Sasha and Emma Book Reviews

Sasha and Emma by Paul Avrich & Karen Avrich Book Summary

This “lively” dual biography is “an enormously rich book, offering an absorbing portrait of the world of anarchists in turn-of-the-century America” (The New York Times Book Review).

In 1889 two Russian immigrants, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, met in a coffee shop on the Lower East Side. Over the next fifty years Emma and Sasha would be fast friends, fleeting lovers, and loyal comrades. This dual biography offers an unprecedented glimpse into their intertwined lives and the lasting influence of the anarchist movement they shaped.

Berkman shocked the country in 1892 with “the first terrorist act in America,” the failed assassination of the industrialist Henry Clay Frick for his crimes against workers. Passionate and pitiless, gloomy yet gentle, Berkman remained Goldman’s closest confidant though the two were often separated—by his fourteen-year imprisonment and by Emma’s growing fame as a champion of causes from sexual liberation to freedom of speech. The blazing sun to Sasha’s morose moon, Emma became known as “the most dangerous woman in America.” Through an attempted prison breakout, multiple bombing plots, and a dramatic deportation from America, these two unrelenting activists insisted on the improbable ideal of a socially just, self-governing utopia, a vision that has shaped movements across the past century, most recently Occupy Wall Street.

Sasha and Emma is the culminating work of acclaimed historian of anarchism Paul Avrich. Before his death, Avrich asked his daughter to complete his magnum opus. The resulting collaboration, epic in scope, intimate in detail, examines the possibilities and perils of political faith and protest, through a pair who both terrified and dazzled the world.

“A narrative laced with irony details the remarkable reorientation of this pair after they were deported to a Soviet Russia they had lauded as a utopia but soon fled as a monstrous dystopia. A fully human portrait of two tightly linked yet forever fiercely independent spirits.” —Booklist (starred review)

“An in-depth look at a lesser-known chapter of American and world history.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

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