Lioness

The definitive biography of the iron-willed leader, chain-smoking political operative, and tea-and-cake-serving grandmother who became the fourth prime minister of Israel 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.

FRANCINE KLAGSBRUN is the author of more than a dozen books, including The Fourth Commandment: Remember the Sabbath Day and Married People: Staying Together in the Age of Divorce. Lioness received the 2017 National Jewish Book Award/Everett Family Foundation Book of the Year. Klagsbrun was also the editor of the best-selling Free to Be . . . You and Me and is a regular columnist for The Jewish Week, a contributing editor to Lilith, and on the editorial board of Hadassah magazine. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Newsweek, and Ms. Magazine. She lives in New York City.

Cast of Characters xi Introduction: "Call Me Golda" xv PART ONE • STUBBORN ROOTS 1 The Carpenter's Daughter 3 2 An American Girl 27 3 "Dearest Gogo" 44 4 The Path to Palestine 62 PART TWO • ASCENT 5 "New Jews" 83 6 The Dark Years 106 7 A Star Is Born 118 8 Pioneer Woman 137 9 Black Clouds Rising 153 10 "And the Heart Breaking" 176 11 Life and Death 192 12 Ein Breira-No Alternative 220 13 "Nevertheless: A Woman" 245 14 1947: The Turning Point 269 15 "The Time Is Now" 294 PART THREE • MADAM MINISTER 16 Moscow 325 17 "Either Immigrants or Shoes" 351 18 The Politician 375 19 "Golda Meir" 396 20 Conflict and Charisma 421 21 "A Mutual Distancing" 443 22 Seat of Power 471 PART FOUR • PREMIER 23 The Chosen 497 24 A Different Kind of War 514 25 "What Has Happened to Us?" 535 26 Terror, Territories, and the Palestinian Question 558 27 Premier Meir and President Sadat 584 28 "I Will Never Again Be the Person I Was" 610 29 An "Irrevocable" Decision 639 30 "My Only Fear Is to Live Too Long" 662 Endings: "I've Always Been a Realist" 684 Acknowledgments 693 Notes 697 Bibliography 769 Index 785