Golda (55 page)

A woman of greater wisdom might have resigned and let the younger generation battle it out, no matter the cost. A leader of foresight might have told her people everything they didn’t want to hear, that the situa- tion was not sustainable, that a dozen problems were woven into the na- tional fabric, and that they were living on quicksand. A creative prime minister might have devised new approaches to everything from ethnic divisions to peacemaking. And an innovator might have burst the na- tional bubble of arrogant self-confidence by explaining that the political system was ossified or acknowledging that Israelis were not, in fact, the new superheroes.

But the Israelis of the early 1970s weren’t looking for wisdom, fore- sight, creativity, or innovation. They didn’t want to be challenged; they were thrilled to be led by a woman who amplified their smugness. Not-

so-silent coconspirators to the inflexibility and dogmatism they now de- ride, they lauded their prime minister, heaped her with the kind of approval ratings few world leaders could begin to hope for, and cajoled her to remain in power well beyond her day.

“Israeli society, for thirty years, a full generation, refused to look in the mirror,” recalls Yaakov Hasdai, a researcher for the Agranat Commission and founder of Laor. “It looked for any explanation, hopes or dream that would allow them to sleep. . . . Golda was alone at the top. All around her were young Israelis, heroes, each taught to be Superman, and she thought they were.”

When the Yom Kippur Earthquake rocked the national psyche, Israe- lis lashed out at Golda for not sharing their qualms or for allowing them to fester. She ceased to be the courageous leader who led the
yishuv
when all the male leaders were locked away, who faced down the British, raised the money to save the new nation from annihilation, created housing for thousands of new immigrants, drafted the first labor and so- cial security laws, brought them under the protective wing of the United States, and kept faith with their spirit even when their bravest hero’s be- lief in them flagged. She became Golda the Intransigent, who let them down.

After all, it was easier to rewrite history to blame everything on an old lady who was dead than to face inconvenient truths. Golda’s fate, then, was decreed not by the gods, as in ancient Greece, but by historical cir- cumstances, and the hubris of her tale is as much Israel’s as hers.

* * *

In this age of the nonsectarian televised confessional, the tragedy of Golda Meir seems more personal than political. While she became the “somebody” her mother informed her that she never would be, Golda paid an enormous price for her success. Admired by millions at a distance and able to hold audiences spellbound with her American-accented He- brew and her Yiddish-tinged English, she was such a lonely woman that

her security guards took to calling her friends and acquaintances so she wouldn’t languish without company during the long nights when sleep eluded her.

She died with a photograph of Morris still on the table at her bedside although he’d left her more than three decades earlier after finally admit- ting that he would never come first in her life. And having repeatedly become involved with men who put her on a similar footing, in her old age, she found little comfort. A woman of passion, she knew how to charm, but she couldn’t give herself over to intimacy.

While her daughter, Sarah, staunchly defends Golda as prime minis- ter, even two decades after her death she can never quite bring herself to defend her as a mother. “Would Milwaukee have really been such a bad place to live?” asks her son, Menachem, whose lack of enthusiasm for the country his mother built is sadly telling.

Golda herself wasn’t without ambivalence toward her creation. She’d never imagined that a Jewish homeland would not become the world’s beacon of freedom and justice, that, like any other country, it would need policemen and soldiers, an antipoverty bureaucracy, or lawyers to investi- gate government corruption. Or that despite her hectoring, her egalitar- ian utopia of idealist pioneers would turn into a dog-eat-dog capitalist society rife with consumerism and greed, and that she was too busy being a war president to devote much attention to turning that tide. She gave up any semblance of a personal life, then, for a country that turned its back on the very principles that drove her.

But if she’d been inclined to introspection, which she decidedly was not, Golda, child of a generation that had no patience to indulge self- pity, would never have cast her tale as a tragedy, or even as the story of an individual. Despite her political prowess, she didn’t give up her life as an ordinary woman because she wanted to become a politician. She was a true believer. “She had faith when others wavered,” Ben-Gurion once said. “She believed in the absolute justice of our cause when others doubted.”

No matter how anyone else, now or then, measured her life, Golda had an unwavering standard for herself: “I can honestly say that I was never affected by the question of the success of an undertaking. If I felt it was the right thing to do, I was for it regardless of the possible out- come.”

acknowledgments

Few clichés have a firmer basis in reality than the one that suggests that writing is a collaborate endeavor. Despite the image of the driven author locked away in the lonely grip of her muse, the truth is that neither writ- ers nor their work thrive in a vacuum and that we are utterly dependent on an enormous cast of characters.

Golda came alive for me, flaw by flaw, triumph by triumph, thanks to the patience and generosity of scores of individuals in Israel and the United States who shared their memories. I am particularly grateful to Yigal Lossin, Raphael Rothstein, Ari Rath, Rinna Samuel, Nomi Zucker- man, Lyova Eliav, Meron Medzini, Yehuda Avner, and Aharon Yadlin. And I found my way to most of them thanks to the indefatigable Irit Pazner, without whom I could never have navigated my way through an endless list of pressing interviews.

For research assistance, I thank David Fachler, Chevy Weiss, Gen- nadii Kostyrchenko, and Andrew Blahnik, as well as the staffs of the National Archives of the United States; the Israel State Archives, espe- cially Hagai Tsoref and Louise Fischer; the University of Wisconsin– Milwaukee; the library of the
Jerusalem Post;
the Central Zionist

388
acknowledgments

Archives; the Oral History Division of the Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University; the Dorot Jewish Division of the New York Public Library; the Rasmuson Library at the University of Alaska– Fairbanks; the Stamford (New York) Village Library; and the Nelson Riddle Archives at the University of Arizona. And a special
spasiba bol- shoii
to Artyom Zhdanov, who ensured that the photographs for this book were crisp and, as always, shielded me from mangling the Russian language.

I am grateful to my colleagues at the National University of Science and Technology in Bulawayo, who stayed on strike long enough in early 2006 for me to finish this book without pressure, and to Cleophas Muneri, Gibbs Dube, Vusa Maphosa, Hayes Mabweazara, Stenford Ma- tenda, and Lawton Hikwa for welcoming me into the most collegial aca- demic environment imaginable.

The Jewish community of Bulawayo swept me in with open arms, shared Golda stories with me over dinner at the Feigenbaums, kept me laughing at the Rubensteins, and grounded me at the Laskers. The friendship of Shelley, David, Benji, and Carly Lasker; Ida and Harry Shmeizer; Ivor, Pauline, and Zara Rubenstein; Ruth and Alan Feigen- baum; Elsa and Ray Roth; Brian Sher; Henry Sommer; Jason Roth; El- sie Furman; and Tanya Goldwasser kept me in touch with the best part of Golda.

Lisa Bankoff has now guided me through nine books with good grace, or at least as good as possible given the rising tensions, and Tina Wexler talked me down with the greatest of aplomb. Claire Wachtel provided the seed for this book. I am immensely grateful to them all.

Without my extended family, I couldn’t stay grounded enough to function, not to mention to write. So thanks aren’t enough. I’ve already overused the word “gratitude.” And “appreciation” is an absurdly dry lo- cution. Frank Bruni, Patrick Wright, Bruce Conroy, Cheral Coon, Jen- nifer Collier, and Michael Jennings: I’m relieved you don’t need words since I don’t have any.

acknowledgments

389

For the seventh time, my husband, Dennis Gaboury, bore the brunt of the stresses of the bizarre nature of my work, steering us around Is- rael through the mazes of motorists trained in offensive driving; endur- ing repeated readings of a single paragraph; wending his way through piles of footnotes with me; and serving as the whipping post when the words wouldn’t come but the deadline was approaching. Partners are the unsung heroes of publishing, and Dennis is most certainly mine.

Elinor Burkett

Bulawayo, Zimbabwe

introduction

notes

1. “I remember so well”: Richard M. Nixon,
   RN: The Memories of Richard Nixon
   (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990).
   

2. “another state who is also a woman”: September 25, 1969, Public Papers of Richard Nixon.
   

4 giggling about the flowers: Lou Kaddar interview, (56)88, Oral History Di- vision, Institute for Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University of Jerusa- lem (OHD).

1. At the National Press Club: Golda spoke at the National Press Club on September 26, 1969.
   

2. “We’re not so fortunate”:
   New York Times,
   September 28, 1969.
   

5 “You don’t have to be Jewish”:
New York Times,
September 30, 1969.

1. Golda responded with her coy: Ibid.
   

2. “such a sad face”: Ibid.
   

10 Elie Wiesel:
New York Times,
October 7, 1969.

chapter one

13 the bells of Kishinev: Andrei Shapiro, “A Singular Event in Jewish History: The Kishinev Pogrom,”
Hagshama
(World Zionist Organization), 2003.

16 “Hebrew” immigrants:
New York Times,
September 13, 1912.

16 One afternoon . . . a drunken peasant: Kenneth Harris interview with Golda in
The Observer
(London), reprinted in
Washington Post,
January 17, 1971.

16 building mud castles: Peggy Mann,
Golda: The Life of Israel’s Prime Minis- ter
(New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1971), pp. 7–8.

16 boarded up windows: Harris interview.

16 “That pogrom never materialized”: Stephen Klaidman, “Golda Meir: She Lived for Israel,”
Washington Post,
December 8, 1978.

18 It was a blessedly quiet Sabbath morning: Sheyna Korngold,
Zikhroyne`s

(Tel Aviv: Farlag Idpres, 1968), p. 42.

20 “Fasting is only for grown-ups”: Peggy Mann interview with Clara Stern, Bridgeport, Connecticut, from Ralph G. Martin,
Golda: Golda Meir, the Romantic Years
(New York: Scribner, 1988).

chapter two

1. “I could have stayed in Russia”: Sheyna Korngold,
   Zikhroyne`s
   (Tel Aviv: Farlag Idpres, 1968), p. 62.
   

2. precisely how deep the American influence: Meron Medzini,
   Ha-Yehudi- yah ha-geah: Goldah Meir ya-hazon Yis´rael: biyografyah politit
   (Tel Aviv: Edanim, 1990), chapter 2.
   

3. “She was an extraordinary person in every aspect”: Golda Meir,
   My Life
   

(New York: Putnam, 1975), p. 21.

1. American Young Sisters’ Society: Ibid., pp. 38–39, and Marie Syrkin,
   Way of Valor: A Biography of Golda: Myerson
   (New York: Sharon Books, 1955), p. 31.
   

2. Christian boy threw a penny at one of Golda’s friends: Interview with Re- gina Medzini, in Martin,
   Golda: Golda Meir, the Romantic Years (
   New York: Scribner, 1988), p. 35.
   

27 “to become a rebbetzin”: Linda Maiman, “Golda’s Milwaukee,”
Milwaukee Journal,
October 31, 1976.

1. “I can tell you that Pa does not work yet”: Martin,
   Golda,
   p. 32.
   

2. “But a very clever woman you’ll never be”: Ibid., p. 38.
   

28 “She was so beautiful and everyone spoiled her”: Korngold,
Zikhroyne`s ,