Sasha and Emma

Imagine my surprise when I turned on the television today and saw people talking about Karen Avrich's new book Sasha and Emma. The visibility of the book comes through the good work of public relations professionals, but that is the case for the visibility of any book.

I have, as many of my friends know, been interested (nay, obsessed) with Emma Goldman for decades. I think it began when I got a letter from my grandmother (I asked her for some family history), and she told me that my great grandfather owned a restaurant in Chicago, and Emma Goldman would come there when she was in town. I remembered Emma from the movie Reds (she was played by Maureen Stapleton), and from the book Ragtime, but I never thought of her as a real person until I began reading about who she was and what she did.



After reading her autobiography, and after finding Howard Zinn's play on a library bookshelf (totally by chance), I spent the better part of a year working on an opera about her and her relationships with the various men in her life (you can find it here. I decided to keep it in the public domain because Emma would certainly have preferred it that way.)

Other Emma-related Musical Assumptions posts:

Thank You Howard Zinn
Money, Music, and Value
Emma Goldman Opera
Goldman Fantasie