Golda (3 page)

Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself.

B

y the time the bells of Kishinev’s churches tolled noon on Easter Sunday, April 19, 1903, the 50,000 Jews of the Bessarabian capital

had been huddled in terror for more than six hours. For them, it was the ninth day of Nisan, 5663, the seventh day of Passover, and they should have been celebrating the exquisite memory of freedom and deliverance from Pharaonic enslavement. The year before, they’d barely escaped the threats and bloodlust set off by the ancient calumny that Jews use the blood of young Christians in the ritual preparation of matzo. But this year, they feared they might not be so lucky.

In early February, the battered body of a Gentile boy had been discov- ered in a Kishinev neighborhood, and then a Christian girl committed suicide in the Jewish hospital. Suddenly, the city was awash in sinister rumors about Jewish plots.
Bessarabetz,
the city’s only newspaper, stoked the fire with tales of Jews exploiting the toils of hapless Christians, of Jew- ish plots to undermine the power of the tsar, and of the international Jewish conspiracy to seize and rule the whole world.

Finally, in late March, an anonymous handbill circulated in the city’s taverns and teahouses. “Brothers, in the name of our Savoir, who shed his blood for us; in the name of our Father the Czar, who cares for his people and grants them alleviating manifests, let us exclaim in the forthcoming great day: Down with Zjids! Beat these mean degenerates, blood suckers drunk with Russian blood!”

The leaders of the panic-stricken community had pleaded with Gov- ernor Von Raben to arrange police protection, to no avail. So on
Noch Velikoi Soobboty,
the Night of the Great Saturday in the Russian Ortho- dox calendar, Christians chalked prominent crosses on their homes and stores, and the Jews of Kishinev boarded up their houses, nailed their shutters closed, and hunkered down for the inevitable.

It was a strange phenomenon, the majority petrified of the minority. But in that odd corner of Eastern Europe called the Pale of Settlement, Christians had been tormenting Jews ever since Catherine the Great set her mind on protecting the masses from “evil influences” by banishing Russia’s Jews to the farthest and least economically significant reaches of her empire, to pieces of Russian Poland and the Ukraine, to Lithuania, Belorussia, the Crimea, and Bessarabia, until 94 percent of Russia’s Jews were confined to the Pale.

There, the Jews coped by insulating themselves in their own world. Signs in Yiddish advertised Jewish-owned groceries and factories, barbers expertly twisted Hasidic side curls, and tinsmiths refurbished dented tea samovars and cooking pots for a population so poor that most Jewish communities were nothing more than warrens of hovels leaning together in dank courtyards.

They lived girded against outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence that felt like natural phenomena, as unpredictable and unavoidable as the erup- tion of sleeping volcanoes. For more than two decades, the fury had ig- nited almost regularly—in 30 Ukrainian towns in 1881, on Christmas day that same year in Warsaw, in a total of 166 towns and villages from one end of the Pale to the other. Then again, in 1882 and 1893.

That Easter Sunday in Kishinev, the violence began innocuously

enough: just a knot of teenage boys heckling and shoving the few Jews who dared cross Chuflinskii Square. Then the adults came, men who’d been celebrating the resurrection of Jesus with vodka or tuica, the local plum brandy, and fixed on capping it off with the first pogrom of the twentieth century.

By midafternoon, more than two dozen mini-gangs of two to three dozen men had fanned out along the winding alleys of the old Jewish quarter, smashing windows, kicking in doors, raiding small shops. Gradu- ally, the crowd—the same sort of crowd that would soon turn on the tsar himself—was joined by a new and more lethal wave of rioters. Hearing a rumor that Tsar Nicolas II had given permission for a three-day orgy of Jew-beating, students and seminarians streamed out of the Royal School and area religious colleges wielding iron bars and axes.

At 13 Asiasky Street, two families trembled inside a low-roofed out- house as the rampage swept into their courtyard. They thought they’d found safety. But the crowd found them, stabbing one man, a glazier, in his neck. When he still showed signs of life, they beat him to death with sticks and truncheons. Panicked, the others in the outhouse made a rush for a small attic, but the crowd spotted and followed them. So they tore their way through the roof, seeking protection in the sunlight and the gaze of a policeman, a Russian priest and scores of neighbors below. Five minutes later, their battered bodies became part of the dross of the morn- ing’s bloody frenzy.

* * *

In New Bazaar, 150 Jews organized in self-defense—but they were ar- rested. A grocer, blind in one eye, offered his attackers all his money, the not-so-princely sum of 50 rubles, for his life and livelihood. They took the cash, then destroyed his shop and gouged out his other eye with a sharp- ened stick, yelling, “You will never again look upon a Christian child.”

Joseph Shainovitch’s head was bashed in by a gang of drunks who then diverted themselves by driving nails through his mother-in-law’s eyes. A two-year-old boy’s tongue was cut out while he was still alive. Bodies were

hacked in half or gutted and stuffed with chicken feathers as the city’s bourgeoisie sauntered the streets in calm indifference.

For two days, the murderers, looters, and rapists ran free in the streets. When the frenzy finally died down, pages of scripture floated in the wind, and everywhere blood mixed with brick and glass, mortar and mud. The toll was 49 dead, 587 injured. More than seven hundred houses and 588 shops were destroyed. Two thousand families were left homeless.

That year, 76,203 “Hebrew” immigrants arrived in the United States from Eastern Europe, among them a failed carpenter named Moshe Yit- zhak Mabovitch.

* * *

The second of his three daughters, Goldie, saw none of that carnage, knew none of its victims. But long before the Jews of Kishinev were forced to bury their dead, she was aware of what it meant to belong to the most vilified of Russia’s outsiders. One afternoon, when she was playing with a friend on the dusty streets of her hometown of Pinsk, a drunken peasant grabbed the two girls and banged their heads together. “That’s what we’ll do with the Jews,” he laughed. A few weeks later, Goldie was build- ing mud castles with her friends in the alley when a troop of Cossacks rode by on their horses, slashing at the air with sabers and whips. Rather than veer around the girls, the men jumped over them yelling, “Death to the Jews.”

Goldie raced inside, bolted the heavy door, and cried frantically for her mother. But she already knew that there was nothing Bluma could do, that Jews were helpless in the face of such hatred, a lesson she’d absorbed when rumors of a pogrom spread through Pinsk. Goldie didn’t quite understand what a pogrom was beyond adult whispers about
goyim
brandishing knives and clubs screaming “Christ Killers.” But her father, Moshe, and the other men in their apartment building frantically boarded up windows and doors, hoping to barricade their families against the danger.

“That pogrom never materialized,” Golda recalled years later. “But to this day I remember how scared I was and how angry I was that all my

father could do to protect me was to nail a few planks together while we waited for the hooligans to come.”

The Pale of Settlement was a harsh teacher, and terror was just one of its lessons. Normalcy was hunger, the day’s porridge carefully doled out in small spoonfuls. Golda’s older sister, Sheyna, regularly fainted at school because she left home in the morning with her stomach empty, and her younger sister, Tzipka, wailed nonstop. To welcome the Sabbath on Fri- day night, the family was lucky to have a bit of dried fish to eat with their potatoes.

Goldie learned about her lot as a woman when Sheyna, suffused with both the idealism of a teenager and her mother’s fiery temper, refused to succumb to the despondency and added the misery of incessant fighting to the dreary mix. “I want to go to school,” Sheyna insisted. What for? Bluma practically spat. Girls don’t need an education; they need to be prepared for marriage,

Things were unlikely to change, or so her high-strung mother pre- dicted regularly. Sheyna, her regal but mule-headed eldest, was bound for trouble with her fancy ideas about education and her prattlings about liberation. Bluma didn’t worry about Goldie, her favorite, who was eight years younger than Sheyna. But the rest of the family found Golda’s feisty self-absorption so unbearable that one aunt declared that she had been possessed by a dybbuk, a malicious spirit. And Bluma couldn’t imagine how little Tzipka, the youngest by four years, was go- ing to grow when she could never afford enough porridge or potatoes to feed her.

Mired in a perpetual cloud of doom, Bluma prophesized on a daily— sometimes hourly—basis that nothing good would ever happen: Moshe would never earn enough money to get them out of an unending series of dank rooms in shtetl hovels, she lamented, with the utter resignation of a stolid peasant babushka who found the strength to cope but never the means to escape. Life would be a perpetual struggle. We’ll starve. The goyim will kill us. And the future?
Feh!
What future?

Goldie’s father, Moshe, had tried to defy the odds. When he failed to

make a go of things as a cabinetmaker in Pinsk, he’d hauled the family off to Kiev, a city so anti-Semitic that Jews needed special permits to live there. But unlike Bluma, who had the stubborn shrewdness of a tough businesswoman, Moshe had a fondness for ideas and a gullible naïveté that made him a patsy for thieves and charlatans. He found few buyers for his furniture, and was rarely paid when he did. Within a year, the rent was overdue, he was in debt to moneylenders, and the family celebration for Shavuot, the holiday marking the day the Torah was given to Moses, was bread, beans, and potatoes.

The only solution Moshe could divine was to sell everything and send the family back to Bluma’s father in Pinsk while he joined the long line of more than two million Russian Jews making their way to the
goldina me- dina,
the golden shores of America.

* * *

It was a blessedly quiet Sabbath morning when Sheyna taught Goldie the final lesson that would define her life. Bluma had taken Tzipka, her youngest daughter, with her to synagogue. Sheyna was off with her friends. And Golda was curled up in her favorite hiding spot, on the warming shelf above the massive black iron stove built into the wall of the kitchen. Suddenly, a whisper interrupted her reverie, and Golda peered down from her perch to see Sheyna sneaking in with a group of other teenagers. While two young men stood watch at the window, the others hunkered on the floor and listened raptly to a handsome young man with long, flowing hair rail against the evils of the tsar and the necessity for Jewish self-defense. Goldie sunk back into the shadows, struggling to absorb every word.

After an hour or so, the group disbanded, one by one sidling into the alley. Golda climbed down and confronted her sister.

“If you annoy me, I’ll tell Maxim [the neighborhood policeman] what I heard,” she threatened.

“Tell him what?” Sheyna asked angrily.

“That you and your friends shouted, ‘Down with the tsar!’ ”

Sheyna turned stern and sober. “If you do, I’ll be flogged with a whip, maybe sent to Siberia or killed.”

Sheyna appeased her sister with a lesson on the evils of tsarist Russia, the glories of socialism, and the distant dream of a Jewish homeland. Pulling out a newspaper she’d hidden away, Sheyna pointed excitedly to the photograph of a man with dark hair and a heavy beard. “This is The- odor Herzl,” she explained, regaling Goldie with stories about his meet- ings with the sultan of Turkey, the kaiser of Germany, and the prime minister of England, all to save the Jews.

The name Herzl was buzzing throughout Jewish Pinsk, whispered in synagogues and in alleys, and scores of Jews saved their pennies for his new association, the World Zionist Organization, formed to create a Jew- ish homeland in Palestine. A secularized Viennese Jew galvanized by the 1894 trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, Herzl had concluded that Jews would never be assimilated into European society and limned a utopian vision of a Jewish state where Jews could be freed from life as an unwanted and vilified minority. His ideas had been widely ridiculed by Jewish lead- ers, but his fantasy of a Jewish state struck a deep chord among the Jewish masses.

Russian peasants and workers were rising against the tsar and Jews had enlisted in the revolution by the thousands, particularly joining the Bund, the popular name for the General Jewish Labor Union of Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, which offered socialism as the answer to Jewish misery. But while sympathy for socialism became almost as widespread as loathing for the tsar, memories of the viciousness of Rus- sian workers ran too deep for most Jews to rush toward them in broth- erly embrace.

Young people like Sheyna and her friends instead teetered between Zionism and Socialism, suspicious both of non-Jewish socialists and of the political Zionism of Herzl, which put the fate of Jews in the hands of the world powers. Gripped by a powerful need to redeem centuries of

helplessness with bold action, they developed a hybrid philosophy, Labor Zionism, which married class struggle and activism to aspiration for a Jewish homeland run by and for Jewish workers.

Sheyna’s group did little more than talk. But as the government clamped down on public meetings and political discussions, talk, too, became dan- gerous. Rather than meet in homes, they began gathering in the woods or in synagogue after services.

Bluma reacted with the empty gesture of forbidding her daughter to participate in political activity lest they all be exiled or killed, but Sheyna baited her mother mercilessly, reporting on all of her escapades and near run-ins with the police. After months of door slamming, threats, and screaming, Bluma locked Sheyna out of the house.

The expulsion didn’t last long, but Bluma laid down a firm proscrip- tion against Sheyna’s political guru, the long-haired young man Goldie had spied from her perch in the kitchen. The grandson of a prominent Torah scholar, Shamai Korngold was the author of the pamphlets Sheyna distributed, the principal speaker at their gatherings, the fairy-tale revolu- tionary. She was already hopelessly enamored of her romantic rabble- rouser.