the living dead. All the horrors he had known, the agony of body and soul, the suffering of his fellow-prisoners, all this he had now to dig out from the depths of his being and re-create. The black spectre of fourteen years again began to haunt his waking and sleeping hours.

Day after day he would sit at his desk staring into vacancy, or he would write as if driven by furies. What he had written he often wanted to destroy, and I would wrestle with him to save it, as I had fought through all the years to save him from his grave. Then would come days when Sasha would vanish into the woods to escape human contact, to escape me, and above all to escape himself and the ghosts that had come to life since he had begun to write. I would torment myself to find the right way and the right word with which to soothe his harassed spirit. It was not only because of my affection for him that I took up this struggle each day; it was also because I perceived in the very first chapter of his writing that Sasha was in the birth-throes of a great work.

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