Acknowledged as the "Press Queen" in her home country, she became one of the wealthiest women in Europe at the time, and the richest person in interwar Latvia.

She started working at the age of 17 as an advertising agent and theater critic for the German-language newspaper, Rigaer Tagesblatt.

Twenty-one years older than Emilija, he was a bankrupt former school teacher and failed shop-owner who had come to Riga looking for work, which he found as the reporter on Latvian issues of the Rigaer Tagesblatt.

On 8th of December, Emīlija founded her own newspaper using funds she had obtained from her divorce settlement.

Emīlija's business sense and Anton's dedication to hard work soon bore fruit, and Jaunākās Ziņas blossomed.

But eventually, as four different sides (the Imperial German Army, the Bolsheviks, the pro-German local Landwehr, and finally the Army of the new Latvian Republic) marched through Riga, Jaunākās Ziņas shut down and during the Bolshevik occupation of Riga, Emīlija and Benjamiņš had to take refuge in Berlin for some six months.

Just before the war started Jaunākās Ziņas had received delivery of the latest industrial printing presses from Germany; now, since Germany was an enemy country of Imperial Russia, the bill no longer had to be paid[2] and still later, when the war was over, the German firm in question was bankrupt and no longer existed.

To that end, in the latter part of the 1930s, she bought a ten-hectare industrial estate in Ķekava, by the Daugava river, with the intention of going into chemical manufacturing and color photograph development with her nephew and adopted son, Juris.

Anton's children from his first marriage promptly challenged the will in Court and publicly declared that their father was insane.

On 17 June 1940 the Red Army occupied Latvia and shortly thereafter the formerly independent country was incorporated into the Soviet Union.

Right at the beginning of the Soviet occupation, the Nazi government of Germany created a safe passage for people to escape, and Juris Benjamiņš used that to successfully evacuate the valuables from the Kr.

Rudolph Aicher (her younger sister's husband) through his contacts with Joachim von Ribbentrop, managed to arrange an interview with Heinrich Himmler in the hopes of getting the German Government's intervention on her behalf.

But above all, her former employee, her regular party guest, and her friend: Vilis Lācis, the new Communist Interior Minister for the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic was the one who decided such things.

Emīlija Benjamiņa was subject to the 1941 Soviet deportations from Latvia and died in the Usollag Gulag forced labor camp on 23 September 1941, a little over a week after her 60th birthday.