Read Golda for Free Online

nothing. . . . What’s realis- tic? A stone? Something that’s already in existence? That’s not realism. That’s death.”
    So late one cold February night, while her parents slept, Goldie packed a small suitcase, tied a rope to the handle, and lowered it out of her second- floor bedroom to her friend Regina, who was waiting below. The next morning, acting as if nothing unusual was happening, she ate her break- fast, tucked her books under her arm, and said good-bye to her family. In- stead of walking to school, however, she headed for Regina’s, where she picked up her meager belongings. With a quick hug to the girl who’d been her best friend from the first week she’d landed in America, Golda took a trolley to the railroad station and bought a ticket for Denver, spending ev- ery dime she’d saved, every cent Sheyna could send her, and small contri- butions from her friends.
    * * *
    Ever the dogmatist, Sheyna referred to Golda’s arrival in Denver as her liberation from “the tyranny and oppression” of their parents. But Gol- da’s was liberation light, involving little struggle, no real hardship, and
    absolutely no risk. When she got off the train, dressed in an ankle-length black skirt and high-necked white blouse, Sheyna was waiting on the platform with Shamai and their two-year-daughter, Judy. That evening, Golda slept in a comfortable bed in their tidy brick bungalow. Within days, her life assumed a routine remarkably parallel to the one she’d just escaped.
    In the morning, she walked twenty blocks to North Side High School. After classes, she worked for Shamai at his new dry cleaning business. At the end of that long day, she made her way home to help Sheyna with dinner and the dishes before settling down to work on her algebra and Latin.
    But on weekends, Sheyna’s house vibrated with young people arguing socialism and anarchism, Hegelian philosophy and Zionism in beautiful Yiddish and execrable English—and they didn’t see Golda as a little girl undeserving of a place at the table. The only person who hesitated to welcome Golda was Sheyna, who tried, unsuccessfully, to shoo her off to her books or her bed.
    Golda was riveted as they debated change: Could it come without the class struggle advocated by Lenin? What would the split between the Bol- sheviks and the Mensheviks mean for Jews? What role should the eman- cipation of women play in the revolution? Should they join the Socialist Party? Become pacifists? The debaters weren’t serious intellectuals. They were lung-sick bachelors who’d been in the hospital with Sheyna or were the sons of Denver’s Jewish consumptives, barbers who thought of them- selves as philosophers, janitors who described themselves as poets, wan- nabe revolutionaries, and kooks.
    Golda knew that socialism meant democracy and the right of workers to a decent life. But she’d never heard of Peter Kropotkin or Georg Wil- helm Friedrich Hegel. So she sat quietly and concentrated, going over the conversations in her head, honing what became, in later years, her greatest strength, her ability to listen for hours.
    Golda had little inclination to the abstruse or abstract. Although she didn’t read any of the books her new friends debated, she knew what she
    thought, relying, as she always would, on her gut. Kropotkin’s anarchist vision of a society free of central government hardly seemed practical. Hegel was impossible to decipher. How could freedom inevitably lead to terror? She hated Schopenhauer, the German father of pessimism. If life is as futile and necessarily full of suffering as he taught, what was the point?
    Emma Goldman, the fiery Russian-American rebel, was more her style. But Goldman seemed too focused on America. What about the Jews? Who could worry about birth control and American wages when her brothers and sisters were being slaughtered in Eastern Europe? Even then, Golda was a narrow nationalist.
    Inevitably, Zionism captured her imagination. And among