Golda (21 page)

Jerusalem after house-to-house fighting. Every attempt by the new Israel Defense Force to dislodge Arab troops from Latrun, which dominated the Jerusalem–Tel Aviv road, was failing. And the Syrians controlled much of the Galilee.

Even if the fledgling state had been triumphing on all fronts, Golda would have balked at her new assignment. For three decades, she’d dreamed of throwing herself into the nitty-gritty of building a Jewish homeland. Negotiating with the Russians on its behalf felt like a poor substitute, no matter how critical Ben-Gurion deemed such diplomatic negotiations to be.

As she was considering how to convince Sharett to send someone else, a car struck her cab and Golda was rammed forward, twisting her right leg, which had not healed correctly after it was hit by a cart during her time at Merhavia. She wound up at New York Hospital for Joint Dis- eases.

The accident could not have been more perfectly timed, or at least that’s what Golda initially thought. Since Sharett and Ben-Gurion were anxious to get their new ambassador to Moscow quickly, she had an ideal excuse for suggesting that someone else be sent. But her hopes were quickly dashed. Forget it, Sharett cabled from Israel. Her name had al- ready been submitted to the Russians and the press notified. No matter what, Golda was going to Moscow. Soon.

But Golda’s recovery was anything but swift. Although her leg began to heal, she developed phlebitis and blood clots. And as she lingered in her hospital bed, her illness sparked a minor political scandal. Mapam, the Marxist Zionist party, decided that her leg problem was a “diplomatic illness” staged by Ben-Gurion to delay an exchange of ministers with Moscow to allow the U.S. ambassador to arrive in Israel before the Soviet ambassador and become the dean of the diplomatic corps.

Under pressure from both Mapam and the Soviets, who had decided to feel snubbed, Sharett barraged Golda with cables only partially dis- guised as polite inquiries about the state of her health. HOW DO YOU FEEL? WHEN CAN YOU LEAVE NEW YORK?

He also contrived a way to deal with the rumor that Golda was still hoping to wiggle out of the Moscow assignment. “DO YOU HAVE ANY OBJECTION TO APPOINTMENT OF SARAH AND ZECHARIAH AS RADIO OPERATORS IN MOSCOW EMBASSY?” he asked in a

cable. Her daughter and fiancé, still in danger in the Negev, had become hostage to Golda’s speedy recovery.

The onslaught from Tel Aviv, coupled with Golda’s innate sense of indispensability, wore her down. Although her doctors strongly advised against it, she packed up her belongings and flew back to Tel Aviv, leav- ing herself with permanent leg problems.

When Golda and her staff gathered in Prague for their flight to Mos- cow, there was none of the giddy anticipation they might have felt if they’d been opening an embassy in Paris or Washington. Half the em- bassy staff had personal recollections of life inside what had become the Soviet Union, and several had relatives there. Golda herself was still haunted by memories of hunger and pogroms. And for her as a socialist, the Soviet Union was a graveyard of dreams of justice, egalitarianism, and freedom.

But in the schizophrenic world of war and diplomacy, the Soviet Union had proven a friend to Israel, an abrupt change of course for a county that had supported the Arabs, albeit halfheartedly, for three de- cades. The Soviets, however, were less interested in bolstering the Arabs than in ensuring that the British left the Middle East, and partition seemed the only strategy guaranteed to rid the region of Western pow- ers.

So when the United Nations began debating the partition of Palestine, Soviet delegate Andrei Gromyko had set himself up as a staunch sup- porter of a Jewish homeland. “The heavy sacrifices of the Jewish people during the tyranny of Hitlerites in Europe emphasize the necessity and justify the demands of the Jews to create their own independent state in Palestine,” he said.

The Soviet Union became the second country to grant official recog- nition to the provisional Israeli government, after Guatemala. And

Moscow had demonstrated its friendship in more concrete ways, arrang- ing to sell the new state arms through Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia while the United States maintained an embargo against arms sales in the region.

Although strongly pro-Western, Ben-Gurion and Sharett believed that Israel’s survival depended on staying aloof from the Cold War. The mili- tary tide was turning, leaving Israel in firm control of the lower Galilee from Haifa to Lake Kinneret. Although they had been stalled in their at- tempts to retake Old Jerusalem, the IDF had stopped the Egyptian drive toward Tel Aviv. But the shaky truce negotiated in mid-July seemed un- likely to hold and they’d already fought off one attempt by the United Nations to reshape Israel into a small fragment of what they’d been prom- ised in partition. So they couldn’t afford to be ideologically picky about its friends. If Israel were to survive in a hostile neighborhood, they needed to build strategic bridges to a powerful country sending clear signals of amicability. Golda, they hoped, their most forceful emissary to the out- side world, could be their architect.

So forty years after she and her family fled, Golda was returning with food in her belly, credentials as the minister plenipotentiary of a Jewish state, and a dizzyingly contradictory mission. On one hand, Is- rael was counting on her to build on those tentative signs of solidarity. On the other, she was to pry open the floodgates that would allow hun- dreds of thousands of Russian Jews to join the new exodus to the strug- gling state.

With no experience in diplomacy—an actual aversion to diplomacy— and only a halting knowledge of Russian, Golda was afraid that she wasn’t up to the task. She needn’t have worried. Stalin’s seeming support for Is- rael had been little more than a ploy to remove Great Britain from a strategic region.

“The Jews in the civilized world are not a nation,” Lenin taught. “The best Jews, those who are celebrated in world history, and have given the world foremost leaders of democracy and socialism, have never clamored against assimilation.” Stalin had already decided that no matter their

inclination, the Jews of the Soviet Union would be the Leninesque best Jews in the world.

* * *

The Soviet Foreign Ministry had ordered the Ministry of State Security to perform a background check on Golda, and after checking synagogue re- cords and conducting interviews, the Ukrainian secret police gave her a clean bill of political health. Two of her aides were deemed to have “anti- Soviet propensities.” Nonetheless, Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Mikhailov- ich Molotov approved their appointments, seemingly ignoring the State Security warning that the entire staff had been ordered “to establish con- tact with Jews in the Soviet Union and find the way to involve them in active pan-Zionist activity.”

The Israeli Foreign Ministry had no budget yet, and the staff had all agreed to work for free, in exchange for housing, food, and cigarettes. Perhaps moved by that seeming idealism, or, more likely, by her own fer- vor, Golda had decided to run the embassy like a kibbutz.

But the Hotel Metropole, where they were delivered on September 2 and would remain until the Foreign Ministry found them a permanent home, looked nothing like a kibbutz. Reserved exclusively for foreign- ers, the posh art-nouveau edifice—the Tower of Babel, as Muscovites called the Metropole when it opened in 1901—dripped with thick Ori- ental carpets and huge cut-glass chandeliers, a stark contrast to the austerity of Israel. When Golda saw the first hotel bill, she panicked. The price of diplomacy was too high for a country without a function- ing treasury. She grabbed Lou Kaddar, who’d been chosen to serve as her translator and aide, and went shopping for hot plates, butter, eggs, bread, and sausages. Borrowing crockery and cutlery from the hotel, since none was for sale in Moscow’s half-empty shops, she instructed her staff to take only breakfast in the dining room and fend for them- selves for lunch and dinner. Golda even set up a makeshift kitchen in her bathroom so she could cook Sabbath dinner for the single members of her staff.

Making do was the watchword in Moscow, late 1948. With Russia’s farms and industry decimated by the German invasion and Stalin’s col- lectivization, food was scarce, consumer goods nonexistent.

“What were they thinking, sending an old woman like Golda to a place like Russia after the war, to a devastated country?” thought Kaddar, who was thirty-five years old to Golda’s fifty.

But the tiny diplomatic community took the Israelis under their wings, although not without causing some discomfort. The British consul in Je- rusalem had warned his counterpart in Moscow that Golda was a “tough American Trades Union and Labour boss . . . not over intelligent but honest.” When she appeared on the scene, the Moscow consulate wrote back that she lost no time “circularizing the whole of the Diplomatic Corps. This has caused some flutter amongst those of my diplomatic col- leagues, and they are the majority, who have not recognized the State of Israel.”

Still, the French told Kaddar where to find the best
kolkhozes,
farmers’ markets, for fresh cabbage, onions, and potatoes. The British shared the addresses of the shops where bread was sold, at a premium, without end- less lines. And the Americans offered the Israeli the handiest gift, the thick catalog of a Danish company that shipped in food and other neces- sities.

At Golda’s request, Kaddar had purchased diplomacy books in Paris. But they offered no advice on Golda’s first protocol crisis, what to wear for the formal presentation of her credentials. During her briefing at the Foreign Ministry, Golda asked what would be appropriate. Male diplo- mats, she was told, wore tails.

Having to worry about things like clothes was precisely the type of nonsense that made Golda despise diplomacy, and she was tempted to don the simple white cotton shift of a female kibbutznik and dub it their “national costume.” But fiercely disciplined, Golda rarely gave in to petty temptations.

At 11 a.m. on September 8, she presented her credentials wearing a black evening dress she’d had made in Tel Aviv, a black velvet turban, and

a $10 strand of fake pearls borrowed from her personal aide. The Foreign Ministry had requested that she deliver her remarks in English, but she refused, snapping, “I am not an Englishwoman or an American.” Her ministry contact explained that they had no official Hebrew translator. Golda offered to bring one of her aides to interpret, a suggestion the So- viets declined. Nonetheless she spoke in Hebrew, knowing full well that the Russians present would have no idea what she was saying.

Settled in and officially credentialed, Golda was ready to work—to hammer out diplomatic agreements, open trade relations, test the waters about Jewish emigration, and make the rounds of Soviet offices to de- velop her contacts. But when she tried to reach out, she discovered that there were no contacts to be made, no diplomatic agreements in the off- ing, and no commercial relations in sight. The Soviets might have fought to receive a high-ranking Israeli ambassador, but they weren’t interested in dealing with her. “From the moment they arrived in Moscow, Israeli diplomats were virtually unemployed,” wrote Uri Bialin, an expert on Is- raeli foreign policy.

Twice, she met with Foreign Minister Molotov, but the conversations were diplomatic niceties, without substance. She put out feelers about loans or other financial assistance, but the Soviet Union was almost as broke as Israel. Mostly, she and her staff were ignored. Israel had nothing to bargain with but its neutrality, and Stalin was already convinced that Israel would become a lackey of the bourgeois imperialists.

“Golda had nothing to do but go from one cocktail party to another,” said Kaddar, recalling the constant round of receptions.

The only relief she found at those dreary events was a petty game of diplomatic rebellion she played with Kaddar. Unaccustomed to speaking through an interpreter, Golda was impatient with Kaddar’s insistence on translating even the most mundane of questions rather than simply an- swering them herself. The first time they attended a social event and Lou asked her, “How did you come to Moscow?” Golda snapped back, “What, you don’t know?”

Over time, Golda began throwing out absurd answers. “We rode white

donkeys,” she responded one day. When a fellow diplomat asked, through Kaddar, “Where are you living?” Golda often said, politely, “In a tent,” or “On the street.”

Golda was exasperated at the utter boredom, and her annoyance was exacerbated by her sense of estrangement from events in Israel. Back home, the truce had collapsed, but the Israeli military had seized the entire Galilee and driven the Egyptians out of the Negev. While the Arab states were still refusing to accept defeat, Israel was on the cusp of the vic- tory the world had assumed it could never achieve. Golda longed to be part of the moment.

Her tedium was compounded by a healthy streak of fear. Inside the hotel, a
smotryashaya po etazhu
sat by the elevator taking notes each time the Israelis left their rooms. When they left the hotel, the militia followed them. The Foreign Ministry sent them drivers and maids, whether Golda requested them or not. She’d brought a driver from Israel, but the For- eign Ministry refused to give him a driver’s license.

Imagining that their rooms were searched when they left the hotel, they took to carrying their important papers with them. And warned that their rooms were bugged, Golda vowed to give the secret police nothing to hear. So if she wanted to have a private conversation with one person, they took a walk. When a large group had to meet, she convened the gathering in her enormous bathroom and turned on the taps, hoping that the noise would ruin any tapes. Every few minutes, Mordechai Namir, the legation counselor, yanked the chain on the old-fashioned toilet, just in case.

Golda could have handled both the monotony and the anxiety. Less sanguine about the possibilities of Soviet friendship than either Sharett or Ben-Gurion, she could even have handled being snubbed by officialdom. But Russia was home to three million Jews, her people, and she needed contact with them, and they with her, she believed, and she needed to open the door to their emigration to Israel.