Old Red

LIVING MY LIFE--Emma Goldman-- Knopf (2 vols: $7.50).

Everybody admires a fighter who has heart. Now that Emma Goldman's fighting Red career is finished, you may even find it possible to add a kind of warmth to your disapproving admiration of her. That is, after you have read her own story of her stormy life. To look at her as she appears now, with that hard, defiant old face, that grim and challenging eye, it is easy to see how hateful, what a nuisance society found her; you would never guess how many lovers she has had, how many friends.

Emma Goldman, good anarchist, has always been against all governments. In a long and rebellious life she has missed few protestant chances. For years her friends have urged her to write her autobiography, but Emma had too many other jobs on hand. At last, an old (62), disillusioned woman, she has filled two fat volumes, nearly 1.000 pages, with her bitter-sweet reminiscences.

She has tasted wormwood oftener than honey. Like many a fellow radical she was born a Russian Jewess, arrived in the U. S. a simple young immigrant. Her family settled in Rochester, N. Y. and Emma went to work like anybody else. The execution of the Chicago anarchists (1887) turned Emma Goldman's stomach, transformed her from a potential to an actual Red. Meantime she had married (at 18) one Jacob Kershner, whom she quickly discovered was impotent. Emma left him, her family and respectability, went to Manhattan to plunge into anarchism and free love. She made rapid headway in both.

In reeking restaurants, in crowded tenement rooms she listened to the voices of revolution. Soon she joined in. She made many friends. Johann Most, fiery anarchist editor, became her idol. She had lovers--Alexander Berkman, her lifelong comrade and "Fedya." She began to study labor history and improve her English. She made speeches. It was not long before radicals all over the U. S. knew Emma Goldman; the police knew her too.

When trouble broke out in 1892 in Homestead, Pa., between Carnegie Steel Co. and its employes, Emma Goldman and Berkman felt they ought to go out there and fight. But Berkman had a better idea: he would shoot the capitalist-in-charge, Henry Clay Frick. With Emma's blessing he went to Pittsburgh, shot Mr. Frick three times, but unsuccessfully, and went to jail for 14 years. His attempt canonized Berkman in Emma's eyes, set an untarnishable halo round his head. When her former guide & friend Johann Most made slighting remarks about Berkman, Emma horsewhipped him publicly. Her fiery spirit was housed in a fiery body: in love she took her only vacations from the Cause. After Berkman came Ed Brady, Hippolyte Havel, Ben Reitman. She was very willing to take Berkman back when his prison term was over but somehow he did not want to; from then on they were just Platonic.

Though she herself was never actually connected with bombs & bloodshed, Emma Goldman's burgeoning reputation as a fomenter of trouble led the police into many an attempt to pin something on her. When Czolgosz shot President McKinley, Emma was thought to have inspired him, was reluctantly released when no proofs of complicity could be found. But she had her share of prison. As she became famous she began to get fanmail. Specimen: "You damn bitch of an anarchist, I wish I could get at you. I would tear your heart out and feed it to my dog."

No fanatic is notable for a sense of humor, and Emma Goldman had little inclination to laugh, but now & again something roused her to a grim grin. Once when she was lecturing on modern drama, chaperoned by the police "An archist Squad," the sergeant interrupted her, ordered her to stick to her subject.

Said she: "I am sticking to my subject."

"Nothing of the kind!" he yelled. "Your subject is the drama and you're talking about Ibsen!" The police cleared the hall.

The year 1919 saw the biggest anti-Red drive the U. S. has known. Into Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer's net fell Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, 247 others. As undesirable aliens they were ordered deported to Russia.

When the deportees reached Russia, the revolutionary's promised land, their hopes were high. But Emma and Berkman found that an anarchist is even more un happy under Communist dictatorship than under Capitalist democracy. They soon discovered, in spite of Bolshevik protestations, that many an anarchist languished in Soviet prisons, that they themselves were under suspicion. Emma's comments on the state of affairs would bring applause from many a Moscow-fearing tycoon. "People raided, imprisoned, and shot for their ideas! The old and the young held as hostages, every protest gagged, iniquity and favouritism rampant, the best human values betrayed, the very spirit of revolution daily crucified . . . the Bolshevik myth and its principal spook [Lenin] . . . The Cheka [secret police] . . . was nothing more than a gang of cut-throats."

Last straw was the butchery by the Bolsheviks of the revolting soldiers and sailors of Kronstadt. After less than two years in Russia Emma and Berkman were glad to be given their passports, were nevertheless surprised when Latvian police, informed by Cheka, arrested them after they had crossed the border. For the next few years they wandered over Europe, harried by the police, two anarchists without a country. In 1925 Emma achieved the protection of British citizenship by marrying "the old rebel James Colton." Apparently out of a job for good. Emma settled down in France to write her memoirs.

Born to Trouble

JOB: THE STORY OF A SIMPLE MAN-- Joseph Roth--Viking ($2.50).

Man is born to trouble, but he somehow never gets used to it. Mendel Singer, Russian Jew, teacher of the Scriptures in the village of Zuchnow, was a harmless kind of fellow, poor like the rest of his neighbors, but with a good wife, two sons and a daughter. Everything went as well as could be expected for Mendel until his last child, Menuchim, was born--a cripple, practically an idiot. When his mother carried the child to the wonder-working Rabbi he said: "Pain will make him wise, ugliness good, bitterness mild, and sickness strong!" But Menuchim went on being a cripple, practically an idiot.

Then Mendel's sons grew up to military age. Shemariah escaped over the border, went to the U. S., but Jonas was taken for a soldier. Daughter Miriam grew up too, began to go into the wheatfields with Cossacks. Mendel and his wife, married too long, were sick of the sight of each other. One fine day a letter came from Shemariah: he was doing well in the U. S.. would soon send them money to join him. When the time came they left idiot Menuchim behind with friends. They found Shemariah was indeed doing well in the U. S., but Mendel and his wife never got acclimatized; their bowels yearned for Menuchim. They were about to send for him when the War broke out. When the U. S. went in, Shemariah enlisted; the news of his death killed his mother. Miriam, now a nymphomaniac, had to be put in an asylum. Pious Mendel Singer turned at last against his religion, put away his robes and holy books. "People gossiped about him, saying that he went now and then into the Italian section, in order to eat pork and irritate God."

One day when the War was over a famous Russian musician brought his orchestra to the city. Mendel heard his friends talking about it, thought nothing of it until the door opened and in walked the musician, inquiring for one Mendel Singer. It was Menuchim, whom pain had made wise, ugliness good, bitterness mild, and sickness strong. Moreover he was prosperous. His troubles over, Mendel Singer prayed again to God.

The Author. Joseph Roth's father was an Austrian, his mother a Russian Jewess. Because of what he now thinks "a ridiculous ambition" to better himself socially, Joseph went to the University of Vienna, left it after two years to go to War. His knowledge of Russian helped him to become an officer, a position he liked so much he decided to stay one. Revolution in Austria made him change his mind: he was glad to pick up odd jobs. Newspaper work for the Frankfurter Zeitung gave him leisure to write books. He has written eight: Job is his first bestseller. Dorothy Thompson (Mrs. Sinclair Lewis) did the translation; the Book-of-the-Month Club chose it for November.

Trouble-Shooter

SPARKS FLY UPWARD--Oliver La Farge --Houghton Mifflin ($2.50).*

This pleasantly written romantic melodrama tells the story of the rise (but not the inevitable fall) of Esteban Perez, hard-riding soldado of a Central American republic which Author La Farge calls "Alturas."

Esteban smelled powder early. He was only five months old when his Indian mother carried him through the battle of Cerro Caido, in the war of independence (against Spain). In the battle his mother lost her man but rescued an aristocrat. Don Geronimo Cerromayor, was adopted for her pains. So Esteban grew up with a fancy name, but there were still times when he felt like an Indian.

When middle-aged Don Geronimo took a beautiful young wife, Favia, he was a long time noticing how Esteban looked at her. By the time he did, and sent Esteban off to be a soldier, the damage was done. The army was just the life for Esteban: he had a fine time and learned a lot. Then there was an Indian uprising; he applied for active service, saw plenty. came back not only a colonel but a hero. Life, which he liked simple, began to grow complicated. He put horns on Don Geronimo's hat, and Favia loved him for it; but an Indian woman had attached herself to him and refused to let go. Also Esteban was beginning to dabble in the fire of revolutionary politics. When he simplified everything by leading his tough soldiers in a successful revolt he knew he had lost Favia forever, but he knew Marta was really more his style.

The Author. Oliver Hazard Perry La Farge's ancestry is a rich mixture. Some of his forbears: Benjamin Franklin. Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, Artist John La Farge (grandfather), Architect Christopher Grant La Farge (father). Manhattan-born (1901), Author La Farge is called "Ink" by his intimates, has spent most of his life at Saunderstown, R. I. For schooling he naturally went to Groton, inevitably to Harvard. There he became one of the leading literary figures of his class, spent his summers on university archeological expeditions to Arizona and Utah. Later he investigated Indians and temples in Guatemala and Mexico, wrote a book about it (Tribes and Temples) with Frans Ferdinand Blom. His first novel, Laughing Boy, a Navajo love story, won the Pulitzer Prize for 1929. Long, lank, dark-skinned, dark-haired, with a little mustache over a big mouth, Author La Farge has "low-swinging, gorilla-like arms," has some-times been mistaken by Indians for one of themselves. He is married to Wanden Mathews, lives in Manhattan.

Crock of Gold

A BURIED TREASURE--Elizabeth Madox Roberts--Viking ($2.50).

If people really talked the way Authoress Roberts' country characters do, they would either be hired for an antique chorus or put in an asylum. No gramophonic realist but an artist who digs for buried treasure, Authoress Roberts makes her Kentucky farmers' speech into the kind of lyricized dialect which the late John Millington Synge dug for and found among his Aran Islanders.

Old Andy Blair and his childless wife Philly were as poor as their neighbors, maybe poorer. So when Andy, chopping at a stump of firewood, struck an iron pot, he was sure it was a pot of gold. For once Andy w was right: the pot held over $1,900 in coin, and two pearls. At first the old couple wanted to run and tell everybody, then they thought better of it. They hid the treasure in the house, invited the neighbors to a surprise party. By the time the night of the party came they had worried so much about their riches that they decided to say nothing about it after all. In order to have a surprise, Philly persuaded a young couple to get married then & there.

But two rascals posing as house-painters, uninvited guests, smelled a rat. They watched their chance, came back later, pilfered the pot. Philly was nearly foundered with grief. But Andy had been too smart for them, he had taken out the treasure and hidden it somewhere else. When the thieves came back for another attempt the sheriff got one, the other was glad to escape. Said Andy to his wife: "And whenever I open the pot to take out, I'll remember to take out a piece for the Lord. Recall it to my mind iffen ever I forget, Philly. Recall it to my mind how I stood, my hand up in the air for a strong oath, iffen ever the kettle is opened and some is taken out, one piece of equal kind goes to God. Make me recollect I promised." Philly said she would, but allowed she could not pledge herself to make him do it.

The Author. Elizabeth Madox Roberts, 46, good-looking but unmarried, lives near Springfield, Ky., where she was born, whither some of her ancestors had plodded from Virginia over "Boone's Trace." Independent, self-contained, her speech and writing alike are full of a mannered dignity, a compound of books and Kentucky dialect. Before she settled down to be an important U. S. novelist she wrote a book of poems, Under the Tree, which won the Fiske Prize. When the Literary Guild chose A Buried Treasure for its November book Authoress Roberts hung up a figurative trophy: she was the first authoress (or author) to have three novels chosen by a book club. The others: The Time of Man (Book of the Month, October 1926); The Great Meadow (Literary Guild, March 1930).

Walpole Tetralogy (Cont'd )

JUDITH PARIS -- Hugh Walpole -Doubleday, Doran ($2.50).*

As Author Walpole anxiously points out in a foreword, you do not have to have read Rogue Berries to understand Judith Paris: each volume of this tetralogy (two are still to come) can be taken or left alone.

Judith, half-gypsy daughter to old "Rogue" Herries, 18th Century Cumberland squire, was a wild thing from her youth up, but she had character. Her wildness got her into many a scrape, led her to marry Georges Paris, an attractive, coldhearted, unscrupulous rascal. Character made her stick to him when he was unfaithful to her, even when the police were after him. Finally Georges went too far: he murdered a man; whereupon the man's old father murdered Georges. Judith became a governess for a while, then went back to the Herries family in Cumberland. She might have married again but she was faithful to Georges' memory. A combination of wildness and character, however, led her to such kind lengths that one fine day she had a little bastard baby. As her story closes she is holding together what is left of the oH Herries household against the machinations of a spiteful younger branch.

Though Author Walpole says he has had "the plan of writing the history of an English family that should cover 200 years and that should have throughout the same English scene for its centre . . . before the later Forsytes were thought of or any suspicion of Sagas hung in the literary air," Author John Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga is in no danger of being overshadowed.

*New books are news. Unless otherwise designated, all books reviewed in TIME were published within the fortnight. TIME readers may obtain any book of any U. S. publisher by sending check or money-order to cover regular retail price ($5 if price is unknown, change to be remitted) to Ben Boswell of TIME, 205 East 42nd St., New York City.

*Published Oct. 21.

*Published Oct. 8.

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