Free Golda by Elinor Burkett Page B

comrades did not greet Golda with open arms, chiding that their kibbutz wasn’t a shelter for women running from broken mar- riages. Golda had dreamed of losing herself in toil. Instead, the work committee assigned her to work as the mitapelet, the kibbutz nanny, to care for five children, day and night. Within six months, she was back in Jerusalem, and the ever-patient Morris.
    Golda was trapped, and the birth of a daughter in May 1926 cinched the noose tighter. Sarah was sickly and needed medicine, Morris’ wages were unpredictable, and Golda could feel all of her dreams evaporating.
    When she and Morris couldn’t find the money for Menachem’s nurs- ery school tuition, Golda took in the school’s laundry, spending hours boiling water by lamplight, soaking and scrubbing towels, aprons, and dia- pers in the bathtub in the living room. Finally, she swallowed her pride and accepted a job as an English teacher at a private school.
    In Golda’s account, just when she was about to hit rock bottom, she happened into Remez and, out of the thin air, he offered her a job as sec- retary of Moetzet HaPoalot, based in Tel Aviv. “They were interested in the services of someone like myself,” she wrote. “I had already worked in Tel Aviv for Solel Boneh and had gone on working for it—though only briefly—in Jerusalem.”
    It was an odd explanation since Golda had been nothing more than a cashier in the Tel Aviv office of Solel Boneh, so insignificant that years later, her boss could barely remember her. The truth was that Golda was the Histadrut’s solution to their recurrent problems with the obstreperous women of the Council. Despite Ben-Gurion’s promises, not a single woman was serving on any of Histadrut’s major policy bodies and wage discrimination remained rampant. The men of the Histadrut were trying to turn the Women’s Council into a female enclave while remaining the gatekeepers of who could leave it to enter the establishment, and its leader, Maimon, had resigned in disgust.
    When Remez ran into Golda, the Histadrut leaders were frantically searching for her replacement, for an obedient woman who’d allow the Histadrut and the Ahdut Party that controlled it to set the Council’s pri- orities and keep it loyal to the emerging establishment. The young Amer- ican was the answer to their problem.

    chapter four

    Not being beautiful forced me to develop my inner resources.
    The pretty girl has a handicap to overcome.

    I

    f Jerusalem represented the resignation of the shtetl, for Golda, Tel Aviv sung with the vibrancy of the new Jew. Rothschild Boulevard was turning into the city’s own Hyde Park, where heated discussions about Russian politics competed with pronouncements about the perils of capi- talism and a dozen competing ploys for forcing the British to fulfill the promise of the Balfour Declaration. The entrepreneurial energy of the 34,000 immigrants of the Fourth Aliyah exploded into rows of book- stores, haberdasheries, cafés, and cinemas. In the shimmering light of the desert, Golda left behind Morris and the drudgery of a babushka to throw
    herself into that future.
    Except for the waking minutes she had to spend on Menachem and Sarah. That conundrum Golda wrote about two years later in a collection of stories by pioneer women:

    Taken as a whole, the inner struggles and the despairs of the mother who goes to work are without parallel in human experience. But within
    that whole there are many shades and variations. There are some mothers who work only when they are forced to. . . . In such cases, the mother feels her course of action justified by compulsion. . . . But there is a type of woman who cannot remain home for other reasons. . . . Her nature and being demand something more. . . . She cannot let her children narrow her horizon. And for such a woman, there is no rest. . . .
    She of course has the great advantage of being able to develop. . . . Therefore, she can bring more to her children