EMMA

Cover mock-up (potential) by David Lester

In The End We Are More Than Ever Alone (tentative title)

A graphic novel about the last year in the life of Emma Goldman, one of history’s greatest left wing orators and radicals who died in Toronto in 1940.

This graphic novel will explore how Emma remained a committed radical for 50 years. Despite arrests, beatings, prison, deportation, exile and the melancholy of unrealized ideals.

During her last year in Canada, as Nazism invaded Europe and the Second World War began, Emma raised the banner of free speech and waged a battle to save a man from deportation and death. It would be the last poignant act of resistance in her 50 years as a revolutionary.

As for the drawings, I will reference the visual techniques of film noir rendered in watercolours to evoke the historic sections of Goldman’s life in Toronto in 1939. Overall I will be creating the book in watercolour and acrylic paints, pencil and pen.

WHO WAS EMMA GOLDMAN?

Emma Goldman (June 27, 1869 – May 14, 1940) was an anarchist, feminist and revolutionary known for her fervent political activism, passionate writing, and raucous speeches. In the recent political landscape she would have surely have been in the forefront of the Occupy movement and at the Battle in Seattle.

Born in Kovno in the Russian Empire (present-day Kaunas, Lithuania), Goldman emigrated to the U.S. in 1885 and lived in New York City, where she met her life-long comrade Alexander Berkman. In 1893, she was imprisoned for one year for attempting to incite unemployed workers to revolt against capitalism.

During the early part of the 20th century she spoke to audiences in the tens of thousands across North America. Her lectures and writings on prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality were ahead of their time. Her infamous lectures on birth control landed her in prison. Throughout her life she had to contend with police surveillance and violence as well as physical threats from members of the public, and an onslaught of media hysteria.

In 1906 she founded the magazine Mother Earth which was eventually banned for it’s articles on anti-militarism. In 1917, Goldman and Berkman were sentenced to two years in jail for their opposition to American men being drafted into World War I.

After her release from prison, Goldman was stripped of her U.S. citizenship and deported to the Soviet Union. At first, she supported the revolution in Russia, but soon discovered it was a totalitarian state.

After escaping Russia, she was forced into exile, being deported from countries across Europe. Eventually she was permitted to settle in the south of France where she wrote her 993 page autobiography, Living My Life.

During the Spanish Civil War, she ran the English language press office of the anarchist trade union, CNT/FAI, raising support for the fight against fascism. In 1939, when fascism triumphed in Spain, Goldman, gripped by depression over the anarchists defeat and the suicide of her friend Berkman, she moved to Toronto, Canada, where she died at the age of 70.

Emma Goldman (watercolour pencil) by David Lester.