into biology at the University of Toronto. With the money Bessie had helped earn by working in the factory, our family scraped together enough to pay for Lil’s tuition.
Irv Charney graduated as a pharmacist the next May, and in August he married Bessie, moving her out of our parents’ place on St. Patrick Street and in with him in a rented flat above a dry goods shop on Spadina Avenue. Irv went to work for Mr. Rothbart, and being a good provider now, chipped in to help pay for Lil’s tuition. The decision was clear: Bessie would quit her job at the factory. We didn’t know then what a mistake that would be, how that decision was another switch on the tracks, diverting our lives to a course we couldn’t reverse.
Lil took her studies seriously, but if there was a choice between school books and politics, activism took priority. All those years since we’d heard Emma speak, Lil had been learning about anarchism, going to meetings, making new friends who shared her political leanings. Furthermore, she’d devoured everything there was to know about Emma herself, read everything she could get her hands on.
In December of ’33, Emma swept back into Toronto with almost fifty years of hardship and social struggle carved into the lines on her face, and I thought Lil would explode from excitement. Emma wasn’t just visiting Toronto, she was moving here. Since Lil considered Toronto a dreary backwater town, she was amazed that someone with Emma’s past, someone who’d travelled to all the major cities in North America and Europe, would choose to live here. Born in Lithuania in 1869, Emma immigrated as a teenager, with her family, to Rochester, New York. She married young but left her first husband because he was impotent, and moved to New York City, where she worked in a garment factory, became active politically with local anarchists, and quickly distinguished herself. After training as a nurse in Austria, she returned to New York and worked with the residents of the Lower East Side, even helping women to seek safe abortions. She was a masterful organizer, a keen thinker, and a clear and declarative writer, but she was best known, and most hated, for her public speaking.
When I learned about Emma’s life, I felt an odd kinship with her that she would surely never have understood. I realized that she too had discovered how speech was a knife cutting both ways. It could draw people in, move their souls, but then, depending on what you said or how you spoke, fickly, it could provoke terrible retribution or crushing exclusion. Of course, Emma was more in control of when that happened than I ever was. She mastered the English language, which I believe was her sixth, after Lithuanian, Yiddish, Russian, German, and French, and she spoke it with barely any accent. The world knew Emma because she wove her words into unforgettable, sometimes shocking tapestries, and people were afraid of their powerful message.
She was ahead of her time and she paid for it. Hounded and imprisoned several times by the American government for her unorthodox views, she was eventually tried and deported to Russia in 1917, just after the October Revolution. There, she met with Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders, and quickly became disenchanted with the authoritarianism of the new Russian leadership. Before long, she denounced the Bolsheviks, left Russia, and took up residence in England and France, with numerous lengthy stays in other countries, including Canada.
Essentially, from 1926 to 1940, she moved back and forth several times between Toronto and the South of France, with a few years in London somewhere in the middle. After my family heard her speak in ’26, she went to St-Tropez, then a sleepy village of artists and fishermen on the Mediterranean. It was cheaper to live there, and she rented a cottage found for her by patron of the arts and socialite Peggy Guggenheim. The next year, Guggenheim gave her the money to purchase it. Emma named her little sanctuary hopefully. She called it Bon Esprit—Good Spirits—and she installed herself to write her autobiography, Living My Life, which was published in 1931.
Lil read Living My Life cover to cover, all one thousand pages of it. Captivated by Emma when she’d heard her speak on Ibsen’s The Doll House, Lil had set about to devour every idea that Emma had put to print. The most compelling to Lil was the call to critical thought. While the communists were busy talking about the bonds of capitalism, Emma was more concerned with the bonds of the human mind. She decried the shackles that convention and uncritical thinking can place on a person, communist, capitalist, anyone. Her experience with the Bolsheviks in Russia had confirmed to her that even communists could become tyrants and that even if the means of production had been changed, the proletariat could be duped if they didn’t first free their minds.
EMMA HERALDED HER ARRIVAL in Toronto by launching a speaking tour at Hygeia Hall. I remember Lil’s face brightening when she read the news—it meant not only that she might get to meet her idol but also that Rupert MacNabb’s not-so-secret efforts to thwart the tour hadn’t fully succeeded. MacNabb, a wealthy industrialist, had somehow discovered that Emma’s comrades were scouting locations and was determined to erect as many roadblocks as he could. He called potential venues and raised the spectre of bad publicity from riots and police raids, urging them to turn Emma away. His connections and influence on the editorial board of both the Mail and Empire and the Globe ensured those newspapers ignored her visit, but he failed with the Daily Star, which wrote a favourable editorial a few days after the first lecture. And, though he couldn’t get the tour cancelled, MacNabb caused just enough frustration that he inspired a lust for payback in many people. Most did nothing about it, but it drove Lil to actions we’d later regret.
MacNabb’s opposition to Emma wasn’t personal in nature. She’d never targeted him either publicly or privately; he merely detested her for what she espoused. Lil said that unlike the general public, MacNabb probably knew that anarchism wasn’t about people setting off bombs, or mobs running wild and foaming at the mouth. That it didn’t mean looting and fornicating in public. He knew that while anarchists criticized government, they didn’t preach chaos. Lil suspected that MacNabb had actually read Emma’s ideas and that what bothered him most was her belief that we should routinely question those with power and influence. Unlike the general public, MacNabb actually had power and influence.
Nonetheless, Emma wasn’t as concerned with him as her supporters were. To her, MacNabb was a gadfly that she brushed away with a wave of the hand. Her mind was always on the bigger picture, overseas or south of the border, or on her own writing. She let others take care of the details while she prepared for her lecture.
On the opening night of the tour, my parents had another commitment, so Lil decided to go with friends. When she asked if I wanted to join, I agreed, but half-heartedly. I had a reputation to maintain as a surly seventeen-year-old, but I was secretly intrigued by Emma’s notoriety and also simply looking for something to do on a Monday night in January. In the summer, I might’ve gone out to hang around in the park smoking, but in the winter, there weren’t many places to congregate and do anything that I considered fun. My parents often suggested I have friends over, but that was out of the question. I didn’t have friends, or not the kind you’d invite home, anyway. I couldn’t imagine the guys I knew, who were this close to thugs, sitting on our living room couch while Ma served tea and Pop interrogated them. What an unmitigated disaster that would’ve been.
I went that night with Lil and her classmates. Emma’s speech was “Germany’s Tragedy and the Forces That Brought It About.” For the rise of Hitler, she blamed the heavy industrialists and the landed gentry, the Social Democrats who didn’t dare touch them, and the Communists who spent more time attacking the Social Democrats than the Hitlerites. When someone asked if the German Evangelical Church should be praised for its stand against tyranny, she lamented that they had stood by while the Jews were persecuted and only began to speak out when they were targeted themselves.
After the speech, a crowd gathered around the podium, and Lil announced that she wanted to go to the front to see if she could meet Emma. Her friends declared that she’d never get near her and that they didn’t want to wait. I felt the same way but had to hang around because she was my sister. As Lil pushed her way forward, her copy of Emma’s autobiography clutched in a sweaty palm, I followed a few steps behind. I stood on the outskirts of the gathering and craned my neck to see through. Lil hung back for a while, but then she saw an opening and shoved her way to the front.
I saw her stick out her hand. “I’m so pleased to meet you, Miss Goldman, I’ve been a very big fan of your