Beneath the Steel: Poetry
Smith, David Bruce
Beneath the Steel: Poetry Golda/Golda Meir: The Romantic Years by Ralph G. Martin Scnbner's, 198a 422 pp, $19.95 Reviewed by David Bruce Smith Relatively little has been written about Golda Meir....
...These were romantic times, but everything important to Golda had begun with Morris...
...This was an anchor she then could not and would not cut...
...She loved her family, but she also revered her work...
...For Morris, according to Martin, this separation meant the "real beginning of the real end of their marriage...
...She was bewitched by Herzl's premonition and from that time on Golda decided to become a pioneering woman in Palestine...
...From them Golda learned about Theodor Herzl, who in 1897 predicted the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine within fifty years...
...His uncomplaining nature allowed her to be away from her family for long periods of time with less guilt than had he acted otherwise...
...and hardly even knew her younger sister, Clara...
...One could quickly understand why so many men chased her and wanted her...
...David Ben-Gurion had called her 'the only man in my cabinet.' She had the steel when it was wanted...
...He did, in 1917...
...Golda's uninteresting existence in Tel Aviv, then in Jerusalem, veered when an old friend and future lover, labor leader David Remez, offered her a job as secretary of the Women's Workers' Council...
...she cannot divorce herself from a larger social life...
...Golda was born in Pinsk, Russia, in 1898, and her family moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, eight years later...
...When she arrived in the United Stales, she expected widespread Jewish oppression...
...Shana replied by letter: "You must come to us immediately...
...She cannot let her children narrow her horizon...
...He was not a Zionist and he would not go to the desert to work on a kibbutz...
...He thought she would change her mind, but Golda informed Morris after months of arguing the issue, that if he wanted to marry her, he would have to marry Palestine, too...
...She would become valuable to the Zionist movement as the woman who understood Western ways from her days as an American...
...But beneath the steel was poetry, music, romance...
...Golda wrote Shana, who by then was married and living in Denver...
...By the time she was 29 in 1927, she was a frustrated, depressed wife and mother who worked part-time washing clothes and teaching English...
...it would also mean that she would have to move back to Tel Aviv, while Morris remained in Jerusalem...
...Her responsibility would be to train women for various positions in agriculture...
...But, writes Martin, "nothing consumed Golda so completely as her cause, her party, her country— more important to her than family, friends, lovers...
...Deep within herself, she felt he was her anchor...
...Though she felt guilty and even questioned her capacity as a mother, making a homeland for Jews to return to always overrode any circumstances...
...She tolerated her monotonous marriage because of the children, and because of her attachment to Morris...
...When he divulges Golda's love affairs he explains that she needed them...
...After three years at Mcrhavia, the Meyersons left the kibbutz to live in Tel Aviv—because Morris was ill...
...This dichotomy of family and public life caused her personal discomfort and public greatness...
...Morris was part of her soul...
...The greatest surprise, even for the author, was "Golda's beauty as a young woman...
...Ironically, Golda could not have become the public Golda without the passive Morris...
...Golda quarreled with her rigid BOOKS mother, Bluma...
...Golda's adventuresome life on the kibbutz was halted...
...Four years later they were laboring on the kibbutz of Mcrhavia...
...She remained separated from him, but "despite the loosening of the marriage bond . . . Morris belonged to the heart of her life...
...By the time Golda turned 14, Bluma had selected a husband for her, but Golda confronted her mother with her plan to continue high school, and, perhaps, attend college...
...Morris still believed that in time and with children, he could convince Golda to return to his family in Pennsylvania...
...She repaid him by giving his solitary life zest...
...Golda ran away to Denver at the age of fifteen...
...These two spheres or her life tortured Golda because she was never able to balance or resolve either one...
...Shana's house was filled every night with lonely tubercular bach'elor poets and philosophers who were anxious to resolve the world's enigmas...
...While living in Denver, Golda met Morris Meyerson during a time when she was estranged from Shana...
...There is a type of woman," she wrote, "who cannot remain home...
...Morris and Golda still loved each other, according to the author, but they could no longer communicate...
...Morris, in contrast, cared only about his books and records...
...In the years that followed Golda would fall in love with men she worked with: Remez, labor leader Zalman Aranne, socialist writer Zalman Shazar (who would become Israel's third president) and, if rumors are to be believed, statesmen Berl Katznelson and David Ben-Gurion as well...
...That made the most sense to me," Golda recalled...
...She was an outspoken, independent, willful girl who idolized her defiant older sister, Shana...
...She was not one of those who could successfully compartmentalize her life...
...If her cause called, everything else was squeezed into a corner...
...The provoked Bluma countered by demanding that Golda quit school immediately...
...And for such a woman there is no rest...
...Golda, however, was still adamant about going to Palestine...
...Being a Jew, without any doubt...
...Ralph Martin's Golda/Golda Meir: The Romantic Tears is comprised of many voices and surprises...
...Martin is a caring, perceptive writer who scrutinizes Golda and Morris without violating the integrity of their relationship...
...She would raise S50 million dollars to finance Israel's survival to statehood, and she would become an official in Jerusalem during Israel's 1948 war...
...What she could do, better than most, was to maintain a tight mask over her private passions...
...loved her kind, but impractical father, Morris...
...She was a complex woman of Russian, American and Israeli heritage, and not many people knew her intimately...
...she would become the chief Jewish negotiator with the British...
...That full firm figure, the long lustrous hair, the magnetic sparkle, the way she threw her head back when she laughed...
...he read works of literature to her, introduced her to music and acquainted her with the arts...
...Years later, when Golda was asked whether she was more aware of being a Jew or a woman while growing up, she replied, "Oh...
...David Bruce Smith is director of communications for the Charles E Smith Companies and a freelance writer...
...As Golda's prominence escalated, she was forced away from her children /or longer and longer periods...
...they supported her fervent belief in Zionism...
...Although Golda quickly Americanized, she had already been imbued with Jewish identity from stories she had heard from her parents about the pogroms in Europe...
...In spite of the place which her children and her family take up in her life . . . her nature and her being demand something more...
...Though they seemed an implausible couple, Morris and Golda fell in love...
...Though her fears were not realized, her intense feelings about her Judaism did not diminish...
Vol. 14 • December 1989 • No. 7
