Golda (9 page)

Not being beautiful forced me to develop my inner resources.

The pretty girl has a handicap to overcome.

I

f Jerusalem represented the resignation of the shtetl, for Golda, Tel Aviv sung with the vibrancy of the new Jew. Rothschild Boulevard was turning into the city’s own Hyde Park, where heated discussions about Russian politics competed with pronouncements about the perils of capi- talism and a dozen competing ploys for forcing the British to fulfill the promise of the Balfour Declaration. The entrepreneurial energy of the 34,000 immigrants of the Fourth Aliyah exploded into rows of book- stores, haberdasheries, cafés, and cinemas. In the shimmering light of the desert, Golda left behind Morris and the drudgery of a babushka to throw

herself into that future.

Except for the waking minutes she had to spend on Menachem and Sarah. That conundrum Golda wrote about two years later in a collection of stories by pioneer women:

Taken as a whole, the inner struggles and the despairs of the mother who goes to work are without parallel in human experience. But within

that whole there are many shades and variations. There are some mothers who work only when they are forced to. . . . In such cases, the mother feels her course of action justified by compulsion. . . . But there is a type of woman who cannot remain home for other reasons. . . . Her nature and being demand something more. . . . She cannot let her children narrow her horizon. And for such a woman, there is no rest. . . .

She of course has the great advantage of being able to develop. . . . Therefore, she can bring more to her children than if she were to remain at home. . . . But one look of reproach from the little one when the mother goes away and leaves it with a stranger is enough to throw down the whole structure of vindication. . . .

Having admitted all this, we ask: Can the mother of today remain at home all day with her children? Can she compel herself to be other than she is because she had become a mother? . . . Can we today mea- sure our devotion to husband and children by our indifference to ev- erything else? . . . If a woman does remain exclusively with her children and gives herself to nothing else, does that really prove that she is more devoted than the conventional mother?

Golda’s plaint was more than a tad disingenuous, or perhaps self-delud- ing, for she was no ordinary working mother. She didn’t go off to work for eight or ten hours to keep her mind lively or make a minor contribution to her society. She made her play to become somebody by throwing her- self into an unending series of meetings and caucuses, conventions, strat- egy sessions, and tactical debates.

Menachem, five, and Sarah, three, were enrolled in a kindergarten run by the labor movement and picked up after school by their babysitter, who fed them and put them to bed. If Golda didn’t make it home by midnight, which she usually didn’t, the nanny slept over. Weekends provided no re- spite because Golda didn’t have weekends. Her schedule was so tight that she made appointments to take her children to concerts and the cinema.

Although Golda knew that her departure from Jerusalem meant the

end of her marriage, Morris kept up the pretense, or perhaps the hope. He painted the furniture in the children’s new room, created whimsical decorations, and faithfully showed up every Saturday morning to cook them breakfast. All day he read to them, filled the apartment with music, took them for walks, and made their favorite fudge.

“Morris was father and mother to their children,” said Judy Shapiro, Golda’s old friend from Chicago.

Clara, Golda’s younger sister, who had stayed in the United States, praised Golda for being a warm and loving mother “when she was around. But she wasn’t always around.”

In fact, she was almost never around.

Golda’s time wasn’t sapped by the Women’s Council, for hers was a minor job in which she had little interest. “I never had sympathy for the women’s organizations as such,” she acknowledged later in life. But the Histadrut was the heart of the revolution, what Katznelson called one of the world’s greatest revolutionary movements, the “plot on which contem- porary Jewish history hinges,” as he put it. And her Council position gave Golda entrée to that crusade.

When Ben-Gurion created the Histadrut, he went the Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies, one better. Israel would not only have
one big union
that would guarantee workers the right to strike, de- cent wages, vacation, and sick leave. It would have a labor movement that would also be the economic engine fueling the national economy and controlling the means of production. Eight years after its founding, His- tadrut was already Palestine’s biggest employer, producing one-third of the gross
yishuv
product.

The rest of the world might have been skeptical about the prospect of an independent Jewish country in Palestine. But inside Histadrut head- quarters, the new nation was already taking shape. From its small offices in a low red building downtown, Ben-Gurion limned the outlines of the future state, David Remez struggled to revive a dead language that had no words for “bulldozer” or “road sign,” and Levi Eshkol searched for water for new settlements.

Golda was the most junior member of that coterie, but she quickly proved herself to be more than the expected lackey. Every year, the His- tadrut sent representatives on fund-raising tours across America, an expe- rience that most Zionist revolutionaries found so painful that volunteers had become impossible to recruit. To Palestine’s Eastern European so- cialists, the Jewish residents of the fat capitalist land, comfortable and complacent, were anathema, and they hadn’t proven all that generous.

Pontificating either in Yiddish or in heavily accented English with flowery Eastern European prose out of step with the American vernacu- lar, few of the visitors from Palestine managed to fire American passions. They were too out of touch with the local zeitgeist and too contemptuous of “dollar land,” as Manya Shohat, one of the first Histadrut emissaries, called the United States.

Golda, however, was, by upbringing, an American Zionist. Unschooled in lofty Eastern European rhetoric, she knew the American audience, where their fears and dreams lay buried, what made their emotions van- quish their intellects. Nonetheless, the first time she was sent back to the United States as a Histadrut emissary, when she rose to the podium to address the closing session of the launch of the annual 1928 tour, her knees trembled as she faced an audience of 585 delegates. She was thirty years old and hadn’t been in the United States in seven years.

In a plain dress with her hair pulled back in a low bun, she spoke in a monotone with little cadence. But instead of high-minded platitudes, the delegates heard a young woman paint a picture of the struggles of Jewish workers in Palestine bravely fighting off Arabs, facing down the British, to keep themselves—and the Jews of the world—safe for another generation. She didn’t bully the delegates—that would come later. She didn’t berate them for staying comfortable on the western shore of the Statue of Lib- erty. Unlike her predecessors, she simply reached out her hand.

“The Palestinian workers have begun to dig a tunnel to reach their American brothers,” she said, “and . . . the American Jewish workers have heard the chop of our hammers. . . . The wall of separation is being bro- ken down and the union is coming.”

The applause was long and fervid, the reviews fantastic. Golda quickly became the most popular Histadrut liaison to the United States.

But the situation back home in Palestine distracted Golda and the rest of the leadership from tasks like fund-raising and nation building. While she was gone, well-organized Arab groups had seized control over the Western Wall and attacked Jewish settlements near Jerusalem. In He- bron, they went house to house, hacking at women and children with hatchets. The violence spread to Safed in the north and the Gaza Strip. For six days, the British had allowed the mob frenzy, the first serious ji- had in the region, to continue. By the time it was quelled, 135 Jews were dead, more than 300 wounded.

Anxious to be more than the Histadrut’s token female, Golda didn’t go home to unpack or check on the children but went directly to a gathering point for the Haganah, the Jewish self-defense force created clandestinely after the 1921 riot, to help resist the rioting she called a pogrom.

Although the Haganah didn’t need her, a woman with no military training, the Histadrut did, and the leadership knew it. Her popularity in the United States became her entry ticket to the upper echelon. She might have lacked the education or intellectual heft of the men around her—Ben-Gurion and Remez, after all, had studied law in Istanbul, and Moshe Sharett, the emerging
yishuv
diplomat, had studied at the London School of Economics. But her perfect Yiddish and American English, and her power over an audience, made her their most formidable transla- tor and emissary. In 1930, when Ben-Gurion’s dream of a united labor political party came true with the merger of his Ahdut HaAvoda party and Hapoel Hatzair into Eretz Yisrael Workers’ Party, to be known as Mapai, Golda proudly sat in the hall as a delegate.

Within months, however, she was off again, to the Conference of So- cialist Women in England, looking for friends for the Jewish community in Palestine. The British government was dragging its feet on the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, and the
yishuv
sent emissaries to every pos- sible forum to drum up political support for their cause.

Later in the year, she returned to London as a Histadrut delegate to

the annual Imperial Labour Conference, this time with Ben-Gurion. BG, as everyone called him, was a difficult person, diffident and unyield- ing, and Golda was still nervous around him. At the meeting, Ben-Gur- ion spoke first and was promptly shouted down by scores of Arab delegates. “Don’t waste your breath,” he told Golda when it came time for her to address the gathering. But she refused to be cowed.

“I trembled at her daring words,” Ben-Gurion reported in
Hapoel Hat- zair
newspaper. “Her speech shook the convention. She spoke with ge- nius, assertively, bitterly, with hurt, and sensibly. Although I had heard of her success in the women’s convention and other gatherings arranged for her by the labor movement in different places, her speech was a great surprise to me.”

Within a year of her departure from Jerusalem, Golda was a traveling celebrity. She spoke in cities all across the United States, hammering away at her message and raising sorely needed funds. In Great Britain, she won the backing of members of British cooperative societies. In Brus- sels, she wooed the big shots of the Socialist International, including Leon Blum, who was to become France’s first Socialist and Jewish prime minister.

Back home, Golda became firmly established as the sole woman in the old boys’ club, a fixture among the senior movers and shakers. Always with her trademark unfiltered Chesterfield cigarette in her hand, she never missed a meeting or discussion, anxiously catching up after a monthlong absence lest she be sidelined.

Menachem and Sarah paid a high price for her success. Late one night, Golda was chairing a meeting at Histadrut headquarters that ran on and on, as labor meetings did, often not breaking up until the early morning. People wandered in and out for coffee, for caucuses, for breaks from the dense cloud of cigarette smoke. At home, the babysitter was long gone, having been told that Golda would return early. For hours, Sarah and Menachem entertained themselves by singing songs. Finally, restless and worried, they wandered over to the Histadrut building and silently took seats on a bench. Wrapped up in argument, Golda didn’t notice

them until she called a vote and realized that two of the hands she was counting as FOR belonged to her own children.

“She did these things because she felt it was her duty,” said Menachem in later years, stoically defending his mother. “She would always say, ‘If you want things, you have to go and do them.’ But if we really needed her, she was always there.” Sarah, who’d been born with serious kidney prob- lems and was regularly confined to bed, never became that sanguine, admitting that she was “orphaned of my mother.”

Perhaps the most telling glimpse into what they both felt was how viv- idly they remember the excitement they experienced when Golda was felled by one of her regular migraines. “Even though she was sick, we were happy just to have her home,” Sarah recalled.

Morris, Sheyna, and Bluma picked up the slack when Golda was gone, often for months at a time. But furious at Golda’s neglect of her offspring, Sheyna finally fired off a particularly pointed letter to Golda in Brussels about the importance of motherhood and the relative insignifi- cance of her outside work.

“Believe me, I know I will not bring the Messiah, but I think that we must miss no opportunity to explain what we want and what we are to influential people,” Golda shot back. “I ask only one thing, that I be un- derstood and believed. My social activities are not an accidental thing: they are an absolute necessity for me. I am hurt when Morris and others say that this is all superficial, that I am trying to be modern. It is silly. Do I have to justify myself ?”

While Sheyna berated Golda for the family aspect of her private life, Golda was simultaneously dogged by gossip about its intimate side. The
yishuv
was like a small town, with scuttlebutt the currency of social cohe- sion. The neighbors were too nosy, the culture too ingrown for anyone to have much privacy. Ben-Gurion’s affair with Rivka Katznelson, the editor of the monthly magazine of the Histadrut, for example, was an open se- cret, as his relationships with a string of other women would become over the years. Outside the religious community, such affairs rarely caused much scandal unless they led to the breakup of a marriage.

But as the only woman in the political hierarchy, Golda was subject to a different standard. Gossip spread that she was “easy to get,” recalled Aviva Passow, the daughter of one of Golda’s oldest friends. People snig- gered at her nickname, the Mattress. “Men have always been good to me,” Golda commented. “I’ve always moved within a circle of intellec- tual giants. I’ve always been appreciated and loved.” Those in the know put it differently: she was sleeping her way to power.