Storm in My Heart. Helene Minkin

      Alexander (Sasha) Berkman around 1892.

       (Joseph A. Labadie Collection, University of Michigan Library)

      However, I couldn’t imagine then that Berkman would actually be ready to do something that demanded a huge sacrifice on his part. I must admit that, as I said earlier, as a fifteen-year-old I generally didn’t understand people and life. Later I learned that I’d been mistaken in my perception of Berkman, and quite the opposite was true. No, I couldn’t then imagine that this pale, lean young man with the ever-present sarcastic smile on his thick lips, would soon play such a huge role in our struggle; that he would be so courageous and so ready to make the greatest sacrifice—his young life. That he didn’t pay with his life for shooting steel magnate Henry Clay Frick during the historic Homestead, Pennsylvania strike doesn’t matter: he sacrificed his life.

      My interactions with Berkman were friendly, but also very cold and restrained. Something of a wall stood between me and all three of them: Berkman, Emma, and Fedya. I still don’t know who put up this wall. Perhaps I did it myself.

      Fedya was also very serious in his beliefs, and gave the impression that he was ready to do anything for his ideal. Emma used to call Fedya “Rakhmetov,”26 which was the name of the hero in Chernyshevsky’s famous novel, What Is To Be Done? The character, Rakhmetov, was a Russian nihilist with a strong, heroic character. I couldn’t see this kind of heroism in Fedya, but Emma had such a strong influence on me that I began to see it. Fedya was quiet, and his intense, near-sighted eyes made him seem a strange person who kept his ideas inside and who thought a lot more than he spoke. I imagined that he was thinking about the great deeds he was ready to do with the same heroism as the Russian nihilists, but it now occurs to me that he was more of an artist than an idealist. I think that he was more interested in Emma the woman than in Emma the idealist who was a strong influence on him. It turned out that he really wasn’t built from the same stuff as Berkman, since at the first opportunity, he turned away from the movement and surrendered himself solely to his art—his painting—and to his private family life.

      Both Fedya and Sasha were students of the Russian gymnasium, children of more-or-less aristocratic parents. The free spirit of the American republic, which reached across the ocean, all the way to despotic Russia, drew them here like it did so many other educated young men and women during the great wave of immigration.

      • •

      I’ll now return to our commune. As the reader already knows, we, that is, Emma, Sasha, Fedya, and I, founded the commune. We lived according to the principles of communism—as we at that time understood communism, of course. Each of us contributed to the commune as much as he or she could. I worked in the corset factory and brought my earnings to the commune, Berkman worked and brought in what he made, Fedya earned very little because he rarely sold a painting, but he also contributed what little he earned. Emma ran the house because she was a much better “housewife” than the rest of us. She had already been married and ran a household with her husband in Rochester.

      The bond between Emma and Most grew with each day. He recognized that she had the talent of speech and took it upon himself to help Emma develop as a speaker. He gave her many opportunities to participate in discussions, as well as the necessary books, so she was very busy with reading and studying. The rest of us at the commune saw that she needed to have more time, so we helped her with a lot of the housework. I was overjoyed that Emma was going to speak to the people; she would help the movement in the greatest, most important way. I didn’t feel that I had the talent of speech, so I was happy that others would do what I was incapable of doing. Thus was life in our first New York commune on 13th Street.