Israel's New Foreign Minister

...But a public personality like Mrs...

...Golda flared up, 'Men are attacking the women, not the other way around...

...Regardless of how applicable this analysis may be to Mrs...

...This happens near the end "when the Cabinet was discussing something new in Israel a series of attacks on women [and] one of the men suggested a curfew for girls...

...The uncommon in Mrs...

...The whole labor movement of Israel must have shared in this selflessness in order to approve the governmental policy of unlimited immigration which has worked such social hardships upon the whole population...

...Myerson both belonged in a sympathetic light...

...Therefore, "a charwoman cleaning the building of the Vaad Ha-Poel might earn more than Golda, its newly instituted executive secretary.'' It is refreshing to hear of a bureaucracy which does not merely rake off the choicest part of the gravy...

...Less agreeable to this reviewer was Miss Syrkin's tone, which at times can only be described as that of an expatriate Israeli...

...For example, she seems to have stayed on with her husband (a very different type of person from herself) long after their incompatibility was evident to those around them...

...Unlike so many of the new immi grants to this country, they did not prosper...

...Myerson has proved too difficult to distinguish from the commonplace, and the best that the portraitist can do is retreat to a romanticized Rousseauistic idealization of a hyper-modern woman who has managed somehow to retain the quality of a primitive Jewess of Biblical days...

...Myerson is evidently content to serve as a peg upon which the audience (which sometimes includes a biographer) hangs its own dreams...

...She had none of the intellectual's paralyzing hesitations and timidiWay of Valor: A Biography of Golda My erson...

...Was this due perhaps to some "paralyzing hesitations...

...If there is going to be a curfew, let the men be locked up, not the women!' " If there were other incidents of this kind, the personality portrayed here would come far more alive than it actually does...

...Golda Mabovitch (her maiden name) was born in 1898 in the city of Kiev...

...ties,'' writes Miss Syrkin...

...To Zionism, Golda at the age of 18 added socialism, and this was to remain the formula of the rest of her political life...

...Myerson's career fills her with admiration and perhaps a little envy, which she is at no pains to conceal...

...The truth is that Miss Syrkin discreetly hints at things about Mrs...

...If intellectuals alone had suffered from "paralyzing hesitations," Hamlet would not have remained popular on the stage for over 300 years...

...About Golda Myerson there was nothing weak...

...Miss Syrkin deserves a subject more grateful, more arresting, more verbally colorful and expressive...

...Myerson, it would certainly seem to hold' true of Miss Syrkin herself...

...But, though this is a hard thing to say, it is Mrs...

...This was the moment of vital choice in her life...

...If I felt it was the right thing to do, I was for it regardless of the possible outcome.'" The reader is likely to find this description less sympathetic than the author, and there is also reason to question its complete accuracy...

...She could suffer for the multitude and devote herself to a program of action which would ameliorate or end that suffering...

...The situation of the biographer in a case of this kind is not an easy one...

...More than 40 years later, she was to join the Jewish Executive (in spite of poor health and against medical advice) in another fast to protest the British refusal to permit unlimited immigration of refugees into Palestine...

...Many who had started the long journey with her had turned back at various stages of it...

...Women should not be allowed on the streets after dark...

...In 1906, when Golda was 8 years old, her family moved to Milwaukee...

...The explosive amalgamation of the national impulse with the social one was destined to become the most potent political force of the first half of the 20th century, and, by a savage irony of history, the Jews were to be at once its most sensational victims and beneficiaries...

...Myerson interests the author because she was one of the moving spirits behind the creation of the first Jewish state in almost 2,000 years, and also because she is a woman consciously standing up for the rights of her sex...

...Unfortunately, the last quality with which Miss Syrkin is ready to credit her heroine is a sense of humor...

...That is what gives her writing at its best the impression of historical sweep...

...She had made it a condition of marriage that her prospective husband emigrate with her, and she stayed on in Palestine through the leanest years, despite every reason for depression and discouragement...

...Tn one of the rare moments of self-analysis, she once told the writer: T can honestly say that I was never affected by the question of the success of an undertaking...

...Brandeis University Golda Myerson (who recently Hebraized her name to Meir) was Labor Minister in the first Israeli Cabinet in 1948, and is Foreign Minister today, but it is not as a politician that Miss Syrkin is primarily interested in her...

...Her older sister Shana had brought her Zionist convictions with her to America...

...Myerson's personal life which show her to be a much more complex creature than the passage quoted above would suggest...

...When she leaves behind the individual personality and loses herself in contemplation of the movement of masses of nameless men, women and children, Miss Syrkin is at her best and least constrained...

...It is somewhat moving to consider the plight of the lonely individual who is chosen, by chance or merit, to be representative of a given time or place or group and has to sacrifice so much of himself to a public role...

...Their spirits apparently were willing enough...

...Myerson's career rather than her unique personality that has taken her biographer's fancy...

...The account of the struggle for independence particularly is one of the most solid and convincing that I have read...

...Golda Myerson lived in the United States for 15 years...

...WRITERS and WRITING Israel's New Foreign Minister Way of Valor : A Biography of Golda Myerson...

...It is indeed in the latter role that her personality lights up most vividly for at least one reader of the book...

...it was only the flesh that was weak...

...The reverse was true of Golda...

...Myerson, in the eyes of her biographer, is one of "the implacable women" like that other great Zionist Henrietta Szold, who told the author unsmilingly to "wish for better things" when she had the temerity to remark in her presence: "I wish I were thinner...

...Her credo had been stated by Nachman Syrkin, the father of her present biographer, when he wrote: "There can be no Zionism except socialist Zionism...

...Her biographer confesses herself frankly unable to understand her behavior in this instance...

...She was 5 years old at the time of the Kishinev pogrom and first displayed the iron in her character by insisting on fasting with the rest of the community...

...For the Jews of Europe were destroyed by the German manifestations of the idea, but, when the time came for them once again to rise phoenix-like from the ashes of that catastrophe, it was a national-social movement of their own which led them to victory on the soil of Zion...

...She left for Palestine in 1921 to become a pioneer in one of the collective farms or kibbutzim...

...She writes at one point: "Most human beings are indifferent to the sufferings of anonymous masses but are touched by the pain of an individual...

...In the Histadrut (the Jewish labor movement of Palestine), for example, the pay scale was determined by years of service and the number of family dependents, rather than by the type of work performed...

...Many of the incidental details of the book reveal the Poale Zion movement to which Miss Syrkin and Mrs...

...The heart of the book, however, is not to be found in the account of Golda Myerson's life but in the delineation of the historical period from which she emerged into the limelight...

...Obviously, Mrs...