Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman — activist / anarchist with roots in the Russian Empire

Emma Goldman was born on 27 June 1869 in Kovno, in the Kovno Governorate of the Russian Empire, now Kaunas in Lithuania, into an Orthodox Jewish family. Her mother, Taube Bienowitch, had two daughters, Helena and Lena, from an earlier marriage; Emma's brothers were Louis, who died at six, Herman and Moishe.

She grew up in Kovno, in the village of Papile, in Königsberg in East Prussia and, from 1881, in St Petersburg, where her father opened a series of shops, none of them successful. She had little formal schooling, read widely, worked in a factory, and in St Petersburg came into contact with a circle of radical students.

At sixteen she left Russia with her half-sister Helena; they arrived at Castle Garden in New York on 29 December 1885 and went on to Rochester, where an elder sister lived and where Emma worked as a seamstress in a clothing factory. Her parents and brothers followed. In 1889 she moved to New York City, where she met Johann Most, editor of an anarchist paper, and Alexander Berkman, who became her lifelong associate. In 1893 she was sentenced to a year on Blackwell's Island for inciting a riot with a speech to unemployed workers, and on her release began lecture tours in the United States and Europe.

In 1906 she founded the monthly Mother Earth, which she published until it was closed in 1917; her books of this period include Anarchism and Other Essays (1910) and The Social Significance of the Modern Drama (1914). In 1917 she and Berkman were sentenced to two years in prison for obstructing the draft. On their release in 1919 she was declared a subversive alien, and in December 1919 she, Berkman and 247 others were deported to Soviet Russia.

She remained in Russia until 1921 and described the period in My Disillusionment in Russia (1923) and My Further Disillusionment in Russia (1924). She then lived and lectured in several countries, published her autobiography, Living My Life, in 1931, and lived in Toronto at intervals from 1926. She died in Toronto on 14 May 1940, aged seventy, and is buried in Forest Park, Illinois.

Tracing the roots — Kovno, Kovno Governorate (now Kaunas, Lithuania)

Born in Kovno, in the Kovno Governorate of the Russian Empire, in 1869, she grew up in Kovno, Königsberg and St Petersburg and emigrated to New York at sixteen in 1885. In 1919 she was deported from the United States to Soviet Russia, which she left in 1921.

Historical context

Russian Empire · c. 1721–1917

Kovno, Kovno Governorate (now Kaunas, Lithuania). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.

Map: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)

A career defined by ambition