Golda by Elinor Burkett Read Free Book Online

through the ethereal blue,” he wrote to Gogole, as he called her, in January 1915. By October, he was more ardent still. “If I don’t get to see you soon I fear that I shall dwell in the bughouse forever!”
    But neither Morris nor Golda had the time or money for visits. And as the months wore on, Golda began spending less time on Morris’s lit- erature and music and more on her old passion. Wars are notoriously bad for Jews, and World War I was a disaster for the masses in Eastern Europe. As the Russians battled the invading armies of Germany and Austria all across the Pale, both sides took out their frustrations on Jews along the way. Tens of thousands lost their lives; millions more were left homeless.
    Together with her father, Golda threw herself into relief work, going door to door to beg nickels and dimes for the displaced Jews. As the news grew ever more grim, she made speeches on street corners and helped organize meetings in hired halls. Gradually, she grew angry. What’s the point? she asked. How long will Jews continue to accept their plight and meekly be led to the slaughter?
    When she began asking those questions in public, Milwaukee’s lead- ing Labor Zionist, Isadore Tuchman, suggested that it was time for her to do more than talk. “I noticed this striking girl on the platform surrounded by old women,” he recalled. “I thought what on earth is this young girl doing with all these old women? She doesn’t belong at all. . . . So I got in touch with her and asked if she’d join our movement.”
    That movement was Poale Zion, a small band of Zionist socialists more adept at arguing the future shape of Palestine’s collective farms than at figuring out how to turn that concept into a national reality. Only twenty- three delegates, representing four chapters, showed up at their first na- tional convention in 1905. At the second, Poale’s nascent leadership found
    itself under assault for an alleged “collaboration” with non-Socialist Zion- ists, agents of the dreaded “bourgeois class.”
    Poale’s goal was to prepare its members to move to Palestine, but few Americans were lining up to go, chastened by stories of pioneers starving for lack of work and of Turkish soldiers raping women. So in Milwaukee, Poale devoted itself to running a library and a folkschule, a weekend pro- gram of classes for immigrant children in Yiddish, literature, and Jewish history.
    Golda, however, was not impressed with “parlor Zionists,” as she called them, all talk and no action. While she worked in the library and taught classes for immigrant children, she didn’t see any future in America. If she was going to commit herself to the cause, she needed to be serious about uprooting herself and contributing her own sweat to building Pal- estine.
    In every place and generation, a handful of young people discover the exhilaration of being part of something larger themselves. They become religious, throw themselves into causes, or embrace new ideologies. While their friends follow the crowd, they march to the beat of that proverbially different percussionist. In Golda’s day, Americans were less suspicious of those who dedicated themselves to principles, feeling no need to psycho- analyze the few impelled to go against the social grain. No one asked, then, whether Golda was attempting to live up to the image she’d built up of her older sister, trying to prove something to her overbearing mother, or exorcising the demons planted by her father’s helplessness in the face of a threatened pogrom.
    But her two causes—Zionism and Morris—collided. “I don’t know whether to be happy or sorry that you are participating in the Zionist party and that you are, it seems, so enthusiastic a nationalist,” Morris wrote in August 1915. “The idea of allotting Palestine or any other terri- tory for the Jews is, in my eyes, ludicrous. Oppression does not exist be- cause some nations have no territories but because nations