Part I
We have a book in our shul library: “My Life,” an autobiography by Golda Meir. I thought it would be interesting to summarize the early years of her life, based on this book. The summary will span two columns.
Golda Mabovitch was born in 1898. She lived the first few years of her life in Kiev. Her father was a skilled carpenter and cabinetmaker. Because of his skills, he was given permission to live in Kiev, outside the Pale of Settlement where most Jews resided.
Her main memory of Kiev was of a pogrom that was coming, which she understood to mean that horrible things would be done to her family. All her father could do to attempt to protect the family was barricade the entrance to their home with boards of wood. The pogrom never materialized, but Golda always remembered how scared she was. Addressing an Israel Bonds conference in 1959, she admitted: “If there is any logical explanation necessary for the direction my life has taken, maybe this is the explanation: the desire and determination to save Jewish children, four or five years old, from a similar scene and from a similar experience.”
Despite being qualified to live outside the Pale, her parents were still very poor. Eventually, her father decided he would go to America for a few years and make money and then return to Russia. Golda’s mother took her three children—Sheyna, Golda and Zipporah—to Pinsk where her parents were to live for a few years and wait for her husband to return. (Between the births of Sheyna and Golda, five boys were born who died in infancy!)
She writes that the shtetl “reconstructed in novels and films…that gay, heartwarming, charming shtetl on whose roofs fiddlers eternally play sentimental music, has almost nothing to do with anything I remember, with the poverty-stricken, wretched little communities in which Jews eked out a living.”
When they arrived in Pinsk, her sister Sheyna was 14 years old (nine years older than Golda). Sheyna was a dedicated member of the Socialist-Zionist movement, and thus doubly dangerous to the police. As Golda explains, “not only were she and her friends conspiring to overthrow the all-powerful czar, but they also proclaimed their dream of bringing into existence a Jewish socialist state in Palestine.” Golda remembers hearing the screams of young men and women being brutally beaten in the police station nearby. Golda’s mother begged Sheyna to have nothing to do with the Socialist and Zionist movements. But Sheyna was stubborn. On Saturday mornings, Sheyna would have meetings in the house with all her Socialist Zionist friends. Little Golda would listen to Sheyna and her friends and try to make out what they were so excited about. Sheyna’s group also often met in the home of her friend Chaya Weizmann, sister of Chaim.
The first time Golda heard about Herzl was in 1904 when someone said that Herzl died. Sheyna decided to wear only black clothes in mourning for Herzl from that afternoon in the summer of 1904 and thereafter. (This did not end until they reached Milwaukee two years later.)
Golda recalls that when she and Sheyna would get into a fight, Golda would sometimes (jokingly) threaten to tell the local policeman in the neighborhood about all of Sheyna’s political activities!
Eventually Golda’s mother could not take the tension anymore, fearing Sheyna’s arrest and more pogroms. She wrote to Golda’s father and said that they all needed to join him in America. By now he had moved to Milwaukee at the urging of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. (They were trying to disperse immigrant Jews around the country.) She wrote to Golda’s father (in Yiddish): “It doesn’t matter if you’ve saved enough money or not. Believe me, we must come. Now!”
Golda writes: “The preparations for our journey were long and complicated. It was not a simple matter then for a woman and three girls, two of them still very small, to travel all the way from Pinsk to Milwaukee…Perhaps if we had known that throughout Europe thousands of families like ours were on the move, headed toward what they, too, firmly believed would be…a better life in the New World, we would have been less frightened. But we knew nothing about the many women and children who were traveling under similar conditions…and we were very scared.”
When the family had to cross the border into Galicia, they had to pretend to be others, memorizing false names. (Her father did not have enough money for official government exit permits for his family. He only had enough for fake passports.) Their ship that crossed the Atlantic was packed with immigrants from Russia—pale, exhausted and just as scared as her family was. She spent the nights on sheetless bunks and most of the days standing in line for food that was ladled out as though it was being given to cattle. Their ship took them to Quebec. From there, they had to take a train to Milwaukee.
When they finally saw their father, he was beardless and looked like a stranger. The first thing he did was take them on a shopping trip for new clothes. Sheyna refused to wear the new clothes he bought, but Golda was delighted by her pretty new clothes.
Golda’s mother opened a grocery store. But eight-year-old Golda had to help out in the store and this made her late for school almost every day. (Seventeen-year-old Sheyna, on the other hand, generally refused to help out in the store. Her socialist principles, she declared, made it impossible: “I did not come to America to turn into a shopkeeper, a social parasite.”)
Golda loved her elementary school in Milwaukee. When she graduated, she was the valedictorian. Several decades later, when she was prime minister, she came back for a visit. She writes that the school “welcomed me as though I were a queen…They serenaded me with Yiddish and Hebrew songs…Each one of the classrooms had been beautifully decorated with posters about Israel and signs reading SHALOM (one of the children thought it was my family name)…”
The school is now called “Golda Meir School”!
Next week we will continue with 15-year-old Golda sneaking out of her parents’ home and running away to join her married sister in Denver!
My father used to say that he did so well in school that they named a floor after him: the First floor. Mitchell First can be reached at [email protected].
By Mitchell First
For more articles by Mitchell First, and information on his books, please visit his website at rootsandrituals.org.
