tremendous debt we owe to Jewish idealists in the realm of science,
art, and literature. But very little is still known of the important
part the sons and daughters of Israel have played in the
revolutionary movement and, especially, in that of modern times.

The first years of her childhood Emma Goldman passed in a small,
idyllic place in the German-Russian province of Kurland, where her
father had charge of the government stage. At the time Kurland was
thoroughly German; even the Russian bureaucracy of that Baltic
province was recruited mostly from German JUNKERS. German fairy
tales and stories, rich in the miraculous deeds of the heroic knights
of Kurland, wove their spell over the youthful mind. But the
beautiful idyl was of short duration. Soon the soul of the growing
child was overcast by the dark shadows of life. Already in her
tenderest youth the seeds of rebellion and unrelenting hatred of
oppression were to be planted in the heart of Emma Goldman. Early
she learned to know the beauty of the State: she saw her father
harassed by the Christian CHINOVNIKS and doubly persecuted as petty
official and hated Jew. The brutality of forced conscription ever
stood before her eyes: she beheld the young men, often the sole
supporter of a large family, brutally dragged to the barracks to lead
the miserable life of a soldier. She heard the weeping of the poor
peasant women, and witnessed the shameful scenes of official venality
which relieved the rich from military service at the expense of the
poor. She was outraged by the terrible treatment to which the female
servants were subjected: maltreated and exploited by their BARINYAS,
they fell to the tender mercies of the regimental officers, who
regarded them as their natural sexual prey. The girls, made pregnant
by respectable gentlemen and driven out by their mistresses, often
found refuge in the Goldman home. And the little girl, her heart