Free Golda by Elinor Burkett Page A

between her and David Remez, one of the Histadrut leaders she’d met at Kibbutz Dega- nia. Always discreet about her personal life, Golda never talked about the physician, Remez, or any of the other men in her life. “I was no nun,” was all she would say. “There are people who generally don’t talk about their intimate affairs, and I am one of them.”
    Remez had been Golda’s sponsor into movement circles and he had arranged for her employment at Solel Boneh. Shortly after she began working there—perhaps tellingly—he offered Morris a job at Solel’s office in Jerusalem. For several months, he saw Golda only if he commuted down to Tel Aviv and nagged Golda about finding a job closer to him. She resisted until she discovered that she was pregnant. Again, Remez saved her by giving her a transfer to Morris’ office.
    For most Jews, Jerusalem is the golden city, the emotional center of the Jewish universe. It was from Jerusalem that Saul, David, and Solo- mon ruled, and the old Temple wall had been a magnet for the Jewish imagination for centuries. But Golda couldn’t stand it. Where others saw historical continuity, she saw religion, superstition, and defeat. Jerusalem was the Jewish past. Her eyes were on the Jewish future.
    Nonetheless trapped, she left Tel Aviv, and she and Morris rented two rooms with an outside tin shack for a kitchen and a toilet in the backyard in a shabby neighborhood near the Orthodox quarter of Mea Shearim. For light, they had a smoky kerosene lamp. The cistern water was so foul that it had to be boiled.
    Solel Boneh, their new employer, was collapsing, a detail Remez had neglected to share. Morris, Golda, and the rest of the office staff kept
    working, but they were usually paid in mashbit, credit slips, that few mer- chants accepted. On payday, Golda was forced to negotiate endlessly with grocers in the hope they would give her 80 piasters’ worth of margarine and flour for a one-pound chit.
    Golda’s plight wasn’t unique. The yishuv was reeling economically, the number of immigrants too great to absorb. A handful of viable farms had been created, but industry was primitive. And despite the pressure of the Histadrut, even Jewish businessmen preferred Arab workers to Jewish ones, who expected higher wages.
    For Golda and Morris, things grew desperate once Menachem was born, on November 23, 1924, because Golda stopped working. “They were practically starving,” recalled Regina. “The question wasn’t ever what to cook but that there should be enough to cook!” Sheyna sent up boxes of fruit and vegetables from Tel Aviv. But more than once, the neighbors watched Golda weep because she had no money for oil.
    They eased the financial crisis by taking in a boarder, but they were still left with the stark reality that their marriage was a disaster. Morris loved Jerusalem, which captured his poetic imagination. The city might lack cafés packed with socialists arguing whether Israel could avoid the class struggle, but it had a small opera company and plenty of dusty bookstores. Most important, he had a wife at home and a beauti- ful son.
    Golda felt like her grandmother, living in poverty in a grimy slum, sur- rounded by Orthodox Jews who thought Zionism was an affront to God. Or her mother, stuck with a hapless husband who could never earn a liv- ing. “In Jerusalem I was a sort of prisoner,” she wrote. “Instead of actively helping build the Jewish national home and working hard and produc- tively for it, I found myself cooped up in a tiny apartment.”
    The Zionist action was in Tel Aviv, and Golda struggled to keep her contacts there. When her parents arrived in 1926 and began building a house in Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv, she made the long trek down the Judean Hills frequently. But weekend doses of politics weren’t enough,
    and Golda finally decided to return to Merhavia, taking six-month-old Menachem with her. Morris didn’t bother trying to change her mind.
    But her old