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This tale of friends, lovers and fighters for political change has epic sweep, says Robin Feuer Miller.
Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman
By Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich
Harvard University Press
528pp, Pounds 25.95
ISBN 9780674065987 and 9780674067677 (e-book)
Published 29 November 2012
This riveting book has a backstory that dovetails intriguingly with its narrative. The late historian Paul Avrich asked his daughter Karen to complete his project on the lifelong love and friendship between Emma Goldman and Alexander (Sasha) Berkman, who served 14 years in a Pennsylvania prison for his attempt in 1892 to assassinate Henry Clay Frick, the ruthless industrialist and art collector. To some extent, all scholarly writing is infused with the autobiographical and the deeply personal. For six years after her father's death Karen retraced his steps, working with the materials he had gathered, observing that "It was a curious, and curiously fulfilling, way for me to experience my father's life work after his death". A grieving child can find solace in editing, reshaping and reading a parent's words. Think of Mary Shelley, the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, sitting on her mother's grave while reading her works. However isolated we feel, we live in continuing dialogue with those with whom we are closest, whether they are living or dead. The resulting palimpsest of these multiple conversations forms the fabric of each individual human life.
Such is the tender frame for the dual biography - the entwined stories - of the perpetrator of the "first terrorist act in America" and the eloquent woman radical, both Russian-born immigrants who arrived in the US as teenagers and who were deported to Russia in 1919 after the Russian Revolution. Berkman, an anarchist to the core, would remain a man without a country whereas Goldman became increasingly passionate about the US and even after her deportation considered it home.
Sasha and Emma joins a number of other recent dual biographies, including those on Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Leo and Sophia Tolstoy, Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Bill and Hillary Clinton. It is compelling to read about one life as counterpoint, irritant and inspiration to another, and to trace the meanderings of love and...