Golda (5 page)

Within days, Golda poured out her heart to Sheyna and Shamai, who responded with a tantalizing offer: “Get ready and come to us.”

Golda had a mantra that she repeated often to Regina: “Only those who dare, who have the courage to dream, can really accomplish some- thing. People who are forever asking themselves, ‘Is it realistic? Can it be accomplished? Is it worth trying?’ accomplish nothing. . . . What’s realis- tic? A stone? Something that’s already in existence? That’s not realism. That’s death.”

So late one cold February night, while her parents slept, Goldie packed a small suitcase, tied a rope to the handle, and lowered it out of her second- floor bedroom to her friend Regina, who was waiting below. The next morning, acting as if nothing unusual was happening, she ate her break- fast, tucked her books under her arm, and said good-bye to her family. In- stead of walking to school, however, she headed for Regina’s, where she picked up her meager belongings. With a quick hug to the girl who’d been her best friend from the first week she’d landed in America, Golda took a trolley to the railroad station and bought a ticket for Denver, spending ev- ery dime she’d saved, every cent Sheyna could send her, and small contri- butions from her friends.

* * *

Ever the dogmatist, Sheyna referred to Golda’s arrival in Denver as her liberation from “the tyranny and oppression” of their parents. But Gol- da’s was liberation light, involving little struggle, no real hardship, and

absolutely no risk. When she got off the train, dressed in an ankle-length black skirt and high-necked white blouse, Sheyna was waiting on the platform with Shamai and their two-year-daughter, Judy. That evening, Golda slept in a comfortable bed in their tidy brick bungalow. Within days, her life assumed a routine remarkably parallel to the one she’d just escaped.

In the morning, she walked twenty blocks to North Side High School. After classes, she worked for Shamai at his new dry cleaning business. At the end of that long day, she made her way home to help Sheyna with dinner and the dishes before settling down to work on her algebra and Latin.

But on weekends, Sheyna’s house vibrated with young people arguing socialism and anarchism, Hegelian philosophy and Zionism in beautiful Yiddish and execrable English—and they didn’t see Golda as a little girl undeserving of a place at the table. The only person who hesitated to welcome Golda was Sheyna, who tried, unsuccessfully, to shoo her off to her books or her bed.

Golda was riveted as they debated change: Could it come without the class struggle advocated by Lenin? What would the split between the Bol- sheviks and the Mensheviks mean for Jews? What role should the eman- cipation of women play in the revolution? Should they join the Socialist Party? Become pacifists? The debaters weren’t serious intellectuals. They were lung-sick bachelors who’d been in the hospital with Sheyna or were the sons of Denver’s Jewish consumptives, barbers who thought of them- selves as philosophers, janitors who described themselves as poets, wan- nabe revolutionaries, and kooks.

Golda knew that socialism meant democracy and the right of workers to a decent life. But she’d never heard of Peter Kropotkin or Georg Wil- helm Friedrich Hegel. So she sat quietly and concentrated, going over the conversations in her head, honing what became, in later years, her greatest strength, her ability to listen for hours.

Golda had little inclination to the abstruse or abstract. Although she didn’t read any of the books her new friends debated, she knew what she

thought, relying, as she always would, on her gut. Kropotkin’s anarchist vision of a society free of central government hardly seemed practical. Hegel was impossible to decipher. How could freedom inevitably lead to terror? She hated Schopenhauer, the German father of pessimism. If life is as futile and necessarily full of suffering as he taught, what was the point?

Emma Goldman, the fiery Russian-American rebel, was more her style. But Goldman seemed too focused on America. What about the Jews? Who could worry about birth control and American wages when her brothers and sisters were being slaughtered in Eastern Europe? Even then, Golda was a narrow nationalist.

Inevitably, Zionism captured her imagination. And among the dozen factions in the Zionist movement, she was quickly drawn to the Labor Zionism of Aharon David Gordon, which had all the necessary elements of romance, social justice, and Jewish pride.

A farm manager and intellectual, Gordon had left Russia for Palestine in 1903 and taken up a hoe, determined to till the soil himself. Working the land, he believed, would cleanse Jews of centuries of enforced para- sitism.

The Land of Israel is acquired through labor, not through fire and not through blood. . . . We must create a new people, a human people whose attitude toward other peoples is informed with the sense of hu- man brotherhood. . . . All the forces of our history, all the pain that has accumulated in our national soul, seem to impel us in that direction. . . . We are engaged in a creative endeavor the like of which is itself not to be found in the whole history of mankind: the rebirth and rehabilitation of a people that has been uprooted and scattered to the winds.

Inflamed by Gordon’s concept, Golda devoured every issue of magazines like
The Young Maccabean
and
New Judea
for tales of the pioneers who’d return to Palestine. When she could carve out free time, she shook the

blue-and-white collection box of the Jewish National Fund to raise money to buy them land.

Gradually, she built a life for herself among Sheyna’s gang, spending weekends with them at picnics, concerts, and lectures, much to Sheyna’s chagrin. You need to get more sleep, Sheyna nagged her. You need to be careful that men don’t think that you’re loose. In Golda’s account of that time, Sheyna started “watching me like a hawk.” Shamai tried to reason with Sheyna that Golda was anything but flighty. But while Sheyna was sparing of words, she was never short of opinions. She looked at her younger sister, who was only sixteen years old, and reminded her that she was “blessed with a lot of good attributes, also faults worth watching.”

Still craving Sheyna’s approval, Golda was both mortified and furious, the two emotions tugging her in opposite directions. Intoxicated by her first taste of independence, she rebelled. Neither sister could ever recall what the final spark was, but over dinner one night, Sheyna berated Golda one time too many and Golda exploded. “I’m not a baby,” she fumed, jaw clenched. “You have no right to boss me around as though I were. . . . I’m leaving.”

Sheyna refused to back down. “Go ahead,” she snapped.

Golda stormed out of the house. Ten minutes later, she realized she had nowhere to live, no way to support herself, no books, and no change of clothes. She couldn’t go home to Milwaukee; her father wouldn’t al- low her name to be spoken in the house. She was faced with an unam- biguous choice: Apologize to Sheyna or drop out of school. As an adult, Golda was notorious for refusing to compromise, for shrinking from owning up to her errors. Demonstrating that same propensity as a teen- ager, Golda left her books behind, rented an apartment, and struck out on her own.

* * *

It’s impossible to know how much attention Golda would have paid to Morris Meyerson if she hadn’t been “almost as lonely as independent,” slaving away at a degrading job and living in a tiny rented room. A Lithu-

anian immigrant, Morris was the least garrulous of the crowd who hung out at Sheyna’s. Not quite twenty-one years old, with thinning hair and steel-rimmed glasses, he was a private, introspective man who worked sporadically as a sign painter and seemed more comfortable with Chek- hov and Mozart than with political badinage.

But most of the men Golda had met at Sheyna’s avoided her, lest they incur her sister’s notorious wrath. So Golda couldn’t resist when Morris invited her to a free concert in the park. After the last note was played, they strolled hand in hand, Morris analyzing the symphony, Golda awed by his knowledge. “Oh, now I wish I could hear that music all over again,” she said. Morris hesitated, and then offered, “There’s a concert downtown next Saturday night. If you’d like, I’ll get tickets.”

That spring and summer, Golda and Morris spent every Sunday at a free concert in one of Denver’s parks. During the week, they attended lectures on science, philosophy, and psychology at the Workmen’s Circle, a Jewish immigrant aid society, or went rowing on Sloan’s Lake, where Morris read her Byron, Shelley, and
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.

Morris did more than ease Golda’s loneliness. He punctured the wall she’d erected to shield her vulnerability from a tough mother and an even tougher sister. Bluma and Sheyna both hid their worry behind sarcasm, their love beneath a mountain of hectoring. To survive, Golda had devel- oped a thick hide. Other men had offered her strident lectures on Marx- ism; Morris lavished her with the gentle gift of poetry, flowers he could ill afford, reproductions of paintings cut out of magazines framed for the walls of her tiny room. He became her teacher, her mentor, her brother, the first person to love Golda the woman.

Morris is not particularly good-looking, but “he has a beautiful soul,” she admitted in a postcard to Regina.

Those months in Denver were an intimate interlude in Golda’s life, an unusual moment of tenderness. Her time wasn’t spent on causes, on orga- nizing or mounting a bully pulpit, but on developing a soft side of herself that she had never seen. In turn, Golda infused Morris with her own vi- vacity and dynamism, ripping through his cocoon of reticence.

Then, out of the blue, Golda received a letter from her father beseech- ing her to come home for her mother’s sake. It was the first time she’d heard from Moshe in almost two years, and she knew what it cost him to beg her—just as she knew how expensive her sojourn in Denver had be- come. She was in love with Morris, but she was working in a department store instead of studying. Her father promised that he and Bluma would support her decision to go to high school and become a teacher, if only she’d come back.

The sole breadwinner in his family, Morris couldn’t follow her. None- theless, he encouraged her to go home, to heal the rift with her family and to study, promising that he’d join her as soon as possible so they could marry.

* * *

At the age of seventeen, Golda had already tamed her first unruly crew, her parents. When she reenrolled in high school, they offered not a mur- mur of protest. When she talked about teaching, Bluma stayed mum. The only battle they fought was over the identity of the author of the let- ters arriving from Denver, two, three, or four times a week. “Somebody,” Golda responded flipply when Bluma pressed for information. “So who’s this Mr. Somebody?”

Frustrated by Golda’s secrecy, Bluma steamed opened two letters and told Tzipka, renamed Clara in America, to translate them. That night, Clara confessed her betrayal and Golda stopped talking to her mother for several days. Golda’s soon-to-be infamous wrath took its toll. Bluma never defied her again.

Back home, Golda read through the long book list Morris had com- piled for her, Chekhov and Gogol, de Maupassant, Anatole France and

H. G. Wells. She joined a small Yiddish literary society that brought speak- ers in from Chicago to discuss the classics. And she spent hours babbling to her friends about Denver and savoring every word Morris wrote to her.

In her responses, Golda gushed out a torrent of insecurity. Am I smart enough? Pretty enough? Learned enough? Morris never seemed to tire of

reassuring her. “I have repeatedly asked you not to contradict me on the question of your beauty,” he wrote. “Every now and then, you pop up with these timid and self-deprecating remarks. I can’t bear them.”

Week after week, he limned his devotion. “If you were here now, oh how I would kiss you! But that can’t be . . . so accept some kisses from me sailing through the ethereal blue,” he wrote to Gogole, as he called her, in January 1915. By October, he was more ardent still. “If I don’t get to see you soon I fear that I shall dwell in the bughouse forever!”

But neither Morris nor Golda had the time or money for visits. And as the months wore on, Golda began spending less time on Morris’s lit- erature and music and more on her old passion. Wars are notoriously bad for Jews, and World War I was a disaster for the masses in Eastern Europe. As the Russians battled the invading armies of Germany and Austria all across the Pale, both sides took out their frustrations on Jews along the way. Tens of thousands lost their lives; millions more were left homeless.

Together with her father, Golda threw herself into relief work, going door to door to beg nickels and dimes for the displaced Jews. As the news grew ever more grim, she made speeches on street corners and helped organize meetings in hired halls. Gradually, she grew angry. What’s the point? she asked. How long will Jews continue to accept their plight and meekly be led to the slaughter?

When she began asking those questions in public, Milwaukee’s lead- ing Labor Zionist, Isadore Tuchman, suggested that it was time for her to do more than talk. “I noticed this striking girl on the platform surrounded by old women,” he recalled. “I thought what on earth is this young girl doing with all these old women? She doesn’t belong at all. . . . So I got in touch with her and asked if she’d join our movement.”

That movement was Poale Zion, a small band of Zionist socialists more adept at arguing the future shape of Palestine’s collective farms than at figuring out how to turn that concept into a national reality. Only twenty- three delegates, representing four chapters, showed up at their first na- tional convention in 1905. At the second, Poale’s nascent leadership found

itself under assault for an alleged “collaboration” with non-Socialist Zion- ists, agents of the dreaded “bourgeois class.”

Poale’s goal was to prepare its members to move to Palestine, but few Americans were lining up to go, chastened by stories of pioneers starving for lack of work and of Turkish soldiers raping women. So in Milwaukee, Poale devoted itself to running a library and a
folkschule,
a weekend pro- gram of classes for immigrant children in Yiddish, literature, and Jewish history.