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| ISBN-13: | 9780300182736 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2014 |
| Series: | Jewish Lives |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
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Ben-Gurion
Father of Modern Israel
By Anita Shapira, Anthony Berris
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Anita ShapiraAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-18273-6
CHAPTER 1
Plonsk
In 1962, a woman from the town of Plonsk, Poland, who had emigrated to Palestine went back for a visit. On returning to Israel she sent a letter to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, also born in Plonsk, describing what she had found: "the destruction of Jewish Plonsk," as Ben-Gurion put it in his reply. Only three of the town's Jews remained. The magnificent synagogue and the three Jewish religious schools were completely destroyed, and the cemetery was uprooted. The market was still there, but no Jews displayed their merchandise. With much pain and restrained nostalgia, Ben-Gurion inquired what had become of his father's house and whether the garden behind it still existed. The rupture between "now" and "then" caused by World War II, the Holocaust, and the subsequent communist regime was total. An entire world had been made extinct and existed now only in memories and images.
In his later life Ben-Gurion used to glorify the memory of his hometown. In his recollections, this small, humble place of some eight thousand souls, of whom five thousand were Jews, became "the most progressive Hebrew city in Poland."
Plonsk sat on a minor road off the highway between Warsaw and Gdansk. Although it was only sixty-five kilometers from Warsaw, the journey to the capital took over three hours. In the early 1900s the railway had not yet reached Plonsk, and there was no paved road to the town. It had no running water, and sewage flowed in the streets. The winds of the Haskala ( Jewish enlightenment) were blowing in Plonsk, but as might be expected in such a backward place, most of its Jews were piously observant, and progress was only relative. There were three Jewish religious schools and numerous heders (Jewish elementary schools), including both traditional schools and progressive, relatively modern institutions that nevertheless did not teach Russian or mathematics, despite the Russian authorities' demand that the children also be taught secular subjects. The town did not have a gymnasium (high school). Plonsk resembled many other shtetls under the tsarist empire's rule, and despite the ideological storms raging all around, it remained largely conservative, tranquil, and removed from the revolutionary fervor that characterized the Pale of Settlement in Ukraine and White Russia.
David Ben-Gurion was born in Plonsk in 1886, the fourth son of Sheindel and Avigdor Green. Nothing in his origins, his birthplace, or his education hinted at future greatness. The Greens had no notable lineage, no important rabbis or religious arbiters in their history, which they could trace only as far back as the grandparents on both sides. Ben-Gurion's paternal grandfather was a writer of requests, petitions, and letters for the Polish peasants who came to town on market day and sought to take cases to the local court. Avigdor Green inherited this occupation from his father. His son referred to him as a "lawyer," although he was more of a pettifogger (Winkeladvokat) who sat on the corner outside the courthouse. The family was on a fairly sound financial footing thanks to Sheindel's dowry: two wooden houses with a garden behind them on a large plot of land. These houses were on the outskirts of the town, on Goat Alley (whose name attests to its character) next to the priest's house. The family lived in one and rented out the other, and this rent plus Avigdor's income enabled them to live reasonably well.
The most distinguished family in Plonsk was the Zemachs, who were proud of their lineage. Shlomo Zemach and BenGurion were friends from their youth, but there was a big difference between them: the Zemach family genealogy reached back to the seventeenth century, and among its forebears were some eminent Torah scholars. They were wealthy and aristocratic. Shlomo was a tall, handsome young man and a good student in the religious school. Zemach senior was a proud, well-respected Jew, not pleased by his son's friendship with the son of Avigdor Green; there were murmurings in the town about Green because he had exchanged the traditional ultra-Orthodox garb of the long black kapota (coat) for a short European jacket, he had a penchant for cards, and he was a Mitnaged (opponent of Hasidism), whereas most Plonsk Jews were followers of the Rabbi of Gur. On one occasion Zemach senior even slapped Shlomo for visiting the Green house. But the youngsters' friendship was firm, and Zemach was forced to accept his son's connection with the dubious Greens.
The Jews of Plonsk were largely Hasidim who were artisans, apprentices, carpenters, cobblers, and small merchants. Above them was a sparse middle class of homeowners, most of whom were "enlightened" (tolerant of modernity and open to Haskala influences such as secular education); these included many Mitnagdim. At the top of the socioeconomic ladder stood a few rich, aristocratic families, also disciples of the Rabbi of Gur. The Greens were a relatively "modern" middle-class family. They joined the Hibbat Zion (Lovers of Zion) movement when it arose in the 1880s, and, following the dramatic appearance of Theodor Herzl, became loyal Zionists. Avigdor Green was a member of Hibbat Zion, and he imparted his beliefs to his eldest son, Abraham, and his youngest, David.
Plonsk did have its political disputes. Some Hasidim, for example, made the life of another Hasid a misery because he was a Zionist, and the father of a young man who intended to emigrate to Palestine hid his clothes, preventing him from leaving the house. But it seems such events were rare, which is why people mentioned them in their memoirs. The intergenerational struggles that typified the first generation of religious backsliders, the soul-wrenching deliberations that recur in the literary descriptions of the time, are absent from the accounts of Ben-Gurion and his friends in Plonsk. There the process of modernization was gentler and less traumatic than that experienced by many of Ben-Gurion's contemporaries. At the time, Pale of Settlement Jewry was torn between the autonomism of Simon Dubnow, which strove for Jewish cultural autonomy in Eastern Europe; the Jewish socialism of the Bund (founded in 1897, the same year as the First Zionist Congress); Russian social democracy; Zionism; and territorialism, a movement that sought a possible territory for the Jews outside Palestine. These stormy ideological struggles barely touched the Jewish youth of Plonsk. There the youngsters deliberated over remaining in Poland and somehow acquiring a higher education, emigrating to the United States, or becoming a Zionist and going to Palestine.
Ben-Gurion attended a heder and then a Jewish religious school, which he left after his bar-mitzvah. Talmudic disputation did not appeal to him, or perhaps he lacked the talent for this type of study. He wanted a higher education, but was unable to obtain a matriculation certificate, either because of the quota by which Russian gymnasia limited the number of Jewish students, or because he could not afford it. Since Plonsk had no gymnasium, attending one meant moving to Warsaw. Like many Jewish youngsters in this situation, he tried to prepare for the admission examinations by studying on his own.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to his son, Avigdor Green wrote a letter to Theodor Herzl, the leader of the Zionist movement—a letter Ben-Gurion only became aware of some fifty years later, when it was found in the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem. In high-flown, archaic Hebrew, Green explained to the man considered "the King of the Jews" that he had a talented, diligent son who wanted to study but was unable to do so. He would like to send the boy to study in Vienna, Herzl's city, and he sought the advice of the president of the Zionist Organization, and also his financial aid, "for I am unable to support my son, the apple of my eye." The letter reveals the naïveté of the advocate from Plonsk who imagined that he would receive a reply to his letter. But it was also the first expression of the father's belief that his son possessed extraordinary talents.
The years between 1899 and 1904 are shrouded in mist. Ben-Gurion left school but stayed in Plonsk. He apparently learned Russian, read a great deal, and probably helped his father write petitions and requests outside the courthouse. He still wore the traditional kapota. The one ray of light in his life was his activity in Ezra, an organization of Jewish religious school students (the intellectual and social elite of Plonsk), which he founded along with Shlomo Fuchs and Shlomo Zemach after the three decided to speak Hebrew.
Ben-Gurion recalled learning Hebrew from his grandfather at age three. His grandfather would sit him on his lap, point at different body parts, and say what they were in Hebrew; then the child repeated the names after him. He moved on to various household objects, and continued until the boy began chattering in Hebrew. The three friends' decision to speak Hebrew was quite courageous: although it was the language of the Torah, nobody spoke it at that time.
Written Hebrew was different; modern Hebrew literature was widely read. In fact, its language captivated enlightened Jews. Ben-Gurion always mentioned the first Hebrew novel, Abraham Mapu's Ahavat Zion (Love of Zion), as one of the factors that led him to Zionism, just as Uncle Tom's Cabin made him a socialist, while Tolstoy's Resurrection had such a powerful effect on him that for a while he became a vegetarian. Young David Green read a great deal of Hebrew literature and poetry. The youngsters at the Jewish religious school used to hide Hebrew literature inside their Gemara books, but Ben-Gurion had no need of these stratagems since his father allowed him to read as much Hebrew literature as he wanted. He read Mordecai Feuerberg, Micha Yosef Berdyczewski, and Ahad Ha'am, and knew Hayim Nachman Bialik's poems, which he loved, by heart. He also loved Judah Leib Gordon's and Saul Tchernichovsky's poetry. He read the best of Russian literature: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev. In later interviews he stressed that he never learned Polish since he had always known he would emigrate to Palestine and saw no point in learning a language he considered provincial. There is some doubt whether this assertion is true, for he needed Polish to communicate with the peasants who attended the courthouse. Most likely his repudiation of Polish was intended to underscore both his fervent desire to emigrate to Palestine and his connection to Russian, which the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine) considered more prestigious than Polish.
In any event, written Hebrew was accepted by the maskilim (enlightened, educated Jews) as part of the revival of original Hebrew culture, in the spirit of national movements seeking to return to their nation's ancient roots or invent a genealogy for themselves. But Hebrew was not a spoken language, even in Palestine. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, compiler of the modern Hebrew dictionary, was well known for speaking Hebrew to his son from the day he was born. But until the Herzliya Gymnasium in Tel Aviv adopted Hebrew as the language of instruction, and a generation of Hebrew-speaking graduates emerged, spoken Hebrew was a rarity. When Ben-Gurion met the Zionist leader Nachum Sokolov, editor of the Hebrew-language newspaper Hatzfira and future Zionist Organization president, in Warsaw around 1904 and addressed him in Hebrew, Sokolov could reply only in broken Hebrew.
Thus the decision by the three boys in Plonsk to speak only Hebrew among themselves and teach it to their families was a real cultural and political statement. As it turned out, they were so successful that conversing in Hebrew became the hallmark of Zionist youth in Plonsk. The Ezra association also set a goal of disseminating Hebrew education among the poorer youth, the social stratum of apprentices who had barely acquired a little education. The boys devoted themselves enthusiastically to this endeavor, and the local artisans responded by allowing their apprentices to study for an hour and a half a day. It appears that the influence of the Russian "Go to the People" movement was at work here: if the Russians can volunteer in order to advance the people, then so can we! The members of Ezra tried to register as a recognized Zionist association and pay the Shekel membership dues, but their application was rejected because of their age—Ben-Gurion, the youngest of the three, was fourteen at the time, and Fuchs, the oldest, was sixteen.
In 1903, the Kishinev pogrom rocked the entire Jewish world, but there were no reverberations in tranquil Plonsk. What did shock our three youngsters was Herzl's proposal at the Sixth Zionist Congress that same year to establish Jewish settlement in East Africa, known as "the Uganda Program." Driven by a sense of urgency over the distress of Jews in the Pale of Settlement, Herzl sought a "night shelter" for them until they could settle in Palestine, where the Turks were doing everything in their power to prevent such settlement. The proposal caused an uproar at the congress. Its opponents, most of whom were Zionists from Eastern Europe where Jewish tradition and culture were still firmly rooted, threatened to split the Zionist Organization. To Ben-Gurion and his friends the proposal seemed a betrayal of Zion. One hot summer day, as they were drying themselves in the sun after a swim in the River Plonka and talking about momentous issues, they decided that the most appropriate response to the Uganda Program was to emigrate to Palestine.
Yet there was still a long road to travel between decision and action. Shlomo Fuchs was the first to leave Plonsk, but instead of going to Palestine he went to London and thence to New York, like millions of other young Jews seeking to free themselves of the stifling atmosphere of a small, remote town where there was no chance of advancement. Fuchs and BenGurion corresponded at length and in great detail, and through these letters we can reconstruct the young Ben-Gurion's mindset during those years. Fuchs kept Ben-Gurion's letters for almost fifty years until, almost miraculously, they came into the possession of the editor of Ben-Gurion's papers. When asked why he had kept the letters so long, Fuchs replied that they had always known Ben-Gurion was destined for greatness. We shall never know if this was the wisdom of hindsight or genuine precognition. In any event, these letters provide contemporaneous testimony of Ben-Gurion's history from 1904 on.
He was a sensitive, emotional boy, very attached to his friends. His mother died in childbirth when he was eleven and his father remarried, but Ben-Gurion never called his stepmother "mother" and did not feel close to her. The loss of his mother caused him pain that never healed; she dwelt in the mind of the child, the youth, and even the adult as an irreplaceable source of love, devotion, and emotional affinity, for whose loss there was no reparation. David, known as Duvche, was a sickly child, so his mother left her older children for a time and took him to the country where he could recuperate in the healthy air, eating nutritious country food. This episode was etched in the child's mind as a precious memory of unparalleled devotion. "It seems to me that she was one of a kind," he wrote to one of his friends whose mother had died; "she had eleven children [most of whom died in infancy] yet she cared for me as if I were her only son. It is hard for me to describe such abundant love. And it is hard for me to forget being orphaned as a child." On every occasion when Ben-Gurion, as prime minister of Israel, wanted to console a friend on the death of his or her mother, he always mentioned the loss of his own mother. In a letter to Golda Meir following her mother's death, he wrote that a mother "is the most intimate of things, second to none," and with her passing "something unparalleled in love, loyalty, the most intimate bond, is cruelly torn from the soul, the heart, and will eternally be a precious, irreplaceable treasure." He would give his age at his mother's death as younger than it really was—"My mother died when I was ten"—to underscore the misery of the little boy bereft of motherly love.
His idealization of his mother and clinging to her memory suggest that although Avigdor was a devoted father and Duvche his favorite son, relations in the house on Goat Alley were not warm, and the boy lacked love and affection. He first discovered the thrill of love for a member of the opposite sex at twelve, but this seems to have been just worship from afar. It is unclear whether the object of this first love was Rachel Nelkin, the town beauty, for whom he developed real feelings several years later, or another girl. Plonsk Jewish society was very conservative, and attachments between the sexes were usually expressed solely by an exchange of yearning glances.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ben-Gurion by Anita Shapira, Anthony Berris. Copyright © 2014 Anita Shapira. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface, vii,1. Plonsk, 1,
2. "I Found the Homeland Landscape,", 17,
3. Exile and Return, 43,
4. Labor Leader, 62,
5. From Labor Leader to National Leader, 82,
6. Days of Hope, Days of Despair, 102,
7. On the Verge of Statehood, 135,
8. "We Hereby Declare ...,", 154,
9. Helmsman of the State, 174,
10. Ben-Gurion Against Ben-Gurion, 203,
11. Decline, 232,
Epilogue, 242,
Notes, 247,
Acknowledgments, 257,
Index, 259,