Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel

by Francine Klagsbrun Narrated by Jo Anna Perrin

Overview

Golda Meir was a world figure unlike any other. Born in tsarist Russia in 1898, she immigrated to America in 1906 and grew up in Milwaukee, where from her earliest years she displayed the political consciousness and organizational skills that would eventually catapult her into the inner circles of Israel's founding generation. Moving to mandatory Palestine in 1921 with her husband, the passionate socialist joined a kibbutz but soon left and was hired at a public works office by the man who would become the great love of her life. A series of public service jobs brought her to the attention of David Ben-Gurion, and her political career took off. Fund-raising in America in 1948, secretly meeting in Amman with King Abdullah right before Israel's declaration of independence, mobbed by thousands of Jews in a Moscow synagogue in 1948 as Israel's first representative to the USSR, serving as minister of labor and foreign minister in the 1950s and 1960s, Golda brought fiery oratory, plainspoken appeals, and shrewd deal-making to the cause to which she had dedicated her life-the welfare and security of the State of Israel and its inhabitants.



As prime minister, Golda negotiated arms agreements with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and had dozens of clandestine meetings with Jordan's King Hussein in the unsuccessful pursuit of a land-for-peace agreement with Israel's neighbors. But her time in office ended in tragedy, when Israel was caught off guard by Egypt and Syria's surprise attack on Yom Kippur in 1973. Analyzing newly available documents from Israeli government archives, Francine Klagsbrun looks into whether Golda could have prevented that war and whether in its darkest days she contemplated using nuclear force. Resigning in the war's aftermath, she spent her final years keeping a hand in national affairs and bemusedly enjoying international acclaim. Klagsbrun's superbly researched and masterly recounted story of Israel's founding mother gives us a Golda for the ages.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Ethan Bronner

…Francine Klagsbrun has contributed a thorough and absorbing examination of the woman and her role in Zionism and Israel. Lioness wrests Meir from the shadow of the Yom Kippur War and presents her life and career as a lens to examine Israel's challenges—borders, settlements, occupation, terror and the social and ethnic divide between Jews of European and those of Middle Eastern origin…Klagsbrun has spent years reviewing thousands of pages of documents, interviewing those closest to Meir (most now dead) and, while writing with affection, applying the tools of a contemporary truth tester.

From the Publisher

Winner of the 2017 National Jewish Book Award/Everett Family Foundation Book of the Year

“A thorough and absorbing examination of the woman and her role in Zionism and Israel.  Lioness wrests Meir from the shadow of the Yom Kippur War and presents her life and career as a lens to examine Israel’s challenges—borders, settlements, occupation, terror, and the social and ethnic divide between Jews of European origin and those of Middle Eastern origin.”
—Ethan Bronner, The New York Times Book Review
 
“Scrupulously researched. . . . A major achievement.”
—Susan Jacoby, The Washington Post
 
“Engrossing [and] magisterial. . . . One finishes Klagsbrun’s monumental volume—which is both a biography of Golda and a biography of Israel in her time—with a deepened sense that modern Israel, its prime ministers, and its survival is a story of biblical proportions.”
—Commentary
 
“The most comprehensive, best-researched, and carefully nuanced study of Israel’s fourth prime minister published to date. It forces even the most skeptical and opinionated to reassess the Golda legacy and reexamine her impact on Israel’s trajectory. . . . Fascinating.”
—Lilith
 
 “Magisterial. . . . The individual who emerges from the 800 pages of Lioness is not only more nuanced than history has given her credit for being, but also more compassionate, realistic, and capable of compromise than the image of the blunt-edged battle-ax that has passed down to us.”
—David Green, Haaretz

“A majestic and very important account of the extraordinary life of the American-raised woman who became a charismatic and powerful prime minister of modern Israel. I thought I knew her life story, but Klagsbrun’s compelling story of Golda's triumphs and trials, her irresistible personality, gave me a fresh appreciation of this historic woman.”
—Tom Brokaw, author of The Greatest Generation
 
“Masterful [and] compelling. . . . Klagsbrun captures Golda’s unusual blend of toughness, warmth, intelligence, plainspokenness, and passion, along with her remarkable achievements.”
—Sandee Brawarsky, The Jewish Week

“A masterwork melding character and history, Klagsbrun’s majestic study of Golda Meir chronicles marriage as poignant tragedy, visionary socialism as dominant yet fragile, party politics as life-or-death exigency, and daily contingencies as cliffhangers. Part biblically reminiscent drama, part novel-like interiority, part American-inspired pioneering, Golda Meir’s story, from childhood pogroms to Milwaukee schoolteacher to prime minister of the beleaguered reborn state of Israel, has no parallel in the annals of nations.”
—Cynthia Ozick

“Golda Meir—immigrant, Zionist, feminist, and wartime prime minister of Israel—claimed far more than one woman’s share of history. In Lioness, Francine Klagsbrun superbly captures Golda’s courage and unrelenting commitment to the founding and survival of a Jewish state.”
—John A. Farrell, author of Richard Nixon: The Life
 
“A masterful biography—it’s scholarly and gorgeously researched, but most of all it’s the vivid story of a tough, complicated, remarkable woman who led Israel during a crucial period in its history. A powerful read.”
—Patricia Bosworth, author of Anything Your Little Heart Desires: An American Family Story

“Klagsbrun’s prodigious biography goes far beyond previous hagiographies to place Golda’s personal life against the backdrop of the emergence of Israel on the world stage. She lays out Golda’s monumental achievements but does not shy away from her failings, [in this] defining testament to Golda’s much-admired legacy.”
—Hadassah

Library Journal

09/01/2017
As a child, Ukrainian-born Golda Meir (1898–1978) moved from Russia to Milwaukee and later Chicago, eventually dedicating her life to the formation of Israel, becoming the country's first and only female prime minister in 1969. Often seen as energetic and irascible, Meir spurned feminism as a political movement, and her complex story deserves an examination. Klagsbrun (The Fourth Commandment) attempts to capture the richness and depth of Meir's life with the details she feels other accounts have lacked by making the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War the defining event of Meir's life. No one will come away from this book without respect for Meir's tenacity and dedication to hard work. An exploration of the leader's poverty-stricken and dangerous childhood gives nuance to her often controversial later career. With hundreds of books on Meir available, this one stands out with its depth of resources and research, building a convincing case that Meir's achievements are still relevant. VERDICT General readers and scholars of Jewish history will find something useful here, as will those interested in political science.—Margaret Heller, Loyola Univ. Chicago Libs.

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2017-07-25
An evenhanded new biography of one the larger-than-life Israeli leader.During her entire 50-year public career, Golda Meir (1898-1978) was dedicated to the cause of Zionism and creation of the state of Israel, from joining the socialist Workers of Zion movement in high school in Milwaukee in 1915, to becoming the fourth prime minister of Israel in 1969. In this suitably admiring but hardly gushing chronicle, versatile writer and journalist Klagsbrun (The Fourth Commandment: Remember the Sabbath Day, 2012, etc.) guides readers through her own journey of understanding this enormously important, often contradictory, crafty, and frequently opaque personage in Israel's history. The project is the result of a long-running research between America and Israel, including the use of newly declassified files. Meir—whom Klagsbrun refers to as "Golda" throughout because that is the way the premier wanted to be addressed, only adopting the Hebraized version of her married name, Meyerson, because her mentor David Ben-Gurion strongly suggested it in the late 1950s—was hugely popular, even adored, as an effective rainmaker for Israel in 1940s and '50s America, the land of her youth; yet later in Israel, it was a different story. Meir never regained the popularity she enjoyed when first becoming premier in Israel in 1969. In a time of a series of debilitating terrorist attacks and an alarming (for her) unraveling of the social fabric, including, ironically, the thrust of feminism, she and her defense minister, Moshe Dayan, were blamed for being blindsided by the attacks of Egypt and Syria in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, and she resigned over the painful subsequent protests. As the author shows in her well-rounded portrait, Meir was Ben-Gurion's "only man in the Israeli cabinet," a ferocious chain-smoking socialist leader without a high-level education but whose plainspoken speeches brought audiences to tears—and action. A terrific chronicle of a unique world leader.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170549856
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	10/30/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	1,091,456

Read an Excerpt

The visit to America was a fantasy come true. Wherever Golda set foot, she was received with a bursting exuberance no Israeli premier before her had experienced. In Philadelphia, where she arrived on Sep­tember 24, 1969, a crowd of five thousand met her at the airport, many of them schoolchildren carrying posters that read, GOLDA A GO GO or WE DIG YOU, GOLDA. Afterward, more than twenty thousand people packed Independence Hall and applauded wildly at the end of her brief speech about Israel’s desire for peace. “I am wise enough to understand that the applause was not directed to me . . . It was rather an ovation for the State of Israel,” she said, with required modesty. She knew as well as anyone that the men, women, and children who swarmed to see her in Philadelphia and every other city she visited were as intrigued by the “71-year-old grandmother” (as the press frequently referred to her) who headed the State of Israel as they were loyal to that state. Her simple bearing—she appeared time and again in the same black-and-white her­ringbone tweed suit—and midwestern twang with its faint echo of East­ern Europe made her seem the American dream come true, the local girl made good. The “former Milwaukee schoolteacher” (another favorite press nomenclature) from an impoverished family had risen against all odds—including the odds of being a woman—to the highest office in her land. Americans, and especially American Jews, who had admired her earlier as Israel’s foreign minister, were swept away by her presence as prime minister. No one doubted that she would hold her own with the president of the most powerful nation on earth. “What can you do? She’s irresistible,” one observer commented. Most people who saw and heard her agreed.
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Lioness"
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Copyright © 2017 Francine Klagsbrun.
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