Golda (22 page)

Many clearly were anxious to leave. After the declaration of indepen- dence, the Soviet press had printed dozens of letters from Russian Jews

congratulating the government for its support of the new Jewish state, and shortly after her arrival, Golda began hearing from them directly. “I would happily sacrifice my knowledge, experience, and if necessary, my life for the sake of reinforcing, developing, and strengthening the State of Israel,” wrote one construction expert. A Jewish officer in the Red Army asked, “Can a Jew who fought four years against Fascism travel to his Homeland, to his loving country in order to be there at this hour with the finest of his people . . . ? Please print the answer to my question in a So- viet newspaper.”

Promoting emigration from someone else’s country, of course, isn’t a very diplomatic mission, so Golda trod lightly. The first time she met with I. N. Bakulin, head of the Middle East Department of the Foreign Ministry, instead of broaching the possibility of Jewish emigration, she complained about British and American attempts to block the departure of Jews from the West. Bakulin, however, didn’t rise to the bait. Rather, he sympathized with her plight, parroting the party line that emigration was necessary only where Jews lived with prejudice, the “capitalist coun- tries.”

She and Namir knocked on every possible official door, and the an- swer was always the same: a lecture on the evil influence of capitalism. “[It is] as though the problem of Jewish immigration to Israel exists in countries outside the ‘East’ bloc, and since [our] little state cannot absorb millions of Jews from the Diaspora, Jews have to fight for ‘Socialism’ in every country,” Namir said in despair.

They had no more luck dealing with the Soviets about exceptional emigration requests. In late October, for example, Golda petitioned for exit permits for a small group of Israeli citizens who’d been trapped in Bessarabia and Bukovina by the outbreak of World War II. They received no answer.

One night a middle-aged Jew made it past security at the Metropole by waving his British Mandate passport. An ex-Communist who’d left Palestine to fight in the Spanish Civil War, he’d been wounded and transported to Russia for treatment. Unable to secure permission to leave,

he appealed to Golda. But there was nothing she could do to help, just as there was nothing she could do for her second cousin from Pinsk, who showed up pleading for her intervention. “Not one Russian official would discuss Jewish emigration with me, not for individual Jews nor for the multitudes,” she said.

Even meeting Soviet Jews proved impossible. Once word got out where the embassy was located, Jews gathered by the dozens in front of the ho- tel. But few dared enter. One afternoon Golda’s daughter, Sarah, was stopped on the street by a man who introduced himself, in Hebrew, as a former member of Kibbutz Tel Yosef. Overjoyed to find another kib- butznik in Moscow, she urged him to come in and meet Golda. No, he replied. It’s too dangerous.

The danger was torment for embassy staff members with family in Russia and for friends back home who’d asked them to make contact with relatives they hadn’t heard from since the war. At first, Golda approached the authorities with requests for visits, but their coldness suggested how precarious the situation really was. Finally, she barred embassy personnel from seeing their family members. It was too risky, for all sides.

But obsessed with discovering whether Russia’s Jews had clung to their historical identity after decades of repression, Golda had to do something. First, she threw Friday-night open houses. But while the reception room in her two-bedroom suite filled up with foreign reporters, a familiar cast of characters from the embassies, and the occasional visiting American, no Russian Jew ever dared attend.

Next, she sent information bulletins about Israel and the Israeli em- bassy to Jewish communities across Russia. Although she carefully avoided any anti-Soviet remarks, shortly after she submitted the first issue for printing, she was called to the Foreign Ministry and ordered to stop her attempts at illegal propaganda.

Finally, she took to attending the State Jewish Theater, standing con- spicuously in the outer hall during intermission. Scores of Jews encircled her. An intrepid few sidled up with quick questions. But no one ever stayed long enough to converse.

Ironically, the only social contact Golda managed with a Russian Jew occurred at a reception celebrating the thirty-first anniversary of the Octo- ber Revolution. It was one of those formal gatherings that Golda dreaded, hours of careful politesse among diplomats. But in the receiving line, she was introduced to the wife of Foreign Minister Molotov, Polina Zhemchu- zhina, who approached her with a glass of vodka a few minutes later. “I have so many questions for you about Israel,” Zhemchuzhina said in flu- ent Yiddish, grilling her about kibbutzim, the Negev, and Israeli youth movements.

Their conversation didn’t last long because Molotov signaled to his wife that it was time to move on to other guests. But Zhemchuzhina re- mained long enough to offer Golda a bit of advice. “They told me that you’re going to the very beautiful synagogue,” she suggested, in fluent Yiddish. “Go, go there. The Jews want to see you.”

Almost too stunned to respond, Golda asked where she’d learned to speak such perfect Yiddish.
“Ich bin a Yiddischer tochter,”
I’m a Jewish girl, replied Zhemchuzhina, née Pearl Karpovskaia. Then she took her leaving saying, “May things go well with you. If all goes well with you, things will go well with all the world’s Jews.”

Golda never saw Zhemchuzhina again. Within weeks of meeting Golda, she was arrested for treason and exiled to Kazakhstan.

If nothing else, Golda decided that she could at least be present, proudly and visibly present, not just as the ambassador from the State of Israel to the Soviet Union, but as the ambassador from the State of Israel to Moscow’s Jews. Before she left Israel, Golda had instructed her male staff members to pack prayer shawls and prayer books. Then, during her first week at the Metropole, she sent one of them over to the Choral Synagogue, the only real functioning Jewish house of worship for Mos- cow’s 500,000 Jews, to inform Rabbi Shloime Shliefer that the staff of the Israeli embassy would join him for services on Sabbath morning.

A secular Jew, Golda never went to synagogue, but that Saturday, Sep- tember 11, she walked solemnly with her staff from the hotel to the Gorka, the Hill, as the Jews called the area around the synagogue, and

climbed the steps into the women’s balcony. Only a hundred or so old men had come to pray, the usual crowd in those grim days, and no one seemed to notice the solemn woman in the balcony or the young outsid- ers who were called up to read the Torah. Then, Rabbi Shliefer ended the service in an unusual way, not only with his standard prayer for the health of Stalin, but for the welfare of Golda Meyerson as well.

Suddenly, all eyes turned on the strangers, the Israelis. Still, no one dared approach. After the service, Golda stayed behind to talk to the rabbi, for whom she’d brought a Torah from Israel. Outside the synagogue, she lingered, hoping someone might dare, so caught up in tangle of emotions that she was unsure what street to take back to her hotel. An old man walked by her and mumbled in Yiddish, “Don’t talk to me. I’ll walk ahead. You follow.” When they reached the Metropole, without looking back, he switched into Hebrew and recited the
Shehehiyanu,
the prayer for special occasions.

Praised are You, Eternal our God, Sovereign of the universe, for grant- ing us life, for sustaining us, and for helping us to reach this day.

A savvy politician, Golda understood timing. So she waited two weeks to return to the synagogue, until Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. By then, the first warning had been issued, subtle but unambiguous in that climate of careful understatement and threats disguised as innuendo. The fact that it was written by Ilya Ehrenburg, Russia’s most prominent Jewish journalist, a Bolshevik turned anti-Communist who’d transformed himself into a spokesman for Stalin, made the signal all the more dra- matic. “Let there be no mistake about it,” he wrote in
Pravda.
“The state of Israel has nothing to do with the Jews of the Soviet Union, where there is no Jewish problem and therefore no need for Israel. . . . And in any case, there is no such entity as the Jewish people. That is as ridiculous a concept as claiming that everybody who has red hair or a certain shape of nose belongs to one people.”

About 2,000 Jews usually turned up for Rosh Hashanah, the rabbi had

told Golda, so she wasn’t surprised to find herself in a thin line of worship- pers trickling into the immense synagogue on Arkhipovka Street. But that year the line never ended. Moscow’s Jews kept coming, wizened old men and stolid babushkas, young couples carrying infants, teenagers who’d never heard a Hebrew prayer, children, army officers, the ragged, and the well-dressed filling the synagogue until no seats were left, overfilling the synagogue until there was no room to stand, squeezing into every corner until there was no space to yield. The women in the balcony sobbed as they approached Golda, reaching out to stroke her arm, to kiss her hands and the hem of her dress.

The outpouring was so unexpected, so improbable during that long winter of Stalin’s supremacy, the welter of emotions—of pride and awe, longing and nationhood—almost too intense. Golda sat frozen to her chair, unable to speak, silently asking Russia’s Jews for forgiveness for hav- ing doubted them. Then Israel’s military attaché was called to read the Torah and proudly walked to the podium in his uniform, his yarmulke emblazoned with an Israeli flag. The service came to a halt as the congre- gation released the tension of its own ecstasy in a surge of tears.

When the shofar was blown for the final time, no one moved. Sensing that people needed to feel her—to feel Israel—move through their midst, Golda stood up and, without uttering a single word, made her way through the throng, suddenly desperate for space, for relief from the weight of her own emotion. But on the other side of the synagogue doors, as far as she could see, Moscow’s Jews had gathered by the thousands—20,000; 30,000; as many as 50,000 by some estimates. When they saw her, they erupted in Hebrew, Russian, and Yiddish:
Golda shelanu; nasha Golda; Goldele, our Golda, our Golda, you must live.
From somewhere in the multitude, a voice sang out the opening strains of “Hatikvah.”

Still, Golda couldn’t find any words. Only after two of her staff mem- bers opened a path through the tumult and ushered her into a taxi did she find her voice. “
A danke eich vos ihr seit gebleiben Yidn,
” she cried out, leaning out of the window. “Thank you for having remained Jews.”

The Israelis stayed away on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, too

numb, too afraid for the city’s Jews. When they appeared for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, another enormous crowd awaited them. This time, so too did the militia, in force. But inside the synagogue, when the congre- gation intoned Yizkor, the prayer for the dead, Moscow’s Jews prayed, too, for Israel’s fallen.

Golda stayed all day, fasting for the first time in decades. Finally, Rabbi Shliefer arrived at the climax of the service, the Ne’ila. The shofar was blown for the last time and he chanted the closing phrase,
L’shanah ha’ba’ah b’Yerushalayim,
Next Year in Jerusalem.

“The words shook the sun as they looked up at me,” Golda recalled. “It was the most passionate Zionist speech I ever heard.”

No Russian newspaper mentioned the extraordinary events at the Choral Synagogue, the first unsanctioned public demonstration since the fall of 1927, when Trotskyites took to the streets and squares to protest Stalin’s seizure of absolute power. A month later, the Yiddish newspaper
Eynikayt
was closed down, along with Yiddish theaters and the Yiddish publishing house Der Emes. Books by Jewish authors, including Boris Pasternak, Vasily Grossman, and Mikhail Svetlov, were removed from li- brary shelves. And the government began to arrest leading Jews, includ- ing two winners of the Stalin Prize, Russia’s leading Yiddish writers, a major general in the Red Army, and the head of the Soviet Information Bureau.

Stalin’s campaign to stamp out all hints of a Jewish national conscious- ness was launched.

* * *

With Sharett and Ben-Gurion’s hopes for friendship with the Soviets dashed, there was little point keeping someone of Golda’s stature in Mos- cow. “One could send a dummy as Minister and it will have the same impact,” Golda had reported. So on February 2, barely five months after Golda arrived, the government of Israel announced that Golda Meyerson would join the first cabinet, the only woman to be appointed, as minister of labor.

chapter ten

We do not rejoice in victories. We rejoice when a new kind of cotton is grown and when strawberries bloom in Israel.

O

n April 22, 1949, the day Golda moved home from Moscow, 2,463 bone-weary European refugees disembarked in Haifa and were led

to a welcome center to be fed, deloused, clothed, and processed for Israeli identification cards. It wasn’t a particularly frenzied day like the time when 15,000 new immigrants arrived all at once babbling in twenty-two languages with malnourished infants howling, their mothers pushing through a swarm backed up by the elderly, who could barely navigate the rickety gangplanks.