Think of the word "anarchist." What comes to mind? If you're anything like me, you might get a picture of a crazed bomb thrower. Emma Goldman: The Anarchist Guest , a documentary by Coleman Romalis, disabuses us of that notion. In his 42-minute examination of the life of Emma Goldman, we get the idea that an anarchist is someone whose views are like those of a libertarian, only more exaggerated.

Romalis was drawn to Goldman as a subject after he discovered that she spent the last years of her life in exile from the United States living in a quiet apartment in Toronto, not far from his own residence. The director will be on hand for two screenings of the documentary by the San Diego Jewish Film Festival at 11 a.m. Sunday, Feb. 18, and 5 p.m., Mondy, Feb. 19 in the AMC Theaters in La Jolla.

Goldman was a woman of many causes: she was a vocal supporter of labor's right to organize, was an outspoken advocate for birth control, a fiery opponent of the draft, and was a practitioner of free speech and free love. 

Born in Kovno, Lithuania, in 1869, she immigrated to the United States as a young woman. Her longtime friend and lover, Alexander Berkman, was imprisoned for attempting to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick, whom Berkman and Goldman accused of ordering his guards to kill striking workers. Goldman was arrested and imprisoned for other offenses, including incitement of riots.

In the buildup to World War I, Goldman opposed the draft. Eventually, at the behest of the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover, she and Berkman were exiled to the Soviet Union, which they found more repressive than the United States. Disillusioned, she sucessfully applied to Canada for "guest" status, explaining the documentary's title.

Romalis portrays Goldman living in boring old Canada and pining for the excitement of life, and protest, in the United States. One of the most vivid images is the skyline of Detroit as seen across the lake from Windsor, Ontario -- the closest Goldman could get to her once adopted land. Eventually, the United States permitted Goldman to return for a six-week visit and the documentary makes heavy use of the rather cautious interviews she gave to reporters. She praised Franklin Roosevelt for recognizing the right of workers to organize; said Italy was a pretty country without Mussolini, and said of Hitler she never met him nor wanted to.

Associates, who were barely out of their teens when Goldman died in 1940, remembered her in interviews as a short Jewish lady, not at all formidable in her appearance, but who could overpower an audience with her oratory. Witnesses to her last years, they sensed that, for all her fame, and for all her lovers, she was a very lonely woman.

Goldman's small group of followers in Toronto mainly were drawn from the ranks of the Workman's Circle, a once powerful leftist and secular Jewish organization. What the documentary fails to communicate to us is any sense of how Goldman's Judaism affected her life or her views. It is regrettable that in this documentary, "Jewish" is simply one of many adjectives, like "short" used to describe Goldman.