Golda (6 page)

Golda, however, was not impressed with “parlor Zionists,” as she called them, all talk and no action. While she worked in the library and taught classes for immigrant children, she didn’t see any future in America. If she was going to commit herself to the cause, she needed to be serious about uprooting herself and contributing her own sweat to building Pal- estine.

In every place and generation, a handful of young people discover the exhilaration of being part of something larger themselves. They become religious, throw themselves into causes, or embrace new ideologies. While their friends follow the crowd, they march to the beat of that proverbially different percussionist. In Golda’s day, Americans were less suspicious of those who dedicated themselves to principles, feeling no need to psycho- analyze the few impelled to go against the social grain. No one asked, then, whether Golda was attempting to live up to the image she’d built up of her older sister, trying to prove something to her overbearing mother, or exorcising the demons planted by her father’s helplessness in the face of a threatened pogrom.

But her two causes—Zionism and Morris—collided. “I don’t know whether to be happy or sorry that you are participating in the Zionist party and that you are, it seems, so enthusiastic a nationalist,” Morris wrote in August 1915. “The idea of allotting Palestine or any other terri- tory for the Jews is, in my eyes, ludicrous. Oppression does not exist be- cause some nations have no territories but because nations exist at all.”

Undaunted, Golda set out to convert Morris, penning him dozens of letters about the bravery of the Jewish pioneers in Palestine and pleading

with him to at least agree to a trip there. “Yes, Gogole, I shall even con- sider a trip to Palestine (or the North Pole for that matter) with you,” he replied indulgently. “But why we need go there now I don’t know. We shall roll there, cost prepaid, after we have died of some Latin disease and been buried under four ft. of sod. As to that group of ‘idealists’—why, you need not envy them. Six weeks of struggle with the virgin soil will cure them of their ‘idealism’ permanently.”

Assuming that Golda would grow out of her Palestine fascination, Morris continued to write long letters about the world they had shared in Colorado, critiquing performances of Wagner’s
Entrance of the Gods into Valhalla
and describing his research in zoology and paleontology. Golda replied excitedly with news about the revival of Hebrew in Palestine. Nei- ther seemed to notice the growing disconnect.

Zionism consumed Golda’s every waking moment. Asked to join Poale’s Executive Committee, she threw herself into organizing their annual fund- raiser for pioneers in Palestine. On weekends, she and her friends held pic- nics at Lincoln Park, auctioning off packed lunches to raise money for their
folkschule.

In the United States, Zionism had attracted the energies of few young people, and even fewer who were both female and moderately American. Golda, then, who never powdered her nose or donned a flapper outfit, became a rising star in that tiny universe, news of her celebrity traveling well beyond Milwaukee. “There was a rumor afloat that there was a koo- koo girl who was barnstorming for Labor Zionism in Milwaukee,” re- called Judy Shapiro, whose father, Ben, was an activist in Chicago. “
Meshugenah
Myrtle, (crazy Myrtle), they called her.”

By the time Morris finally found a way to free himself from his family and move to Milwaukee, Golda was basking in the attention, the plau- dits, and the energy. Morris and Zionism, she was about to have it all. Shrewdly, at first she carved out plenty of time for them to fall back into their old routine. She and Morris read together, went to the opera and symphony. In the summer, they took the trolley to Bradford Beach or strolled through Lake Park with a basket lunch.

But as Morris settled in, working occasional jobs as a painter, Golda was constantly caught between him and her passion for Zionism, which he stubbornly refused to share. The two collided dramatically when the first important pioneers from Palestine arrived in Milwaukee as part of a thirty-city tour. Yitzhak Ben-Zvi and David Ben-Gurion were scheduled to address a public meeting on a Saturday night and have lunch at the Mabovitch house the next day. Golda was dying to hear their speeches, but Morris had already bought tickets for a concert by the Chicago Phil- harmonic. “I just didn’t have the courage to say that I would not go to the concert,” Golda explained. After all, she knew that she’d meet them the next day. But Ben-Gurion canceled the lunch because “somebody who could not come to listen to him speak is not deserving of having him as a guest.”

Abashed, Golda vowed never to be unworthy again. She dropped out of teachers’ college. What was the point of preparing for a career when she would soon join a collective farm in Palestine? The mounting reports of the hardships and dangers facing young Zionists there only made the prospect more tantalizing. Craving release from the anger and humilia- tion she’d felt facing Cossacks, Golda imagined herself fighting off the fellahin, the Arab peasants, and striking a blow for Jewish indepen- dence.

“The truth is that I didn’t have exact information, but I knew very clearly what I wanted,” Golda recalled years later. “My mind is not so complicated.”

Unfortunately, Morris’ was. He was searching for the meaning of life, not Jewish liberation. And he dreamed of a quiet life of children and fam- ily in America, not in some malarial swamp.

Golda tried reason, persuasion, and manipulation. When all else failed, she resorted to the tactic that would become a staple in her arse- nal, an ultimatum: Move to Palestine with me or there will be no wed- ding. There was something hard in that ultimatum, a blindness or deep indifference to who Morris was, to anything but what she wanted.

Sheyna, with whom Golda had mended fences, was appalled. “I don’t want to shatter your dreams,” she wrote from Denver. “I know what it means. But, Goldie, don’t you think there is a middle field for idealism right here on the spot?”

Morris refused to be blackmailed, and, in a snit, Golda accepted an invitation from the Chicago chapter of Poale to work in their office. But after a few months, like almost everyone in Golda’s life, he gave in. In the fall of 1917, he offered to move to Palestine with her if she would marry him immediately.

On the day before Christmas 1917, a small group of friends and family gathered at the home of Golda’s parents to witness the ceremony. Golda had no bridesmaids, no caterer, and no fancy dress. In keeping with her self-image as a pioneer, she wore a plain gray crepe de chine outfit—“the plainest of plain,” as she described it—and Bluma served boiled potatoes, herring, and sponge cake. But for once, Golda bowed to her mother’s wishes, forgoing a civil ceremony for a rabbi and a chuppah.

To Golda’s dismay, and Morris’ relief, the young couple couldn’t leave immediately for Palestine because all transatlantic passenger service had been canceled for the duration of the war. They had time, then, time to save money for the trip, to develop as a couple, to establish a routine. Time, in Morris’ fantasy, for Golda to change her mind.

To any objective observer, that was unlikely since the dream of a Jewish homeland seemed tantalizingly close to fruition. The British foreign sec- retary, Arthur James Balfour, had just issued a letter announcing a new foreign policy initiative. “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” he wrote,” and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this objective.”

The declaration was, in part, a gift to Chaim Weizmann, a British Jewish chemist who’d developed a new process to synthesize acetone, an essential component in the production of cordite essential for the am- munition Britain needed to win the war. Lord Balfour had asked what

payment Weizmann wanted in return for use of his process. A national home for my people, he replied.

Balfour’s letter was an extraordinary document in which “one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third,” as author Arthur Koestler put it. But the British weren’t quite as brazen as Koestler and most Zionists thought. The declaration contained a clear caveat: nothing should be done in pursuit of that homeland which might preju- dice the
rights
of existing communities in Palestine.

Morris painted signs when he could find work, and Golda found a job at the Lapham Park Library for 20 cents an hour. But they never spent much time together. There was always a Zionist emergency. Faced with a weekly newspaper that was bleeding money, the Poale board debated whether to close it. Undaunted by either finances or lack of manpower, Golda proposed that they turn it into a daily—and volunteered to do more work.

When the American Jewish Congress was organized, she campaigned tirelessly for Zionist delegates. Shortly before the community election, Golda and her cohort showed up at a major synagogue and asked to speak. The synagogue leadership refused, so Golda waited for the service to end and then stood on a bench outside to harangue the congregants filtering out. “My fellow brethren, it is painful to hinder you as you leave a holy place. It is not us but rather your leaders who are guilty for this. The president and the members who closed the door in my face are to blame.”

A fish out of the Zionist waters, Morris had married a movement. At least three nights a week, Golda was at Poale meetings and rarely got home before midnight. When she was home, her activist friends were constantly stopping by to continue a political argument, organize a rally, or chat.

And it only got worse after Golda was elected as a Milwaukee delegate to the American Jewish Congress convention called to develop a unified American Jewish position for the Paris Peace Conference. The Zionist de-

mand that Britain be given a mandate over the old Turkish territory of Pal- estine and use it to fulfill the Balfour pledge had deeply divided the Jewish community. Fearing that support for a Jewish state would prompt govern- ments to question their loyalty, most of America’s most prominent Jews— German-Jewish bankers and lawyers, rabbis and politicians—vehemently opposed what they called “the segregation of the Jews as a nationalistic unit in any country.”

As she always would, Golda listened silently for hours before she spoke. But when she finally rose to her feet, the young girl from Milwau- kee brought the Congress to a hush. “I tell you her mouth was gold,” said Tuchman. “Every time Goldie opened her mouth, it had an impact somewhere.”

* * *

Just twenty years old, Golda had found her calling. “I tell you that some moments reached such heights that after them one could have died happy,” she wrote Morris. “You should have been in the Hall when the resolution for Palestine was adopted. There were only two votes against it. . . . I didn’t miss a single session.” To Regina, she said simply, “This is the life for me!”

Impressed by Golda’s fire, national Poale Zion asked Golda to become a traveling fund-raiser and organizer. Without a moment’s hesitation, she quit her job at the library and signed on. Morris complained quietly, both to Golda and to their friends. Her father was more vocal: “A few minutes after the wedding, you are leaving your husband and going?” he yelled. “Who leaves a new husband and goes on the road?”

Golda’s response was curt. “At Poale Zion, whatever I was asked to do I did,” she said. “The party said I had to go, so I went.”

The party, of course, did not order Golda to go. She wanted to go. So her relationship with Morris was reduced to a series of postcards, from Cleveland and Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Buffalo, and Youngstown. At times Golda nagged him about taking care of himself. But most of her

communiqués were too brief for intimacy and suggested that she re- mained oblivious to Morris’ disinterest in her cause.

“Dearest, I arrived in Buffalo last night,” she wrote. “I got a very warm reception. Chaverim are waiting for me now to take me to Niagara Falls I

expect to do quite a bit here. Will write more later. Your, Goldie.”

While she crisscrossed the country, Morris decorated the house with framed magazine photographs and buried himself in the public library. When she came home, she always found fresh flowers waiting for her. And while she raced from meeting to meeting, he shopped, cooked, and cleaned—for Golda and the dozens of her
chaverim,
comrades, who were constantly in the house.

In the midst of her travels, her organizing work, and her frantic ar- rangements for their departure for Palestine, Golda got pregnant and had an abortion. No documents remain indicating whether she told Morris, either about the pregnancy or about the termination. But she confided, as always, in her big sister, explaining crisply that her Zionist obligations simply did not leave room for a child.

Sheyna was far from supportive:

I was hurt and angered to the outmost depths to learn that you people did it. And taking all your “considerations” into consideration I still cannot see any good, strong reason for it. You are not sick, you have no defect. Your poverty I think is also a matter of mismanagement . . . and your social activities remind me [of ] society ladies. They too cannot bear children, for it will take them away from their activities. . . . If you were really in earnest about your nationalism and mean the well- fair
[sic]
of your nation, you are the ones that ought to have children. By the time you’ll be ready to go to Palestine you’ll have a child with you to be brought up on that soil.

Sheyna repeatedly urged Golda to slow down, to stay home, cook the family meals, and take care of her and Morris’ clothes. “It may not sound as independent as a young wife going to work, but you profit by it much

more and you may spare an hour a day in preparing to be a good, wise mother and wife some day. And believe me, Goldie, it will pay not only for your personal well fare [
sic
], but for humanity in general.”

But being a wise mother and wife in Milwaukee had no place in Golda’s plan.

chapter three