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Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir at a news conference as she arrived for talks with President Nixon in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 26, 1973. (AP) Last update - 13:43 07/07/2008 Biography Mother of a nation, but not much of a mother By Shoshana Kordova Tags: biographies, Golda Meir  Elinor Burkett debunks the image of Golda Meir as 'everybody's bubbe,' and offers instead the bigger picture of the best man in Ben-Gurion's cabinet (a phrase she hated) Golda by Elinor Burkett, Harper, 496 pages, $27.95 As my attempt to write this review was interrupted yet again by the dulcet sounds of my 9-month-old daughter waking up to vomit for the fourth or fifth time in one night, I found myself wondering: What would Golda do? Advertisement I didn't have to think long about the answer: She probably wouldn't have been home in the first place, but if she were, she would almost certainly have left the sick child with her husband Morris (whom she cheated on and eventually divorced) or with the babysitter who usually put the kids to bed, and run off to attend a Mapai meeting or catch a plane that would enable her to harangue American Jews into sending money to Israel. From "her sensible shoes, frumpy dresses, and swollen ankles to her old-fashioned handbag and omnipresent Chesterfields," in the words of biographer Elinor Burkett, Golda Meir -- or just plain "Golda," as Burkett refers to her throughout the book -- is often characterized as the strong-willed, straight-talking, gray-bunned grandmother of the entire Jewish people. But Meir -- the Kiev-born, American-raised Zionist leader who immigrated to Palestine in 1921 and held many political roles in the state's early years before becoming prime minister, in 1969 -- was not much of a mother to her own two children. Perhaps inevitably -- given the time and dedication needed to help lead the Labor Zionism movement, the Mandate-era Yishuv and ultimately the Jewish state -- she spent little time with Sarah and Menachem, to the extent that they would rejoice when their mother suffered a migraine attack, because it meant she actually stayed home with them. Shortly after her wedding, while Meir was crisscrossing the United States as a fundraiser and organizer for the Zionist socialist group Poale Zion, she had an abortion, because she felt that "her Zionist obligations simply did not leave room for a child." And while her propensity for holding mini-cabinet meetings in her kitchen may have added to Meir's image as everybody's bubbe, in her private life she refused to acknowledge the existence of one of her own grandchildren, Menachem's daughter Meira, whom Meir wanted institutionalized because she was born with mild Down syndrome. In addition, Burkett -- whose eight previous books include an account of her experiences as an American woman in Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan shortly after 9/11, and a demonstration of "how family-friendly America cheats the childless" -- offers the rather disconcerting information that in her younger days, Meir was considered "easy to get," as the daughter of one of her friends puts it. Worse still, for those unused to thinking of Grandma Meir in those terms, she was nicknamed "the Mattress." "Those in the know" (Burkett does not give more specifics) contend that Meir slept her way to power, though the author notes that some of the gossip was fed by envy at her rapid rise in the ranks. According to Burkett, Meir was sleeping with Yishuv leaders David Remez and Zalman Shazar while she was still married to Morris, a situation the author describes as "hopelessly complicated," because Remez and Shazar were best friends. This gap between the grandmotherly image of Meir and the reality of her non-maternal, and even somewhat tawdry, life reveals some of the many nuances and paradoxes of Meir's life and legacy that Burkett, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist for her reports on AIDS who holds a doctorate in history, brings to life in "Golda," her engagingly written, painstakingly balanced and (for the most part) carefully researched biography of Israel's only female prime minister. Palestine, or no wedding Burkett is adept at inserting a clause here or a sentence there as signposts to the reader to signal how a particular incident in Meir's life fits into the big picture of who she was. When Burkett describes Meir's efforts at convincing Morris, her then fiance, to move from America to Palestine with her, Burkett does not just explain what Meir did but makes it clear that her actions were representative of her character and indicative of her future behavior. "Golda tried reason, persuasion, and manipulation," writes Burkett. "When all else failed, she resorted to the tactic that would become a staple in her arsenal, an ultimatum: Move to Palestine with me or there will be no wedding." Burkett is also a master of the telling detail, a literary trait she displays right off the bat by providing a vivid description of the 1903 Kishinev pogrom ("Bodies were hacked in half or gutted and stuffed with chicken feathers as the city's bourgeoisie sauntered the streets in calm indifference"), so as to set the stage for the fear and feeling of persecution that haunted Meir as a child in Russia and continued to be a dominant factor in the way she viewed Israel's role in the world. Unfortunately, this memorable scene, with which the author opens the book, is apparently based on on a single, secondary source, an article published by the World Zionist Organization. Perhaps this explains how, despite the wide-ranging research that can be seen in the extensive endnotes and the appended list of the 69 sources Barkett interviewed for the book, the very first chapter is also marred by a factual impossibility. The author writes that the Kishinev pogrom took place on the seventh day of Passover, which she says was the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Nissan. But that can't be the case, since Passover begins on Nissan 15. The Easter Sunday of the pogrom, April 19, 1903, actually fell on Nissan 22, the eighth day of Passover. In addition, Burkett mixes her attention to the little details, which is admirable as long as those details are accurate, with a completely baffling absence of the basic facts that even the most barebones biography could be expected to include, such as the dates of Golda Mabovitch's birth (May 3, 1898) and death (December 8, 1978), or the year her family moved from the Russian Pale of Settlement to Milwaukee (1906). This strange combination is most striking when Burkett describes Meir's death. At the top of the page, it is November 1977. Giving no indication of how much time has elapsed, Burkett sets up her description of Meir's death adroitly, telling the reader that she died on December 8, a Friday afternoon -- less than 12 hours before prime minister Menachem Begin, the Likud leader who dethroned the Labor alignment Meir had worked so hard to keep together, and Anwar Sadat, under whose rule Egypt invaded Israel during Meir's term as premier, were to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, "grabbing the headlines from them both." The only element missing is what would seem to be the most basic of all: the year these events took place. What Burkett is particularly good at is showing where Golda the legend overlaps with, and drifts away from, Golda the person. She introduces the book by describing the different ways Golda Meir (who Hebraicized her married name from Meyerson under pressure from David Ben-Gurion) is perceived by Americans and Israelis, and she carries through by demonstrating throughout the book the extent to which Meir does and does not conform to the various stereotypes. For Americans, Burkett writes, even today Meir remains seen as "a selfless old lady who worked into her eighties to defend the Jewish homeland from a hostile world .... Especially for women who grew up in her shadow, she remains part Superwoman, a dash of Emma Goldman, a smidgen of Nelson Mandela, all wrapped up in the warmth of our grandmothers." But Burkett recognizes that the shock of the Yom Kippur War helped change Israeli opinion of the prime minister who led the country in October 1973. "Israelis once shared the American affection for her, and for the same reasons. They too reveled in her sarcasm, her staunch certitude, her strength," writes Burkett. But after the war, she says, Israelis began viewing the "Golda story" as that of a woman who "steered Israel into obduracy, ignored peace signals from Arab capitals, and led her people into the exuberant arrogance that sparked the disastrous Yom Kippur War." Burkett, though, does not examine Meir using the black-and-white lens through which Meir herself tended to see the world. Instead, she insists that Meir must be viewed in her own context rather than through the haze of present-day perspectives. "Both the American Golda and her Israeli doppelganger contain some elements of truth," writes the author. But, she adds, "neither offers enough of it to be accurate" in capturing the complex leader. For instance, Burkett writes that although Meir and the other early Zionists were "cavalier about the seeds of anger and frustration that would spring up when they planted a Jewish homeland on someone else's soil," she was not blind to Arab peace overtures, as some have argued. "'I do not agree with those among us and among you who assert today that Sadat tried to achieve a real peace before 1973,'" Burkett quotes Sadat's widow, Jihan, as saying in a 1989 newspaper interview. "'Sadat needed one more war in order to win and enter into negotiations from a position of equality.'" Burkett does not ignore the irony that the woman who proved greatly skilled at getting Jews in fervently capitalist America to part with the money they earned was also a fiercely dedicated socialist who served as vice president of the Socialist International. Burkett captures this paradox neatly when she describes how Meir dealt with the crisis facing the nascent state as tens of thousands of immigrants, mainly refugees from war-scarred Europe, flooded the country in 1949. "On May Day, she marched with 10,000 workers through the streets of Tel Aviv and from the podium expressed her hope that the following May Day would be celebrated in a Socialist state," Burkett writes. "Then she flew to the United States to ask Jewish capitalists to help her out of a bind." It isn't hard to take a cynical view of Meir's consummate fundraising skills, especially when the most high-profile 21st-century model of American generosity to Israel involves a rich businessman, envelopes full of cash and an unpopular prime minister under police investigation. But Burkett takes the reader back to the end of the British Mandate and the early days of statehood, when the fledgling homeland needed every penny it could get just to house its citizens and give them a means of self-defense. In January 1948, the treasurer of the Jewish Agency returned from the United States warning that American Jews were tapped out and would not be willing to donate more than seven or eight million dollars for weapons, even as the Arab armies were poised to attack. But that was before Meir's passion won over the bigwigs. "You cannot decide whether we should fight or not. We will," she told an audience of strongly non-Zionist, wealthy Dallas Jews. "You can only decide one thing: whether we shall be victorious or whether the Mufti will be victorious ... And I beg of you -- don't be too late. Don't be bitterly sorry three months from now for what you failed to do today. The time is now." By the time Meir was done, the Dallas contingent told the director of the United Jewish Appeal that "they were going back to Texas to get so much money they wouldn't know what to do with it," as the UJA director later recalled. Upon her return to Israel, Meir had raised $50 million, which was used to purchase guns, ammunition and airplanes in Europe. "Someday, when history will be written, it will be said that there was a Jewish woman who got the money which made the state possible," Ben-Gurion wrote. 'Crazy women who burn their bras' Burkett also does a good job of conveying Meir's status as a feminist icon who topped the "most admired woman" charts in the United States, Great Britain and the Netherlands, yet who herself deprecated the feminist movement and disdained the idea of affirmative action for women. Meir turned her caustic tongue on the women looking to her as a role model, calling members of the women's liberation movement "those crazy women who burn their bras and go around all disheveled and hate men." Perhaps because she experienced the difficulties of attempting to mother both her children and a nation, Meir did concede that being a working mother could be tough. "After all, it's the woman who gives birth. It's the woman who raises the children," Meir said. "When a woman also wants to work, to be somebody ... well, it's hard." Though Meir's role as mother was generally not one of her priorities, she relished her femininity, abhorring Ben-Gurion's quip that Meir was the best man in his cabinet. Just as feminists around the world were trying to counter long-held beliefs that women couldn't do the same jobs as men because they were too emotional, Meir reveled in being a woman and bragged about her emotionalism, refusing to try to fit someone else's idea of who she should be. "It's no accident many accuse me of conducting public affairs with my heart instead of my head," Meir said. "Well, what if I do? ... Those who don't know how to weep with their whole heart don't know how to laugh either." Shoshana Kordova is on the editorial staff of Haaretz English edition. Her blog, "The 90th Minute," can be found at www.shoshanakordova.com. Haaretz Books, July 2008 More Jewish World news and features Bookmark to del.icio.us   Smoking kills Tehran slams McCain for saying cigarettes could be used to kill Iranians. 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