Читать книгу Storm in My Heart - Helene Minkin - Страница 6

We here begin to print the memoir of a woman who, for thirteen years, was married to a remarkable man, and in those thirteen years and the several years leading up to it, was closely connected to a group of people who engaged in some remarkable activity and led a strangely intimate life amongst themselves.2 During those years, they stirred up the world. Europe and America were in turmoil because of them. Emperors and kings fell by the hands of those who belonged to this movement. Then they murdered the empress of Austria.3 Here in America one of their men killed President McKinley.4 One member of the group, a young Jewish man from Kovno by the name of Alexander Berkman, shot at Frick, one of the biggest millionaires in America and the king of the steel industry.5 In her memoir, Emma Goldman, one of the central figures of this group, wrote in detail about its members and the life of free love they led.

Emma Goldman’s memoirs were published in the Forverts a year ago, and caused a striking sensation. The book was published in English, and all over America people wrote and spoke about it.6 Emma Goldman herself was an exceptional woman, and her life was full of exceptional incidents. She spent the best years of her life in America. During the war, the government sent her and her long-time friend, Alexander Berkman, out of the country for their anti-war protests.

The group about which we speak here are anarchists. At that time, anarchists around the world had two leaders: the famous Russian revolutionary, Prince Peter Kropotkin, and the German, Johann Most. Kropotkin was the more theoretical leader. The movement as a whole preached violence, bombing, gun-terror, dynamite, and poison. Kropotkin acknowledged this in a kind of theoretical way. The active promoter of these methods was Johann Most. He was one of the most extraordinary speakers in the world, and his speeches flickered and burned with gunpowder and dynamite. In Germany, Austria, and England, he would go from one jail to another. When the Russian revolutionaries assassinated Alexander II in 1881, he, Johann Most, in his newspaper Freiheit, which was then published in London, welcomed the deed and urged people to do the same thing to other crowns.7 Consequently, Most was sentenced to hard labor in an English prison. When his term there ended, he came to America and undertook the same activities, continually calling the worker to rise up and attack capitalists with pistols and bombs. Here, too, he went from one jail to another. Once, it actually happened that he was released from prison—after a year’s time—and on the evening of that very day he was again arrested for a speech he had given.

For several years in New York, Most was surrounded by a group of German anarchists and a few Jewish adherents. In the course of time, when German immigration had almost ceased, the number of German members in his group became fewer and fewer and the movement passed almost entirely into Jewish hands.

The Jewish anarchist circles of the East Side played a major role at that time. The most prominent figures were Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Saul Yanovksy, and Johann Most, who was the leader of them all and also the eldest of the group. As a specific Jewish section within the anarchist movement, Jews published Fraye Arbeter Shtime, of which the aforementioned Yanovsky was the editor.8 Most didn’t have much to do with the Fraye Arbeter Shtime since he was a Christian and didn’t know Yiddish.9 He published his German newspaper Freiheit here.

Of the love affairs that occurred during those years between Johann Most, Emma Goldman, and Alexander Berkman, Goldman has already written in detail. Among others, she mentioned two sisters, Helene and Anna Minkin, who were members of this circle.10 The intimate relations between Emma Goldman and Johann Most lasted several years. Later, an argument occurred between them and their love changed into intense hatred. The younger of the two Minkin sisters then became Most’s lover. He lived with her for thirteen years and had two sons.

Most has now been dead for twenty-six years. The articles that we begin publishing here were written by the younger of the two Minkin sisters, Helene, the widow of Johann Most. Some of the things that Emma Goldman writes about in her memoirs, Mrs. Most describes as well, but she relates the same history in her own manner and from her perspective. Her goal, however, is not to polemicize. The main point of her memoirs is to relate various things from her personal life with Most and her experiences in the aforementioned group: her personal observations and so forth.

She relates many interesting things, and everything that she says gives an impression of striking sincerity and simplicity. It’s obvious this is a person who speaks from her whole heart, and that the author is without artifice, a person who is absolutely incapable of embellishment, self-promotion, of taking her own part and tearing down an enemy. Her lines speak the whole truth and nothing but the truth. And it is an unflinching and an interesting truth.

Mrs. Most’s marriage to Most had a special, truly unusual quality. A young woman, not yet nineteen years old, was eager to live with an older man—twenty-eight years older—a man who could have been her father even if she would have been much older. He was certainly no great physical specimen: an older, graying man with a misshapen face. What kind of enthusiasm for marriage was this? This is an interesting question, and the reader will find an answer to it in Mrs. Most’s own memoirs.

One additional note: Johann Most, this frequently imprisoned volcano of dynamite and bombs, was a totally different man in his family life with this younger woman. He practiced and lived free love, but once together with this Jewish woman from Bialystok, he became a totally different person.11 He became a gentle family man to his wife and a tender father to his children. Whenever he was in jail, he maintained the spirit of this family life in his heart. He always had a photo of his two sons in his jail cell.12 The brothers hung by a nail to the wall. Here is the photo of his two sons when they were still children, and the nail-marks are on the photograph.

From one Most there are now two: the passionate, fiery, plotting Most and the Most of his family nest. As we have already told the reader on another occasion, Mrs. Most keeps the ashes from her dead husband Johann Most in a little box. The box is always beside her on a table. She never parts from it. We now give the floor to Mrs. Most.