Golda (8 page)

* * *

The kibbutz ethos didn’t put much stock in conferences and conven- tions. Sweat, toil, blisters, and calluses were the coin of that realm, not lofty rhetoric. No one objected, then, when the newcomer offered to represent Merhavia at the first convention of kibbutzim at Kibbutz De- gania. In fact, everyone was relieved they’d found someone willing to attend.

Degania was the mother ship, the lodestar of Labor Zionism. There, the notion of a collective community—no money, no salaries, no private property, no hired workers—became reality. And the convention was filled with the leading figures in the Second Aliyah, Golda’s Zionist icons: David Ben-Gurion, general secretary of the new Histadrut, the General Federation of Laborers; Levi Eshkol, leader of Degania’s spin- off, Degania Bet; Berl Katznelson, the philosopher king of the move- ment and the strategic genius behind the new worker’s party, Ahdut HaAvoda, Unity of Labor; David Remez, one of Katznelson’s hand- picked geniuses, who went on to help draft the declaration of indepen- dence.

Those were heady days in Palestine, as the
yishuv,
the Jewish com- munity, laid the first building blocks of an independent Jewish nation. Although Jews might be decades from having their own country, men like Ben-Gurion and Katznelson were already locked in struggle for control over the
yishuv
’s current realities and the shape of the future nation.

Surrounded by Palestine’s luminaries, and halting, at best, in Hebrew, the language of all respectable pioneers, Golda was awed into silence. Just once did she dare address the group—to defend the honor of kibbutz kitchen work. “Why is giving food to people no less an honor than giving food to cows?” she asked, in Yiddish, repeating the argument she made endlessly at Merhavia. “It’s bad enough you speak Yiddish in Tel Aviv,” one of Degania’s founders scolded her. “In Degania, no.” The female delegates, veterans of the struggle for gender equality, booed. Golda burst out into tears.

It was the second time she had been slapped down by her idols, the first time by Ben-Gurion in Milwaukee. She straightened her spine and vowed to show them what she was made of.

The chicken coop didn’t feel very exciting after the gathering at Dega- nia, and Morris had fallen into depression, worn down both by work and by Golda’s indifference to his needs. To make matters worse, he was suf- fering from malaria despite the quinine pills served with the chickpea mush for breakfast.

“Ah, Palestine, Palestine, you beggarly little land, what will become of you?” he wrote his mother. “How ironic sound the lovely words at Poale Zion meetings about a free workers’ Palestine.”

But Golda had caught a glimpse of the Palestine she wanted to be part of and ignored Morris’ complaints. Careful to phrase her offer as another selfless act rather than as ambition, she suggested to her com- rades that she represent Merhavia at another meeting, of the Moetzet HaPoalot, the Women Workers’ Council. Everyone but Morris seemed happy to see her go.

The Council had been created a decade earlier to develop new

approaches to female employment, child care, and the training of female construction and agricultural workers. After World War I, it was clear they hadn’t made much headway. Irate at the continuing resistance to women’s equality, Ada Maimon, a Women’s Council activist, decided to force the issue at the founding convention of the Histadrut, the new worker’s cooperative organization launched by Ben-Gurion. She publicly demanded that the women’s group be merged into the Histadrut and be guaranteed representation on its executive bodies. If Ben-Gurion refused, she threatened, the Council would run a separate list of candidates in the next Histadrut election.

An uneasy alliance of a dozen divergent ideological tendencies and competing power blocs, the Histadrut exercised only precarious con- trol over Jewish workers. If Maimon carried out her threat, she might embolden a dozen other interest groups, from the Orthodox to the Ye- menites, to follow suit, undermining the hegemony of the Labor Party leadership. So Ben-Gurion bowed to Maimon’s demands, assuming the women could be more easily controlled from within than from without.

By the time Golda became involved in the Council, the women of the Second Aliyah, who’d envisioned a strong, independent body speaking boldly for workingwomen, were in open rebellion. Only the newer arrivals seemed content to be the Ladies’ Auxiliary that Ben-Gurion hoped for.

Golda made her own sentiments crystal clear at the second Histadrut conference, held in Haifa in 1923. “It is a sad and shameful fact that we are forced to create a special organization to deal with matters of the woman worker,” she submitted. The goal, she said, should be for the Council to become redundant.

Maimon and the other women were livid at the heresy, especially coming from a delegate allegedly representing the Council. Ben-Gurion, Remez, and Katznelson, on the other hand, were dazzled. Golda had made her first bid for membership in the boys’ club.

Back home at Merhavia, she was greeted with grumbling, the other

members growing impatient with her absences and her requests for new dresses or sandals for outside meetings. So when the leadership of Ah- dut, Ben-Gurion’s political party, asked her to accompany a prominent British suffragist married to a member of the British Parliament on a tour around Jewish Palestine, she demurred. Hobnobbing with the wife of a British grandee didn’t seem important enough to risk the wrath of her comrades. But Berl Katznelson himself appeared at Merhavia to persuade her. Golda was beside herself; she’d been noticed by the sage, the father figure to whom Ben-Gurion himself deferred. No kibbutznik could deny him.

By the time Golda returned, Morris had reached his limit. When she broached the subject of having children, he offered
her
an ultimatum: If you want kids, we’re leaving. Or at least that was one of several stories that Golda offered up over the years. The other was that she, the dutiful wife, left her beloved kibbutz because Morris’ health was in serious jeopardy. “For him, I made the greatest sacrifice of my life,” she told Oriana Fallaci in a 1972 interview. “You see, there was nothing more I loved than the kibbutz. I loved everything about it—working with my hands, the social life, lack of materialism . . . but he was not able to tolerate it—physically or psychologically.”

* * *

Golda hadn’t left Milwaukee to become a Tel Aviv housewife, but that’s where she ended up, living with Sheyna and working as a part-time ca- shier for Solel Boneh, Histadrut’s building cooperative. Morris assumed that he and Golda would soon return to America. No matter how miser- able she was, though, Golda wasn’t budging beyond the Mediterranean Sea. The two were barely speaking.

Their friends wondered how long the couple could keep going, or why they tried. Golda insisted theirs was an unbreakable emotional bond. “Ours was a great love,” she said. “It lasted from the day we met till the day he died.” Her friend Marie Syrkin didn’t buy that romantic

argument. “To her affection for Morris was added a sense of guilt,” Syrkin wrote. “On account of her he had become deracinated and emotionally dependent. She was bound by his bondage.”

Despite Golda’s protestations of devotion to Morris, in Tel Aviv she began seeing other men, and soon the gossipy
yishuv
was alive with ru- mors that Golda was involved with an older man, who later worked as a physician in Tel Aviv, and that something had sparked between her and David Remez, one of the Histadrut leaders she’d met at Kibbutz Dega- nia. Always discreet about her personal life, Golda never talked about the physician, Remez, or any of the other men in her life. “I was no nun,” was all she would say. “There are people who generally don’t talk about their intimate affairs, and I am one of them.”

Remez had been Golda’s sponsor into movement circles and he had arranged for her employment at Solel Boneh. Shortly after she began working there—perhaps tellingly—he offered Morris a job at Solel’s office in Jerusalem. For several months, he saw Golda only if he commuted down to Tel Aviv and nagged Golda about finding a job closer to him. She resisted until she discovered that she was pregnant. Again, Remez saved her by giving her a transfer to Morris’ office.

For most Jews, Jerusalem is the golden city, the emotional center of the Jewish universe. It was from Jerusalem that Saul, David, and Solo- mon ruled, and the old Temple wall had been a magnet for the Jewish imagination for centuries. But Golda couldn’t stand it. Where others saw historical continuity, she saw religion, superstition, and defeat. Jerusalem was the Jewish past. Her eyes were on the Jewish future.

Nonetheless trapped, she left Tel Aviv, and she and Morris rented two rooms with an outside tin shack for a kitchen and a toilet in the backyard in a shabby neighborhood near the Orthodox quarter of Mea Shearim. For light, they had a smoky kerosene lamp. The cistern water was so foul that it had to be boiled.

Solel Boneh, their new employer, was collapsing, a detail Remez had neglected to share. Morris, Golda, and the rest of the office staff kept

working, but they were usually paid in
mashbit,
credit slips, that few mer- chants accepted. On payday, Golda was forced to negotiate endlessly with grocers in the hope they would give her 80 piasters’ worth of margarine and flour for a one-pound chit.

Golda’s plight wasn’t unique. The
yishuv
was reeling economically, the number of immigrants too great to absorb. A handful of viable farms had been created, but industry was primitive. And despite the pressure of the Histadrut, even Jewish businessmen preferred Arab workers to Jewish ones, who expected higher wages.

For Golda and Morris, things grew desperate once Menachem was born, on November 23, 1924, because Golda stopped working. “They were practically starving,” recalled Regina. “The question wasn’t ever what to cook but that there should be enough to cook!” Sheyna sent up boxes of fruit and vegetables from Tel Aviv. But more than once, the neighbors watched Golda weep because she had no money for oil.

They eased the financial crisis by taking in a boarder, but they were still left with the stark reality that their marriage was a disaster. Morris loved Jerusalem, which captured his poetic imagination. The city might lack cafés packed with socialists arguing whether Israel could avoid the class struggle, but it had a small opera company and plenty of dusty bookstores. Most important, he had a wife at home and a beauti- ful son.

Golda felt like her grandmother, living in poverty in a grimy slum, sur- rounded by Orthodox Jews who thought Zionism was an affront to God. Or her mother, stuck with a hapless husband who could never earn a liv- ing. “In Jerusalem I was a sort of prisoner,” she wrote. “Instead of actively helping build the Jewish national home and working hard and produc- tively for it, I found myself cooped up in a tiny apartment.”

The Zionist action was in Tel Aviv, and Golda struggled to keep her contacts there. When her parents arrived in 1926 and began building a house in Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv, she made the long trek down the Judean Hills frequently. But weekend doses of politics weren’t enough,

and Golda finally decided to return to Merhavia, taking six-month-old Menachem with her. Morris didn’t bother trying to change her mind.

But her old comrades did not greet Golda with open arms, chiding that their kibbutz wasn’t a shelter for women running from broken mar- riages. Golda had dreamed of losing herself in toil. Instead, the work committee assigned her to work as the
mitapelet,
the kibbutz nanny, to care for five children, day and night. Within six months, she was back in Jerusalem, and the ever-patient Morris.

Golda was trapped, and the birth of a daughter in May 1926 cinched the noose tighter. Sarah was sickly and needed medicine, Morris’ wages were unpredictable, and Golda could feel all of her dreams evaporating.

When she and Morris couldn’t find the money for Menachem’s nurs- ery school tuition, Golda took in the school’s laundry, spending hours boiling water by lamplight, soaking and scrubbing towels, aprons, and dia- pers in the bathtub in the living room. Finally, she swallowed her pride and accepted a job as an English teacher at a private school.

In Golda’s account, just when she was about to hit rock bottom, she happened into Remez and, out of the thin air, he offered her a job as sec- retary of Moetzet HaPoalot, based in Tel Aviv. “They were interested in the services of someone like myself,” she wrote. “I had already worked in Tel Aviv for Solel Boneh and had gone on working for it—though only briefly—in Jerusalem.”

It was an odd explanation since Golda had been nothing more than a cashier in the Tel Aviv office of Solel Boneh, so insignificant that years later, her boss could barely remember her. The truth was that Golda was the Histadrut’s solution to their recurrent problems with the obstreperous women of the Council. Despite Ben-Gurion’s promises, not a single woman was serving on any of Histadrut’s major policy bodies and wage discrimination remained rampant. The men of the Histadrut were trying to turn the Women’s Council into a female enclave while remaining the gatekeepers of who could leave it to enter the establishment, and its leader, Maimon, had resigned in disgust.

When Remez ran into Golda, the Histadrut leaders were frantically searching for her replacement, for an obedient woman who’d allow the Histadrut and the Ahdut Party that controlled it to set the Council’s pri- orities and keep it loyal to the emerging establishment. The young Amer- ican was the answer to their problem.

chapter four