Golda (7 page)

A Zionist doesn’t make it conditional.

I

n Golda’s Zionist fantasy, heavily influenced by a steady stream of re- cruiting pamphlets, Palestine was gushing with milk and honey, or at least they were poised to flow once she and the
halutzim,
the pioneers, put their backs to the desolate soil. And Tel Aviv, the first new Jewish city to be built in two millennia, was the Hill of Spring, conjuring up cool breezes

and tranquil gardens.

No one had mentioned the flies—swarming over the bread sold off old blankets in open-air markets and laying eggs in the eyes of children. Or the filth. Or the burning
hamsim
winds, blindingly relentless sand spouts. Or the stench of donkeys, rotting meat, open latrines, and unwashed hu- manity.

When Golda, Morris, and their ragged band of seventeen pioneers stepped off the train from Alexandria, Egypt, into Tel Aviv’s ankle-deep sand on July 14, 1921, Sheyna’s daughter, Judy, started bawling. Morris fell speechless. Regina’s fiancé announced flatly, “I’m going back home!”

Golda looked past the ramshackle frame train station to the single tree

in sight and pronounced it a symbol of the Jewish ability to flourish in adversity.

By then, no one was in the mood for inspiring Zionist platitudes.

Two months earlier, stirred by that sort of breathless rhetoric, they had gathered in New York, their departure fixed for May 22. The time was anything but ripe. Rioting had broken out in Jerusalem when Great Brit- ain was given a mandate over Palestine with responsibility for implement- ing the Balfour Declaration. Six Jews had been killed and more than two hundred injured by small bands of fedayeen, Arab suicide warriors. The
yishuv,
the Jewish community of Palestine, was tensely preparing for the next wave of assaults.

The families of the would-be emigrants pleaded with them to delay their departure, but Golda wouldn’t hear of it. Everything was ready, their possessions carefully packed into thirty-three trunks. Assuming they’d be sleeping on the ground, she had bought ten blankets as cushions. At the last minute, she’d sold her curtains since they seemed unnecessary to the tent she expected to call home. But she took her good suit, although only after she removed its little fur collar. Morris packed only two boxes, one for his windup gramophone and the other for his books.

Hundreds of passengers streamed aboard the SS
Pocahontas
on the morning of May 22, most bound for Italy on vacation. As Poale Zion ac- tivists made speeches about the bravery of the intrepid pioneers who would soon be reclaiming the Jewish homeland, Golda stood proudly on deck singing, “Come Home to Zion.”

But their grand departure turned anticlimactic after the ship’s mates went on strike. When they finally sailed, the crew mutinied and crippled the engines, leaving the rickety
Pocahontas
listing badly as it limped north to Boston. There they were forced to wait nine days while the engines were repaired and engineers replaced. But the voyage continued to be damned. In the middle of the Atlantic, pumps and boilers repeatedly broke down, followed by the condensers and refrigerators. Fires broke out in two holds and the engine room flooded. By the time the
Pocahontas
made its way into Ponta Delgada in the Azores for repairs, it was no longer seaworthy.

On the trip from the Azores to Italy, things grew even worse. The cap- tain threw four crew members into a makeshift stockade after they threat- ened to sink the ship. An engineer was mysteriously thrown overboard. The captain’s brother went crazy and had to be chained in his cabin. One passenger broke his leg. Another died.

After a week of eating nothing but rice and tea made out of brackish water, Golda’s group finally shuffled off the boat in Naples, only to find that they’d been stranded by a strike of Arab boatmen in Jaffa against any vessel carrying Zionists. “Christians and Moslems can go to Palestine, but they can’t sell tickets to Jews,” Sheyna wrote Shamai. “So here you have a sad joke—no Jew can enter Eretz Israel.”

Their only alternative was to sail to Alexandria, Egypt, from Brindisi. The voyage might have been a recuperative hiatus since they finally found a trustworthy vessel and bought comfortable third-class cabins. But the other Zionists on board, hard-muscled, Hebrew-speaking
halutzim
from Lithuania, were sleeping on the deck. When they snubbed Golda as the soft American, she insisted that her own group move out of their cab- ins and join them in pioneering solidarity.

By the time they arrived in Tel Aviv, fifty-three days after their depar- ture, they were exhausted, filthy, and demoralized. Founded in 1909 by sixty Jewish families swept up in the romance of building a real Jewish city, Tel Aviv had sounded almost magical: Jewish policemen, Jewish busi- nesses, a Hebrew high school, and Herzl Street, a Jewish avenue com- memorating Zionism’s founding father. But up close it was a dusty frontier town with few paved streets, no power station, little work, and a mayor who rode around on a white horse.

Golda, Morris, Sheyna, and Sheyna’s children, ten-year-old Judy and three-year-old Chaim, rented a two-room apartment behind the Cinema Eden, the only movie house in town. They had no electricity or running water and shared a kitchen and outhouse with forty other people. But in a town where there was little work, Golda and Morris both were lucky. He found a job as a bookkeeper for a British company in Lydda, which meant that he commuted home on weekends. Golda was quickly offered

a position as an English teacher at Herzliya High School, the Hebrew high school, but she refused to accept it. “I didn’t come to Palestine to teach English,” she declared flatly.

In the fantasy she’d been nurturing, Golda saw herself building Jewish socialism on a kibbutz, a collective farm, and she’d set her sights on Kib- butz Merhavia, up north in the Valley of Jezreel, where an old friend from Milwaukee was living. While she waited for Merhavia’s thirty-two members to vote on her and Morris’ applications for membership, she tutored children in English, worked on her broken Hebrew, and optimis- tically readied herself to reclaim the soil.

“We don’t know what will be, but there is only one way,” she wrote Shamai. “Whoever calls himself a Zionist and hasn’t found comfort in his soul in exile must immigrate to the land of Israel. . . . Of course, this is not America, and one may have to suffer a lot economically. There may even be pogroms again, but if one wants one’s own land, and if one wants it with one’s whole heart, one must be ready for this.”

Golda was not prepared for anything, however. In September, she and Morris were rejected by Merhavia, receiving only two votes, one from her old friend.

* * *

Golda’s most enduring quality was her refusal to take no for an answer, so she got on a bus to Merhavia to plead her case. The reception was any- thing but sympathetic. The kibbutz was dominated by
halutzim
of the Second Aliyah, Palestine’s most dogmatic and disdainful wave of immi- grants. Seeing themselves as the Chosen, the most dedicated, the stron- gest in mind and body, they disdained those who did not live up to their standards—and Golda and Morris, they were convinced, couldn’t begin to meet them. Everyone knew that Americans, especially American women, were soft individualists.

It didn’t help that Golda and Morris were married, tarring them with the dreaded brush of hopeless middle-class conformity. For the young kibbutzniks, marriage reeked of conventional gender relationships, reli-

gion, and property rights. They had hoisted the banner of “a rebellion against the bourgeois norms of Eastern Europe,” explained Esther Stern- man, an early resident. Sex should be a free and loving act between two people with “a purity of heart,” not a written contract.

The members’ dogmatism only intensified Golda’s determination. She argued, pontificated, and nagged. But when Merhavia voted a sec- ond time, she and Morris were again rejected. Still Golda didn’t give up, wearing the kibbutzniks down with constant visits and her own brand of dogmatism. On the third vote, they succumbed, giving Golda and Morris one month to prove their worth.

The community Golda fought so hard to call home was in an area of the Jezreel Valley that local Arabs called the Death Swamp. Surrounded by a cement fence dotted with openings for guns, Merhavia was a collec- tion of ramshackle frame barracks and a communal kitchen. The latrine, a quarter of a mile from the barracks, consisted of four holes in the ground with no partitions between them. No one ventured there alone because snipers from nearby Arab villages made a sport out of taking pot- shots at needy kibbutzniks.

Merhavia raised fruit and vegetables, and the kibbutz’s cows produced enough milk for community needs with a surplus sold to neighboring vil- lages and distributors in Haifa. The Jewish National Fund, founded at the Fifth Zionist Congress in 1901 to buy and develop land for Jewish settlement, gave members a regular income in exchange for the planting of trees. But the land was more marsh than soil, and where there was soil, it was filled with rocks. In the summer, work began at 4 a.m. because the
barhash,
swarms of tiny flies, turned afternoon work into a nightmare. Even with long sleeves and lavish coatings of Vaseline, field workers came in for lunch with insects plugging up their eyes, their ears, and their noses.

In late September, Golda and Morris settled into the spartan private room they were allotted. Their first morning, Morris was sent to dig rocks and boulders out of a field being cleared while Golda was assigned to pick almonds. “When I returned to my room in the evening, I couldn’t so

much as move a finger,” Golda later wrote, “but I knew that if I didn’t show up for supper everyone would jeer. ‘What did we tell you? That’s American girls for you!’ ”

Less needy of group approbation, Morris felt no such compunctions about avoiding the dining hall or the chickpea mush that was served at most meals, as soup, salad, or some sort of stew. Building a table and some cupboards out of orange crates, and hanging up strips of flowers on the walls to provide a bit of color, he fashioned a nest in their plain wooden room. His records were carefully organized, the windup gramo- phone set up and waiting.

All that was missing was a glass of tea, and for that he had to trek over to the communal dining room. Morris didn’t mind the physical labor, but he hated the communal dining room, just as he hated the communal toilet, the communal shower, and the communal laundry, which doled out the communal clothes. It wasn’t only the incessant togetherness that annoyed him. No one had the slightest interest in art or music or philoso- phy. After dinner, all they talked about was work, about Zionism, and so- cialism. He would have been content to stay in their room and listen to music. But if he refused to socialize, he was branded as aloof. If he tagged along with Golda, everyone frowned disparagingly at their togetherness. And he couldn’t go alone because Golda was always there.

On Friday nights, she happily sat through long political discussions and then joined the other kibbutzniks as they sang pioneering songs and danced the hora. On weekday evenings, she stopped by for a glass of tea and lingered for hours. What was she supposed to do? Sit in their room and listen to endless classical music? she asked, seemingly puz- zled at her husband’s distaste for the groupthink and the absence of privacy.

“[Morris] was not able to tolerate . . . the sense of belonging to a com- munity,” she complained. “He was too individualistic, far too within himself.”

Finally part of the world she had dreamed of for so long, Golda fed off her legendary stamina. Swinging a pickax was agony, but she never

winced in front of her comrades. If the kibbutz ethic demanded gossiping in the shower or wearing communal underwear, Golda merrily gossiped and wore communal underwear, although she was, by nature, a hygiene fanatic. When she was asked to run the chicken coops, she never men- tioned that she was deathly afraid of chickens. Nobody was ever going to say again that Golda Meyerson wasn’t strong enough, that she didn’t have enough spirit, or that she couldn’t fit in with the cream of the Zionist elite.

Still, too domineering not to try to impose her will, Golda made waves, or at least a few ripples. The other women tried to shirk kitchen duty, deemed less important than the “real work” of tilling the soil. “Why do you regard this work as demeaning?” Golda asked haughtily. “Why is it so much better to work in the barn and feed the cows, rather than in the kitchen and feed your comrades?” Never very sympathetic to women’s concerns, she seemed unaware of how sensitive the issue of kitchen duty still was for the veteran women pioneers, or indifferent to the long strug- gle they had waged.

In the first Jewish agricultural settlements, women caught up in the same “back to the land” fervor as Golda had been treated like maids. Kib- butzim limited their admission, arguing that women weren’t sufficiently productive. “We young women did not encounter hardship in work but in the humiliating treatment and apathetic attitude toward our aspirations,” wrote Sarah Malchin, a Russian immigrant who’d founded the first agri- cultural training school for women. For decades, women like Malchin had shunned the kitchen, where they were told they “belonged,” and fought for the right to plow and dig ditches in the belief that only equal work would win them full equality.

Golda was as disdainful of the kibbutz’s rustic ethos as she was of the politics of the kitchen. When she was on dining room duty, a chore ro- tated among the members, she put tablecloths and flowers out for Sab- bath—for many, a clear sign that she was hopelessly middle class. When she peeled the canned herring served cold for breakfast, the other women mocked her.

“How would you serve herring at your family table?” she asked, her sarcasm resembling her mother’s. “This is your home! They are your family!”

When the time came for the kibbutz to vote on the couple’s perma- nent membership, ironically, Morris was admitted without debate. But while Golda was also admitted, the women members complained about Golda’s behavior in the kitchen, about the fact that she wore stockings to dinner, that she ironed her kerchief and dress every day, not only on Sab- bath, and that when she received her allowance, she used it to buy a hat. The sentiment that she didn’t quite fit kibbutz life lingered. Years later, when Golda’s friend Marie Syrkin asked another Merhavia member what Golda had been like, the woman recounted the story of a rainy day when a few residents were gathered in the kitchen peeling almonds. “Golda sat and appeared a little regal,” she recalled.