Golda (10 page)

Some of the gossip was fed by envy at the rapid rise of such a young woman. But Golda was anything but celibate. Although he had both a wife and a longtime mistress, David Remez still maintained his relation- ship with her, on and off. And her affair with Zalman Shazar, the poet, essayist, and intellectual who would become Israel’s third president, wasn’t exactly a secret; he was always at her house.

Golda had caught her first glimpse of Shazar when he spoke at a May Day rally in Tel Aviv, and the description of him she gave an interviewer almost half a century later suggests how captivated she had been. “He did not speak with his mouth but with both arms and legs, with his el- bows and knees, with every rise and fall of his back, rising and quivering and leaping and filling the entire ambience of the stage,” she recalled. “His every bone spoke. Spoke? Shouted, raged, threatened, exhorted, adjured.”

While Remez served as Golda’s confidant and political guide, Shazar became her inspiration. But the triangle was hopelessly complicated be- cause Remez was Shazar’s best friend. “We always avoid talking about serious things,” Remez berated Golda in one letter. “I don’t know why, but first there was no opportunity and then I didn’t want to make a scene, and Zalman had the same feeling. Talking to you would make a scene. . . . The trouble with you is you were raised on praises. No ques- tion you are successful. I don’t question you in your social earnestness. You are not a mensch. . . . Zalman’s wife loves him and he’s everything to me. Gershon [Shazar’s code name for Morris] has a wife that ignores him. . . . True, Gershon is a very difficult person, but you made him what he is today.”

Listening to the increasingly ugly rumors, Regina asked Golda why she didn’t simply divorce Morris. “Morris won’t give me a divorce,” Golda told her. After a pause, she added, “What do I need it for? I’m not going to marry anyone.”

* * *

Golda was in Europe, yet again, when Morris cabled her grim news: SARAELE DESPERATELY ILL. COME HOME AT ONCE.

After years of consultations, treatments, low- and no-carbohydrate di- ets, Sarah’s kidneys seemed to be giving up. Her face was swollen. She could no longer climb stairs. And she was subsisting on little more than sweetened tea. The doctors predicted that the six-year-old wouldn’t live beyond the age of twelve.

In Golda mythology, she, the frantic mother, raced home, took one look at Sarah, and implored the Histadrut to send her to America as an emissary so Sarah could receive proper medical care. Sarah’s medical crisis, however, was a well-timed coincidence. The Histadrut leadership had already asked Golda to go to the United States for two years to revital- ize the Labor Zionist movement there. Caught between her fierce loyalty to her comrades and her fear of being isolated from the action for such a long period, Golda had hesitated—until Sarah’s illness pushed her out of indecision.

Less than a month after Morris sent his frantic telegram, Sarah was admitted to the new Beth Israel Hospital in Manhattan, and Golda and Menachem were unpacking their meager belongings in the Brooklyn apartment of Fanny and Jacob Goodman, old friends from Poale Zion. Six weeks later, Sarah, who’d long been misdiagnosed in Tel Aviv, was discharged and settled in with Menachem at the Goodmans’. Golda was free to begin her travels.

In the wake of the Holocaust, support for a Jewish state became such an integral facet of American Jewish life that it’s all too easy to forget how tepid and ambivalent American Jewry was toward Zionism earlier in the century. The messianic fervor of European Zionism was driven by the conviction

that only an independent state could ensure Jewish survival and liberate Jews from centuries of victimhood. But that belief struck little chord in Boston or Kansas City. Despite job discrimination and anti-Jewish housing covenants, the United States had proven to be the safest of harbors. So while few American Jews opposed some sort of Jewish nation in Palestine, and many were willing to throw a few dollars into a blue Jewish National Fund box to purchase land there, only a handful saw Palestine as their homeland.

Even mainstream Zionist groups like Hadassah and the Zionist Orga- nization of America practiced a brand of support for Palestine that was anathema to Golda. For them, Zionism was nothing more than a charity on behalf of Jews who had fled Eastern Europe in the wrong direction. The sort of Socialist Zionism preached by Golda was a pie-in-the-sky fantasy few took seriously. Who was going to give a country to a group of crazy Jewish Socialists? And who was going to live there?

Golda’s mission to fire a Labor Zionist movement, a Socialist move- ment, then, sent her to the fringe of the American Jewish community, into a tiny immigrant ghetto. While most American Jews were studying at night to move up and out of manual labor, there they made a cult of it.

Broadening the appeal of the movement, especially of Pioneer Women, the American subsidiary of the Women’s Council, was a tough sell. For two years, Golda rode buses and trains across the country, meeting with chapters of six or eight women in places like Canton, Ohio, Sioux City, Omaha, and Rock Island, to visit Zionist summer camps, and attend con- ventions, while publishing a monthly magazine and trying desperately to scare up funds for the Histadrut.

Over time, she refined the
yishuv
’s story until it was near-biblical: The members of the First Aliyah, penniless schoolteachers and shopkeepers, trudged over the rugged Caucasus Mountains in the deep snow, making their way through hostile Turkey and Syria only to find a land eroded and seared by the centuries; the Second Aliyah pioneers, young and fired by ideology, cleared the Emek, built kibbutzim throbbing with Socialist

spirit despite Arab snipers, malaria, and British betrayal. Golda spoke softly about Jewish women struggling to protect their children during ri- ots, about new hospitals built where no medical care had ever existed, about training schools, desert settlements, the first Hebrew University.

“Palestine today is a place where there are no gangsters, policemen, or flappers, and men and women work side by side in the fields,” she re- ported breathlessly.

She so stirred hearts and awakened such pride that Goldie Meyerson Clubs sprung up all across the country. “Goldie brought us a waft of fra- grant orange blossoms, sprouting veggies, budding trees, well-cared-for cows and chickens, stubborn territory conquered, dangerous natural ele- ments vanquished, all the result of work, work, . . . just for the ecstasy of creation,” wrote Anne Mellman from St. Louis to the Pioneer Women’s newsletter. Her eloquence and sincerity “have instilled in her hearers a reverence for our cause.”

Despite her popularity, Golda seethed with frustration at how little concrete interest she managed to inspire. At thirty-four, she was blazing with newfound self-confidence, but she was devoting her days to a bevy of parlor Zionists, for whom she had nothing but contempt, and not rais- ing very much money. Never one to suffer in silence, Golda took out her annoyance on her members. In her Circular No. 4, February 1933, she berated Pioneer Women chapters for sponsoring “ten-dollar luncheons
instead
of other tasks, when the intent of the luncheons was that this should be an
addition
to all those diverse drives and undertakings that our members have carried out.”

Holding back none of her irritation, she went on to lambaste their programming. “I . . . noticed that there are yet certain branches that carry out the cultural work in a decidedly incidental manner. They support themselves solely by means of lectures by marginal individuals, devoid of a calculated method, such that the topics are constantly incidental, and not each lecture importing significant meaning for our branch.”

In one midwestern city, Golda attacked members for sponsoring card games instead of organizing the usual dances, picnics, or raffles. “For

Palestine, you play cards?” she asked indignantly, revealing her streak of pioneer Puritanism. “This is the kind of money we need? If you want to play cards, you can play as long as you like, but not in our name!”

Simultaneously, Golda was caught up in a running feud with main- stream Zionists worried that the
yishuv
was being taken over by socialists who would leave no room for individual entrepreneurs. Where were those rugged individualists when we were clearing the swamps in the Emek? she shot back in
The Pioneer Woman
. “It is our firm conviction that through our methods it has become possible today to speak of statehood.”

Nonetheless, Golda refused to give up on the mainstream. Unlike Ben- Gurion and other
yishuv
leaders, she understood that Palestine’s pioneers needed the deep pockets and political support of American Jewry. For them, Golda went so far as to dress up. “When I first met Golda in To- ronto in 1932, she looked like a femme fatale with a big fluffy hat and a long cigarette-holder,” recalled Meyer Steinglass of the Zionist Organiza- tion of America. “She was very striking, very good looking and she had this certain air of mystery about her, always.”

Golda’s only respite occurred during periodic trips to New York. At 1133 Broadway in New York’s garment district, where a group of Zionist organizations shared offices, someone was always willing to listen to her vent. And she often snuck out to spend time with Shazar, who was study- ing at Columbia University.

But Golda was away so much that the children, left with a family they barely knew, were on her the moment she walked through the door. “Some- times weeks would pass and we didn’t see each other,” recalled Sarah. “My brother suffered a great deal from this. He quarreled with mother and tried to stop her from leaving the house. I also felt lonely without her.” One night Sarah asked Golda what she did on her long trips. I go to meetings and talk to people, Golda answered. “So why can’t you stay home and talk to me?” Sarah responded wistfully.

Occasionally, she took the children to the zoo or the planetarium, to concerts, museums, movies, and her favorite Chinese restaurants. For the first time, they met their aunt Clara, Golda’s youngest sister, who lived in

Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Morris’ mother and sisters, who lived in Philadelphia.

But it was never enough. “It was a terrible position for both of them,” said Judy Goodman, who often cared for the children when her parents were busy. “They knew no one here, no one.”

Golda’s old friend Regina put it bluntly. “She certainly never should have had children.”

chapter five

I never did anything alone. Whatever was accomplished in this country was accomplished collectively.

W

hen Golda left Milwaukee in 1921, she never mentioned how long she thought it would take to build a Jewish Socialist paradise

in Palestine. But when she returned from the United States in 1934, that chimera seemed even more elusive than it had thirteen years earlier. The Jewish population had increased 400 percent, but almost three-quarters of the residents of Palestine were still Arabs.
Yishuv
leaders churned out reports about a 200 percent increase in exports, a tenfold growth in the citrus industry, and a 1,000 percent rise in electricity. But since they’d started from zero, the figures weren’t all that impressive. Tel Aviv might have been burgeoning, with a population of 150,000, but the
yishuv
was still welfare dependent, begging for handouts from a skeptical interna- tional Jewish community.

Increasingly well-organized Arabs were lashing out at the Jewish pres- ence not only with semi-organized and random attacks, but with strikes, assaults on travelers, and the burning of thousands of the trees the pio- neers had lovingly planted. Desperate to bolster the economy,
yishuv

leaders inflamed their anger further with campaigns to pressure Jewish- owned businesses to replace cheap Arab workers with “Jewish labor” and consumers to “buy Jewish.” The Jewish press railed against employers who deprived Jewish immigrants of jobs by employing “alien” workers and housewives who purchased Arab-grown tomatoes.

Hostile Arabs were the tip of an iceberg of problems. Despite Britain’s pledge to the League of Nations that it would use its mandate to create a Jewish homeland, London had been inching away from its own promises almost as soon as the Balfour Declaration was issued for fear of damaging its position in the Middle East. After each outbreak of Arab rioting, the Foreign Office dispatched a commission of inquiry into its cause. The verdict was always the same: the Arabs resented the growing Jewish pres- ence and the only way to calm the situation was to avoid “a repetition of the excessive immigration.”

Emboldened by such conclusions, the Arabs took to regular rioting in the hope that the next commission would persuade Britain to end Jewish immigration entirely. And a long series of reports and White Papers about the alleged scarcity of open land and the royal obligation to the Arabs led
yishuv
leaders to believe that the government was laying the groundwork to move in that direction.

“You know, the trouble with you is you want a national home but all you’re getting is a rented flat,” Victor Adler, head of the Socialist Interna- tional, cautioned Golda.