A State at Any Cost, page 3
About two years after being widowed, Avigdor Gruen remarried. Ben-Gurion called his stepmother “aunt,” momeh in Yiddish, just as other orphans did. When he mentioned her in his letters to his father, he took care to do so with all due respect. But when he opposed handing over children who had survived the Holocaust to adoption in Israel, he wrote: “Only exceptional people are capable of adoption; we all know what a stepmother is.” As his biographer, Shabtai Teveth, wrote, he seems here to have been thinking back on his own life.13 In any case, his mother’s death shattered his childhood. Sometimes he seemingly sought to heighten the devastation of losing his mother by saying that she died when he was only ten.14 He usually recalled a brief childhood and early maturation, without joy and without games, “except chess.”
Some boys who did not have to work or learn a trade would spend their post–bar mitzvah days in a beit midrash, a religious seminary, where they studied with the help of teachers and on their own for several years until they married and had families, or even beyond that. Others were sent out of town to a gymnasium, as academic high schools were called in Central and Eastern Europe, and then on to higher studies. Ben-Gurion studied for a time at a beit midrash with Shlomo Zemach, where, Zemach claimed, he did not excel. “His brain did not grasp the abstract logical paths in those studies,” Zemach wrote, adding that he himself had excelled at Talmud.15 So Ben-Gurion was a boy orphaned of his mother, a stepson, shorter than his fellows, less gifted at his studies, who heard everywhere that his father was a dubious character. He coped with his childhood trauma as many do—he tweaked it. He often referred to his father as an “attorney,” and termed him a “recognized leader of the town’s Jews.” He claimed never to have felt any inadequacy because of his short stature—his mother had been short as well, he noted. Ben-Gurion also liked to say that a doctor who examined him when he was five years old noted that his head was relatively large and that there was a bump on the back. The doctor deduced from this that the boy had been endowed with tremendous abilities and had a great future before him. That was another reason to leave his melancholy childhood behind him, as soon as he possibly could. “At the age of fourteen I felt myself in every sense an adult,” he later said.16
As a matter of fact, by that time he was idle. He did not attend school and was not working. A biographer suggested that Ben-Gurion helped his father out, learning how to write requests, milling with the crowds along with him on the steps of courthouses, trying to rope in new clients. He read books and began keeping a diary. On Hanukah in 1900, he, Zemach, and Fuchs founded an organization they called Ezra, after the biblical scribe. Their goal was to promote the use of Hebrew in everyday life. At its height, Ezra numbered several dozen members; it lasted for about six years. It was Ben-Gurion’s first public initiative.17
Ben-Gurion later recounted that his Zionist views took form when he was a toddler of three or five; once he claimed, “I was born a Zionist.” He presumably was more accurate when he wrote that “when I still could not understand the substance of discussions and debates, I absorbed the hope of Zion that filled our house.”18 His father was one of the first Zionist activists in Płońsk, one of those who identified with a cluster of initiatives referred to collectively as Hovevei Zion. The movement’s older followers had lived through the Spring of Nations, the national and political revolutions that swept through Europe in 1848. Hovevei Zion was the Jewish answer to the upsurge in national identity and hopes for national independence that swirled around the Jews of Europe. Its adherents identified themselves not just as believers in the Jewish religion, but as members of a Jewish nation. The members of these different societies tried to form an international organization, but Hovevei Zion was fundamentally a romantic and even religious, rather than a political, movement. Many promoted it as a response to the discrimination and persecution of Jews. Socialism was also making its way into the Jewish communities of the Russian Empire at this time. Some of the socialist groups promoted agricultural settlement in Palestine, organizing settlers to found farming communities there, and supporting them thereafter. It was the beginning of what would later be called “practical Zionism.”19
Zionism was a movement founded in Europe, inspired by its culture, and embedded in its history. Zionism’s nationalism, romanticism, liberalism, and socialism all came from that continent. In this sense, the history of the Zionist presence in Palestine belongs to European history.
“A TALL, HANDSOME MAN”
Avigdor Gruen had not yet thought of settling in Zion. In fact, once he became active in Hovevei Zion, he had much less incentive to leave Poland. His social isolation, which might have driven him to emigrate, largely ended thanks to his Zionist activity, which brought him into contact with people who had previously done their best not to be seen in his company. He hosted them in his home once a week for a meeting where, among other things, they together read the Hebrew newspapers Hatzefirah and Hamelitz. Ben-Gurion could not remember whether his grandfather had also been a member of the group, but recalled sitting on his grandfather’s lap and being taught Hebrew—first syllables, then words, and finally complete sentences.20
About four months before Ben-Gurion’s tenth birthday, Hamelitz made its first mention of a man named Theodor Herzl, the author of a new book just published in Vienna, The Jewish State. The item was very positive.21 Word of Herzl quickly spread. Rumors ran through Płońsk that the Messiah had arrived. Ben-Gurion recalled that they spoke of “a tall, handsome man” with a black beard.22 Herzl was not, in fact, tall, nor did he promise divine redemption. Furthermore, as opposed to Hovevei Zion, he did not believe in the efficacy of the settlement of individual Jews in Palestine. His aim was a full-fledged nation-state; to that end he founded a global organization that would seek Jewish independence by negotiating an agreement with the Ottoman Empire and the European powers. In other words, his was political, rather than practical, Zionism. Avigdor Gruen immediately became an enthusiastic supporter of Herzl’s. So did a local shopkeeper named Simcha Isaac. The two of them founded a society they named Bnei Zion—Children of Zion. They began to collect “shekels,” as membership dues in the Zionist movement were called, and to send donations to Palestine. In September 1900, the organization reported having two hundred members.*
*
The Zionist activity in Płońsk attracted outside attention. Hamelitz covered a meeting held in Gruen’s home. A pamphlet in Yiddish, written by the famous author Shalom Aleichem, was read out loud. Its title was “Why Do the Jews Need Their Own Country?” After the reading, the assembled sang Zionist songs.23 Ben-Gurion could certainly have imbibed Zionism in his childhood. Unlike several of his friends, his road to Zionism did not require him to rebel against his father. In that sense it was easier for him.
The newspaper report also indicates that a Zionist gathering in Płońsk was an exceptional event. In fact, most of Poland’s Jews, including those of Ben-Gurion’s age cohort, were not Zionists. Ben-Gurion and his friends were thus exceptional, on the verge of eccentric. He stood out among them because he could speak a bit of Hebrew; his friends had trouble keeping up with him on this score. Zemach related that his own Hebrew sounded ludicrous at first. Levkowitz found it even harder—at that time, he was barely able to read and almost never wrote, in any language. Rather than speak Hebrew, he would communicate with his friends by means of gestures and facial expressions.24 Fuchs’s Hebrew was that of his sacred studies and the synagogue liturgy; everyday Hebrew was a foreign language for him. For the first time in his life, Ben-Gurion had an advantage over his friends.
One seminary allowed them to organize an evening class that included Hebrew lessons and lectures on Zionist subjects; the teenage Ben-Gurion gave talks on Zionism and culture. Once or twice they circulated a mimeographed pamphlet. Ben-Gurion published poems there. One day he traveled to Warsaw to ask for the support of Hatzefirah’s editor, Nahum Sokolow. It was Ben-Gurion’s first public initiative outside his hometown. Hatzefirah did not write anything about Ezra. Sokolow might well not have seen anything new about it.25
It was certainly not Ben-Gurion and his friends who woke Hebrew from its long sleep. A hundred years before, Poland was already one of the centers of a new European Hebrew-language literary culture. Organizations to promote the Hebrew language were already in existence in any number of places; in Płońsk, Ezra was preceded by thirty years by another such group.26
Yiddish continued to be the principal language of the town’s Jews, but the boys of Ezra became adept at Hebrew and used it as a kind of secret argot for themselves. They wrote their letters in modern Hebrew, generally correct, sometimes even rich; their penmanship is adept.
“I THOUGHT I HAD ASCENDED TO HEAVEN”
The letters that the four friends wrote to each other after they parted, and the memoirs they later published, exude tormented adolescent angst; they felt trapped between the outgoing century and the new one. “My soul is not at peace,” Ben-Gurion wrote. “I do not know why I am sometimes so sad, so dejected, and I feel a deep emptiness, great and looming in my heart … I have intense longing for something, I know not what.”27 Levkowitz also recalled “youthful yearning for an unclear unknown” and for “all that is distant.” He felt a “towering thirst” to do a “great deed,” and suffered from intense depression and anxiety. He was sick of life. Zemach was tormented with similar thoughts. “We wondered about life as death and death as life, not understanding much of these, but nevertheless absorbing something into us,” he wrote in his memoirs. He wrote to Fuchs: “It is impossible to die and I am unable to live.”28
Zemach was tall and handsome, with curly hair and a black mustache; he was a proud, conceited gossip. Along with other boys, he made fun of Levkowitz for his ignorance and even publicly humiliated his father in synagogue. He mocked “Mr. Avigdor,” as he called Ben-Gurion’s father, for making spelling mistakes in Russian.29 According to Zemach, Fuchs was an “emotional,” “delicate,” and somewhat “passive” boy. “His character was overdelicate and there was something feminine in every mood of his, but this tenderness was pleasant and very attractive,” he wrote.30
Fuchs did not make himself out to be as depressed as his friends, but he seems to have shared Levkowitz’s longing for “all that is distant.” In 1904 he went to London, leaving behind in Płońsk Zemach’s sister, whom he loved. Zemach wrote to tell him that she sometimes asked about him. But mostly he wrote about his own love for Fuchs’s sister, and his feelings for Fuchs himself. “I so miss you, so very much desire and crave to see you, my beloved friend. O, if I only had shaken your hand before you left, if I could only embrace you and bestow kisses on you.” He once signed a letter with the parting phrase “Your brother embraces you with fierce love and kisses you.”31 Sometimes he patronized him. In London, Fuchs intended to study at a rabbinical college, but had trouble supporting himself. Zemach admonished him: “You have just crossed the threshold and now I’m already hearing dissatisfaction, resentment, and grievances … What did you think, that they would roll out a band to welcome you upon your arrival in London?” Zemach described his relations with Ben-Gurion at that time as close friendship. The two met daily, and according to Zemach, there were no secrets between them save one—he did not speak of his love for Fuchs’s sister. He may well not have spoken of his love for Fuchs, either.
Ben-Gurion told Fuchs that he first fell in love at the age of twelve. “My love then was as soft as the buds of spring,” he recounted poetically when he was eighteen, “and it grew in time and ignited like a flame—and last summer I learned that she loves me … I thought I had ascended to heaven.”32 When he first saw her, she was about ten years old, a student at the government school that he attended. Her name was Rachel Nelkin and she had black braids. This may well be the same girl who “very much captured” Levkowitz’s heart as well.
Levkowitz was a tall, slender youth with a long nose and small eyes. “He’s not handsome,” Zemach wrote.33 He was also very shy. He first caught sight of Rachel at the home of her stepfather, Simcha Isaac, who regularly convened Zionist meetings for young people in the back room of his store. “Sometimes I thought that those boys were not enthralled so much by Simcha Isaac as by his beautiful daughter,” Levkowitz wrote.34 For a long time, he lacked the courage to speak to her. He only spoke with her father, with great gravity. He secretly envied his friends, who were more successful than he, but he put on a pretense of insouciance. Yet he thought of her incessantly, day and night. In the end, he fashioned a scheme to encounter Rachel alone, but after lying in wait, when he found himself face-to-face with her, he blushed, turned his face away, and pretended he had not even noticed her presence. Afterward, he cursed himself and his idiocy. Levkowitz seems to have found life a heavier burden than his friends did. His bashfulness might have killed him had Zionism not taken his mind off his plight, he later wrote.35
He sometimes went to the Gruens’ house, which he also described as “a center of Zionism.” Coming from a poor neighborhood, he saw the Gruens as wealthy. He was drawn there by “a magic that he did not understand,” but something also repelled him—specifically, Ben-Gurion’s two sisters. Paralyzed in their presence, there too he put on a show of having come to talk about the Zionist future.36 It was a particularly tough time to be a teenager. In Płońsk, social interactions between the sexes were still subject to very strict rules. When a boy and a girl were in love, Ben-Gurion related, a matchmaker could generally be called in to arrange things. As Levkowitz put it, “We boys sat over our pages of Talmud, studied, fantasized, and waited for a good match.”37 When it seemed to him that Ben-Gurion was winning Nelkin’s love, Levkowitz was crushed.38
Zemach did not have that problem. One night, when he was eighteen, he had trouble falling asleep. He turned from side to side, then got dressed and opened his bedroom window. Looking into the window of the house across the street, he saw his neighbors’ daughter, Shoshana, Shmuel Fuchs’s sister. For the next hour the two sat at their windows and gazed at each other, as dawn broke. Zemach felt “huge excitement,” as he wrote afterward to Fuchs. “If I didn’t go insane back then [it must be because] I am solid iron … David Gruen told me that I had the look of a lunatic.”
In the months that followed, he continued to share his infatuation with Fuchs. “I am so much in love that I am sometimes ashamed of myself,” he wrote. He promised that he had never even considered touching her, and again quoted their mutual friend: “D. Gruen tells me that I am overly idealistic and that he cannot understand how I can be that way.”39
Zemach’s Zionism was more than a national-ideological aspiration—it was also a fledgling’s longing to flee the nest, to spread his wings, and to go where he wished. Life in Płońsk seemed “banal” to him; he wanted to go to Odessa, to study science and foreign languages, including Arabic and Turkish, the languages spoken in Palestine. Then he would return to Płońsk, not in order “to sink again into the bog” but to take Shoshana and to settle in the Land of Israel. He dreamed of being a Hebrew writer.40 In the meanwhile, youth afflicted him. “I am not happy, my fate is evil and bitter,” he lamented. “When will I finally stop being subject to my parents and become my own man?”41
Other adolescents felt the same way, deeply troubling their parents. They felt that they were losing their children. When the girls took their daily walk through town, Zemach and his companions did their best to impress them. They’d loiter on the sidewalk on the other side of the street and speak Hebrew to each other, as loudly as they could. Zemach smoked. In photographs from this period the boys are bareheaded, eschewing the traditional cap, and are in the company of girls.42 Ben-Gurion swaggered, so as to impress the beautiful Rachel Nelkin. Once he went out for a walk with the daughter of family friends from Warsaw. “It was not long before the entire town was at our heels,” he related.43 Parents had a hard time accepting such scandalous behavior, and many of them attributed it to Zionism.
“A GREAT PASSION FOR A FREE AND NATURAL LIFE”
In its first article on The Jewish State, Hamelitz declared that Herzl “will not find a path into the hearts of the God-fearing,” with just a few exceptions.44 Longing for the Land of Israel had always been a part of the Jewish religion. It fostered a dream of a return to the Holy Land, of aliyah, literally “ascent,” as the book of Genesis puts it in its account of Abraham’s wanderings. Yet the Zionists angered the vast majority of Orthodox leaders, in particular the ultra-Orthodox ones who termed themselves Haredim.† Avraham Gruen, Ben-Gurion’s eldest brother, wrote of a “huge civil war,” including persecution and boycotts, that also “made it difficult to earn a living.” Some rabbis forbade their followers to marry into Zionist families.
