Word: golda
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...strong, hunched shoulders, Golda seemed to carry the entire history of the Jewish ordeal, seeing herself as a paradigm of the Jew from the Diaspora returned to the promised land. And if her audience did not immediately sense that, Golda made sure they soon did. "I, the daughter of Moshe Mabovitch, who was just an ordinary carpenter . . ." was one of her favorite ways of beginning a speech. What she had not experienced in person, she assumed by proxy. Diplomats emerged from interviews with a stunned look, complaining that all they had wanted to do was to discuss a minor customs...
...Golda, that struggle began in her memory when she was four years old, watching her father trying to barricade the entrance to their small house in Kiev against rampaging Cossacks. What she felt then and many times later in her life was "the fear, the frustration, the consciousness of being different and the profound instinctive belief that if one wanted to survive, one had to take effective action about it personally." Her father emigrated to the U.S. in 1903, and brought over his wife and their three daughters three years later to settle in Milwaukee. As a teenager, Golda...
...late '20s, Golda became active in Histadrut, the Jewish labor federation; in 1940 she was named head of its political department. After World War II, with all signs pointing toward an end to Britain's mandate over Palestine, David Ben-Gurion, head of the Jewish Agency, dispatched Golda to the U.S. to raise money for arms that the new Jewish state would need. She minced no words. As she told a Chicago assembly of fund raisers: "You cannot decide whether we will fight or not. We will. You can only decide one thing: whether or not we shall...
...Golda was no sooner back from that trip than Ben-Gurion sent her on a secret mission in 1947 to Trans-Jordan's King Abdullah. She went to the desert meeting disguised as a peasant woman. On an earlier visit, Abdullah had agreed not to attack Israel. At this second meeting, he turned elusive. Why be in such a hurry to proclaim your state? "We have been waiting for 2,000 years," retorted Golda. "Is that hurrying...
...Golda took over as Israel's fourth Premier, more the autocrat than the mother comforter. But even in this dominating role, she injected a maternal element into the cold science of international relations. She assembled her senior cabinet members at supper in her kitchen to discuss affairs of state amid aromatic fumes of the chicken soup she loved to cook. She met Prime Ministers and Presidents at the grandest of diplomatic dinners wearing her severely cut suits and orthopedic shoes. She tolerated bodyguards with reluctance but would often brew tea for them in the morning's small hours...