Golda (4 page)

Bluma grew to tolerate Sheyna’s political activities until she realized that her eldest daughter was infecting Goldie, who worshipped her older sister. Golda followed Sheyna everywhere, nagging her for reading les- sons, for help with her numbers, for her to admire her image in the family’s faded mirror. The more Goldie demanded, the more Sheyna disapproved, and the harder Golda worked to live up to her sister’s standards, the begin- ning of a lifelong pattern.

When Labor Zionists organized a fast to mark the anniversary of the 1903 Kishinev pogrom, Goldie vowed to prove to Sheyna that she was worthy by also forgoing food.

“Fasting is only for grown-ups,” Bluma told her.

“You fast for the grown-ups,” said Goldie, already quick with a rejoin- der. “I’ll fast for the little children.”

Bluma sensed what was coming. An austere perfectionist and the

severest of taskmasters, Sheyna was Goldie’s heroine. There was nothing she wouldn’t do to win her sister’s approval.

“It doesn’t matter if you’ve saved enough money or not,” Bluma wrote her husband, whose last letter, received almost a year earlier, was from a city with the strange name of Milwaukee.

“Believe me, we must come. Now.”

chapter two

Don’t be so humble, you’re not that great.

I

n Russia, Moshe Mabovitch had sported a well-combed mustache and worn a black suit with a high-collared white shirt on special occasions. But the spare-looking man who tried to pull Goldie and her sisters into his arms at the Milwaukee train station was clean-shaven, wore working- man’s clothing, and had renamed himself Morris. Only one thing hadn’t

changed: he still wasn’t making a living.

Within a week of her arrival, undaunted by the fact that she spoke not a word of English and had never run a business, Bluma rented a small store with living quarters behind it and announced that she was opening a
kreml,
a grocery store. With her own special brand of certainty that she knew what was best for everyone, she had everything planned: While Goldie and Tzipka went to school, Sheyna would help run the store. Moshe would forget his part-time job as a railroad carpenter and begin a new career as a building contractor. And they would forget the misery of Russia.

Sheyna was no more amenable to Bluma’s ideas than she’d been back

home. “If I wanted to work in a
kreml,
I could have stayed in Russia,” she thundered haughtily. “Shopkeepers are social parasites.”

Still wearing black in mourning for the death of Herzl, Sheyna hated everything about America. But Goldie was enthralled—by her first soda pop, her first ice cream, her first trip to a five-story skyscraper. At Fourth Street School, she blossomed among the heavily immigrant Jewish stu- dent body. That winter, she learned to sled in Lapham Park. When she and her girlfriends could wheedle nickels out of their parents, they lined up at the Rose Theater to watch movies and traveling vaudeville troupes. Mostly, they hung out on Walnut Street, the heart of Jewish Milwau- kee, or stopped by Settlement House, where choral groups and literary societies offered free entertainment for the Yiddish-speaking immigrants. When they grew weary of the cold, they stopped by the
shvitz,
the steam room, where immigrant women without hot water at home gathered to

soak off the grime and relax over a
glessele
of tea.

Golda’s world was a tiny slice of an old-fashioned shtetl washed onto American shores by the flood of Eastern European Jews who arrived in the waning years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. Before they arrived, the city’s tiny Jewish community—German-speakers who dominated the city’s textile and footwear industries—had aggres- sively avoided calling attention to themselves as “other.” Their synagogues held regular Thanksgiving Day services and ostentatiously celebrated Washington’s birthday.

When the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and the Industrial Removal Office began redirecting Russian and Polish immigrants away from the large East Coast cities into the heartland of America, those established Jewish families winced at the prospect of being identified with semiliter- ate Russians babbling in Yiddish. As the new Jewish immigrants swelled the community from 2,559 in 1880 to more than 10,000 within a decade, the doyens of Milwaukee Jewish society endeavored to pull the newcom- ers up by their bootstraps and into the mainstream of America with sew- ing, cooking, and language classes, and Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops for the children.

Bluma despised the German Jewish ladies with their hats and gloves, flaunting their smug superiority. When they launched a crusade to teach new immigrants the fine points of the American art of cleanliness, she almost spit. “I know how to be clean.”

The perimeter of Golda’s world was narrowly circumscribed. At school, she never would have mingled with those women’s children. Nor did she associate with the “other half,” the non-Jewish German kids. Golda didn’t really live in America, then, not in the America of Fourth of July picnics, baseball games, and political rallies. She never read the daily Milwaukee newspaper and, in later years, couldn’t recall any significant national or local political events that had occurred during her years in the country. In scores of interviews and speeches over the years, she rarely spoke about what America meant to her beyond ritual platitudes about democracy. But in an interview she gave in 1972, she provided a glimpse of precisely how deep the American influence really was:

In America I was able to rid myself of the terror I had in Pinsk, from Kiev. . . . My father worked and was part of a labor union. . . . On La- bor Day he said to my mother, “Today there is a parade. If you come to such and such specific corner, you will see me marching in the pa- rade.” My mother took us to see the parade, and while we were waiting for it to begin, police appeared, riding to clear a path for those march- ing. But my younger sister didn’t know this and when she saw the po- lice she began to tremble andcry, “The Cossacks, the Cossacks!” . . . The America that I knew was a place that a man could ride on a horse to protect marching workers: the Russia I knew was a place that men on horses butchered Jews and young socialists.

If for Goldie that was enough, for Sheyna nothing was sufficient. Trapped in her mother’s store, she had no independence, no time to go to school or to make friends. Fed up with a dominating mother, a passive father, and family expectations born in a shtetl, she found a job at a men’s clothing factory in Chicago and, to the disgrace of her family, moved out.

The absence of Sheyna left an enormous void in Goldie’s life. “She was an extraordinary person in every aspect, and served as a shining ex- ample for me, my closest friend, and my faithful advisor,” Golda wrote long after the mentee had wildly surpassed the mentor. “Sheyna was the only one whose praise, when I was worthy of it—which was not easy, was the most important thing to me.”

But within months, Sheyna was back home, moping around the house, trapped between her self-concept as a modern rebel and the reality of her life. Awkwardly, Goldie tried to comfort her, combing her sister’s hair, quizzing her endlessly about life as a fiery revolutionary. But Sheyna was too listless to spark any fires. Then, an aunt wrote from Pinsk to report that Shamai Korngold, her old heartthrob, had escaped from Russia and was working in a cigarette factory in New York. Sheyna dashed off a let- ter, suggesting that he move to Milwaukee. A week later, she and Golda met him at the train station. “Maybe here he will begin to notice me a little,” Sheyna confessed to her sister.

Golda naively thought that with Shamai in Milwaukee, Sheyna would be happier. But she hadn’t factored Bluma into the equation. To keep her daughter out of the arms of a pie-in-the-sky greenhorn, she summarily barred Shamai from the house. The two might have spent years locked in struggle, but Sheyna collapsed and began coughing up blood. Her par- ents saw no alternative but to send her off to Denver, to the Jewish Hospi- tal for Consumptives.

Still, Goldie thrived, always at the top of her class in school, although chided by her teachers for talking too much. But it was outside the class- room that she made her mark. When she was eleven years old, Golda and her friends organized the American Young Sisters’ Society to raise money for books for needy classmates. Golda talked the owner of Packen Hall into donating the room for a fund-raising gala. So just three years off the boat, she stood before her first audience to deliver an extemporaneous speech about the plight of immigrant children without books.

The local newspaper picked up the story, made more prominent by the photograph it ran, President Goldie Mabovitch singled out as the girl

in tight braids in the top row. “A score of little children gave their play- time and scant pennies to charity, a charity organized by their own initia- tive too,” the caption read.

“Golda had fire,” said her best friend, Regina Hamburger Medzini. Bluma put it differently. She called Goldie a
kochleffl,
a stirring spoon.

One day at school a Christian boy threw a penny at one of Goldie’s friends and ordered her to pick it up. When the girl complied, he mocked her, yelling, “A dirty Jew will pick up every penny.” That night, Golda organized her first demonstration, against anti-Semitism, in front of the boy’s house.

But Golda didn’t have much time for demonstrating or speechifying. Every morning, while Bluma shopped for the day’s produce, she opened the store, standing on a wooden crate behind the counter to measure out sugar by the cup or herring by the piece. When Bluma lost track of time, Golda wept at the prospect of being late to school yet again. What’s the big deal? Bluma mocked her. “So it will take you a little longer to become a rebbetzin, a bluestocking. We have to live, don’t we?”

Although Sheyna and her parents barely communicated, Golda kept up a steady correspondence with her sister, using Regina’s house as their mail drop. Shamai had followed Sheyna to Denver, and after her release from the hospital, they had married. The young couple was barely surviv- ing by washing dishes and shoveling snow. Golda sent them money, a dollar or two here or there, some change from her school money or a bit “borrowed,” as Golda called it, from her mother’s money box.

Golda’s letters to Sheyna were the prattling of a young girl and a steady stream of bad news about the situation at home. “I can tell you that Pa does not work yet and the store is not very busy,” she wrote in one. In an- other, she confided that Bluma had moved them again, to a deli on Tenth Street, and that Moshe was working there as a butcher.

Curiously, she didn’t complain about her own life, although a storm was brewing with her graduation from elementary school. No one in Golda’s extended family had ever finished school and Moshe’s eyes teared up as he watched his daughter receive her diploma and stand at

the podium in a special white dress to deliver the valedictory address on the importance of being socially useful.

Milestones, after all, have a way of opening the door to disaster, and the ink was barely dry on Golda’s newly minted diploma before Golda and her mother were at each other’s throats. Golda had mapped out her life: She’d go to high school, continue on to teachers’ college, and find a job in a school.

Bluma had another vision for Golda’s future: She would find a job as a clerk downtown, then, as Golda later put it, “marry, marry, marry.” Golda was a
dervaksene sheine meidle,
a fine upstanding young girl, who’d fin- ished school and spoke English flawlessly. She was a prize, a good catch who could marry a fine professional man who’d support her with none of the heartache or indignity that Bluma herself had suffered. “You could be a very good housekeeper,” her mother counseled. “But a very clever woman you’ll never be.”

Golda was neither quiet nor modest, however, and her dreams for the future weren’t forged in a Russian ghetto. “She was so beautiful and ev- eryone spoiled her,” Sheyna said. We’re both stubborn, she admitted, but “Goldie even more so. She didn’t like to admit she was wrong. If she re- treated, she was very mad at herself.”

Golda, then, was not about to give in. Nor was Bluma. “You want to be an old maid?” she ranted.

Moshe agreed with Bluma. “Men don’t like smart women,” he taught his daughters. But he urged Bluma to offer Golda a compromise, secre- tarial school. Unlike teachers, who could not marry, secretaries could do what they wanted in their private lives. But Golda refused to cooperate. “I never can explain to myself why I had such a horror of working in an of- fice,” she said. “I wouldn’t hear of it. That’s where the big clash came.”

In the fall of 1912, Golda prevailed and enrolled in North Division High School, to Sheyna’s hearty delight. “Tell me the truth,” she wrote that October, “how many times did you shout and how many times were you about to commit suicide until you won the battle, I mean the fight for going to school?”

That was only round one in the Golda-Bluma feuds. Round two was sparked two months later, when Bluma announced that she had found the perfect husband, a prosperous man who worked in real es- tate. Golda refused to consider marrying a man who was twice her age, no matter how many times Bluma predicted that she’d wind up a bitter old maid. Bluma didn’t know that she had crossed the line, the invisi- ble line that would become infamous among both Golda’s admirers and detractors, where Golda’s natural stubbornness transmogrified into steel.