IN 1962, a woman from the town of Plonsk, Poland, who had emigrated to Palestine went back for a visit. On returning to Israel she sent a letter to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, also born in Plonsk, describing what she had found: “the destruction of Jewish Plonsk,” as Ben-Gurion put it in his reply.1 Only three of the town’s Jews remained. The magnificent synagogue and the three Jewish religious schools were completely destroyed, and the cemetery was uprooted. The market was still there, but no Jews displayed their merchandise. With much pain and restrained nostalgia, Ben-Gurion inquired what had become of his father’s house and whether the garden behind it still existed. The rupture between “now” and “then” caused by World War II, the Holocaust, and the subsequent communist regime was total. An entire world had been made extinct and existed now only in memories and images.
In his later life Ben-Gurion used to glorify the memory of his hometown. In his recollections, this small, humble place of some eight thousand souls, of whom five thousand were Jews, became “the most progressive Hebrew city in Poland.”2
Plonsk sat on a minor road off the highway between Warsaw and Gdansk. Although it was only sixty-five kilometers from Warsaw, the journey to the capital took over three hours. In the early 1900s the railway had not yet reached Plonsk, and there was no paved road to the town. It had no running water, and sewage flowed in the streets. The winds of the Haskala (Jewish enlightenment) were blowing in Plonsk, but as might be expected in such a backward place, most of its Jews were piously observant, and progress was only relative. There were three Jewish religious schools and numerous heders (Jewish elementary schools), including both traditional schools and progressive, relatively modern institutions that nevertheless did not teach Russian or mathematics, despite the Russian authorities’ demand that the children also be taught secular subjects. The town did not have a gymnasium (high school). Plonsk resembled many other shtetls under the tsarist empire’s rule, and despite the ideological storms raging all around, it remained largely conservative, tranquil, and removed from the revolutionary fervor that characterized the Pale of Settlement in Ukraine and White Russia.
David Ben-Gurion was born in Plonsk in 1886, the fourth son of Sheindel and Avigdor Green. Nothing in his origins, his birthplace, or his education hinted at future greatness. The Greens had no notable lineage, no important rabbis or religious arbiters in their history, which they could trace only as far back as the grandparents on both sides. Ben-Gurion’s paternal grandfather was a writer of requests, petitions, and letters for the Polish peasants who came to town on market day and sought to take cases to the local court. Avigdor Green inherited this occupation from his father. His son referred to him as a “lawyer,” although he was more of a pettifogger (Winkeladvokat) who sat on the corner outside the courthouse. The family was on a fairly sound financial footing thanks to Sheindel’s dowry: two wooden houses with a garden behind them on a large plot of land. These houses were on the outskirts of the town, on Goat Alley (whose name attests to its character) next to the priest’s house. The family lived in one and rented out the other, and this rent plus Avigdor’s income enabled them to live reasonably well.
The most distinguished family in Plonsk was the Zemachs, who were proud of their lineage. Shlomo Zemach and Ben-Gurion were friends from their youth, but there was a big difference between them: the Zemach family genealogy reached back to the seventeenth century, and among its forebears were some eminent Torah scholars. They were wealthy and aristocratic. Shlomo was a tall, handsome young man and a good student in the religious school. Zemach senior was a proud, well-respected Jew, not pleased by his son’s friendship with the son of Avigdor Green; there were murmurings in the town about Green because he had exchanged the traditional ultra-Orthodox garb of the long black kapota (coat) for a short European jacket, he had a penchant for cards, and he was a Mitnaged (opponent of Hasidism), whereas most Plonsk Jews were followers of the Rabbi of Gur. On one occasion Zemach senior even slapped Shlomo for visiting the Green house. But the youngsters’ friendship was firm, and Zemach was forced to accept his son’s connection with the dubious Greens.
The Jews of Plonsk were largely Hasidim who were artisans, apprentices, carpenters, cobblers, and small merchants. Above them was a sparse middle class of homeowners, most of whom were “enlightened” (tolerant of modernity and open to Haskala influences such as secular education); these included many Mitnagdim. At the top of the socioeconomic ladder stood a few rich, aristocratic families, also disciples of the Rabbi of Gur. The Greens were a relatively “modern” middle-class family. They joined the Hibbat Zion (Lovers of Zion) movement when it arose in the 1880s, and, following the dramatic appearance of Theodor Herzl, became loyal Zionists. Avigdor Green was a member of Hibbat Zion, and he imparted his beliefs to his eldest son, Abraham, and his youngest, David.
Plonsk did have its political disputes. Some Hasidim, for example, made the life of another Hasid a misery because he was a Zionist, and the father of a young man who intended to emigrate to Palestine hid his clothes, preventing him from leaving the house. But it seems such events were rare, which is why people mentioned them in their memoirs. The intergenerational struggles that typified the first generation of religious backsliders, the soul-wrenching deliberations that recur in the literary descriptions of the time, are absent from the accounts of Ben-Gurion and his friends in Plonsk. There the process of modernization was gentler and less traumatic than that experienced by many of Ben-Gurion’s contemporaries. At the time, Pale of Settlement Jewry was torn between the autonomism of Simon Dubnow, which strove for Jewish cultural autonomy in Eastern Europe; the Jewish socialism of the Bund (founded in 1897, the same year as the First Zionist Congress); Russian social democracy; Zionism; and territorialism, a movement that sought a possible territory for the Jews outside Palestine. These stormy ideological struggles barely touched the Jewish youth of Plonsk. There the youngsters deliberated over remaining in Poland and somehow acquiring a higher education, emigrating to the United States, or becoming a Zionist and going to Palestine.
Ben-Gurion attended a heder and then a Jewish religious school, which he left after his bar-mitzvah. Talmudic disputation did not appeal to him, or perhaps he lacked the talent for this type of study. He wanted a higher education, but was unable to obtain a matriculation certificate, either because of the quota by which Russian gymnasia limited the number of Jewish students, or because he could not afford it. Since Plonsk had no gymnasium, attending one meant moving to Warsaw. Like many Jewish youngsters in this situation, he tried to prepare for the admission examinations by studying on his own.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to his son, Avigdor Green wrote a letter to Theodor Herzl, the leader of the Zionist movement—a letter Ben-Gurion only became aware of some fifty years later, when it was found in the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem. In high-flown, archaic Hebrew, Green explained to the man considered “the King of the Jews” that he had a talented, diligent son who wanted to study but was unable to do so. He would like to send the boy to study in Vienna, Herzl’s city, and he sought the advice of the president of the Zionist Organization, and also his financial aid, “for I am unable to support my son, the apple of my eye.”3 The letter reveals the naïveté of the advocate from Plonsk who imagined that he would receive a reply to his letter. But it was also the first expression of the father’s belief that his son possessed extraordinary talents.
The years between 1899 and 1904 are shrouded in mist. Ben-Gurion left school but stayed in Plonsk. He apparently learned Russian, read a great deal, and probably helped his father write petitions and requests outside the courthouse. He still wore the traditional kapota. The one ray of light in his life was his activity in Ezra, an organization of Jewish religious school students (the intellectual and social elite of Plonsk), which he founded along with Shlomo Fuchs and Shlomo Zemach after the three decided to speak Hebrew.
Ben-Gurion recalled learning Hebrew from his grandfather at age three. His grandfather would sit him on his lap, point at different body parts, and say what they were in Hebrew; then the child repeated the names after him. He moved on to various household objects, and continued until the boy began chattering in Hebrew. The three friends’ decision to speak Hebrew was quite courageous: although it was the language of the Torah, nobody spoke it at that time.
Written Hebrew was different; modern Hebrew literature was widely read. In fact, its language captivated enlightened Jews. Ben-Gurion always mentioned the first Hebrew novel, Abraham Mapu’s Ahavat Zion (Love of Zion), as one of the factors that led him to Zionism, just as Uncle Tom’s Cabin made him a socialist, while Tolstoy’s Resurrection had such a powerful effect on him that for a while he became a vegetarian. Young David Green read a great deal of Hebrew literature and poetry. The youngsters at the Jewish religious school used to hide Hebrew literature inside their Gemara books, but Ben-Gurion had no need of these stratagems since his father allowed him to read as much Hebrew literature as he wanted. He read Mordecai Feuerberg, Micha Yosef Berdyczewski, and Ahad Ha’am, and knew Hayim Nachman Bialik’s poems, which he loved, by heart. He also loved Judah Leib Gordon’s and Saul Tchernichovsky’s poetry. He read the best of Russian literature: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev. In later interviews he stressed that he never learned Polish since he had always known he would emigrate to Palestine and saw no point in learning a language he considered provincial. There is some doubt whether this assertion is true, for he needed Polish to communicate with the peasants who attended the courthouse. Most likely his repudiation of Polish was intended to underscore both his fervent desire to emigrate to Palestine and his connection to Russian, which the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine) considered more prestigious than Polish.
In any event, written Hebrew was accepted by the maskilim (enlightened, educated Jews) as part of the revival of original Hebrew culture, in the spirit of national movements seeking to return to their nation’s ancient roots or invent a genealogy for themselves. But Hebrew was not a spoken language, even in Palestine. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, compiler of the modern Hebrew dictionary, was well known for speaking Hebrew to his son from the day he was born. But until the Herzliya Gymnasium in Tel Aviv adopted Hebrew as the language of instruction, and a generation of Hebrew-speaking graduates emerged, spoken Hebrew was a rarity. When Ben-Gurion met the Zionist leader Nachum Sokolov, editor of the Hebrew-language newspaper Hatzfira and future Zionist Organization president, in Warsaw around 1904 and addressed him in Hebrew, Sokolov could reply only in broken Hebrew.
Thus the decision by the three boys in Plonsk to speak only Hebrew among themselves and teach it to their families was a real cultural and political statement. As it turned out, they were so successful that conversing in Hebrew became the hallmark of Zionist youth in Plonsk. The Ezra association also set a goal of disseminating Hebrew education among the poorer youth, the social stratum of apprentices who had barely acquired a little education. The boys devoted themselves enthusiastically to this endeavor, and the local artisans responded by allowing their apprentices to study for an hour and a half a day. It appears that the influence of the Russian “Go to the People” movement was at work here: if the Russians can volunteer in order to advance the people, then so can we! The members of Ezra tried to register as a recognized Zionist association and pay the Shekel membership dues, but their application was rejected because of their age—Ben-Gurion, the youngest of the three, was fourteen at the time, and Fuchs, the oldest, was sixteen.
In 1903, the Kishinev pogrom rocked the entire Jewish world, but there were no reverberations in tranquil Plonsk. What did shock our three youngsters was Herzl’s proposal at the Sixth Zionist Congress that same year to establish Jewish settlement in East Africa, known as “the Uganda Program.” Driven by a sense of urgency over the distress of Jews in the Pale of Settlement, Herzl sought a “night shelter” for them until they could settle in Palestine, where the Turks were doing everything in their power to prevent such settlement. The proposal caused an uproar at the congress. Its opponents, most of whom were Zionists from Eastern Europe where Jewish tradition and culture were still firmly rooted, threatened to split the Zionist Organization. To Ben-Gurion and his friends the proposal seemed a betrayal of Zion. One hot summer day, as they were drying themselves in the sun after a swim in the River Plonka and talking about momentous issues, they decided that the most appropriate response to the Uganda Program was to emigrate to Palestine.
Yet there was still a long road to travel between decision and action. Shlomo Fuchs was the first to leave Plonsk, but instead of going to Palestine he went to London and thence to New York, like millions of other young Jews seeking to free themselves of the stifling atmosphere of a small, remote town where there was no chance of advancement. Fuchs and Ben-Gurion corresponded at length and in great detail, and through these letters we can reconstruct the young Ben-Gurion’s mindset during those years. Fuchs kept Ben-Gurion’s letters for almost fifty years until, almost miraculously, they came into the possession of the editor of Ben-Gurion’s papers. When asked why he had kept the letters so long, Fuchs replied that they had always known Ben-Gurion was destined for greatness. We shall never know if this was the wisdom of hindsight or genuine precognition. In any event, these letters provide contemporaneous testimony of Ben-Gurion’s history from 1904 on.
He was a sensitive, emotional boy, very attached to his friends. His mother died in childbirth when he was eleven and his father remarried, but Ben-Gurion never called his stepmother “mother” and did not feel close to her. The loss of his mother caused him pain that never healed; she dwelt in the mind of the child, the youth, and even the adult as an irreplaceable source of love, devotion, and emotional affinity, for whose loss there was no reparation. David, known as Duvche, was a sickly child, so his mother left her older children for a time and took him to the country where he could recuperate in the healthy air, eating nutritious country food. This episode was etched in the child’s mind as a precious memory of unparalleled devotion. “It seems to me that she was one of a kind,” he wrote to one of his friends whose mother had died; “she had eleven children [most of whom died in infancy] yet she cared for me as if I were her only son. It is hard for me to describe such abundant love. And it is hard for me to forget being orphaned as a child.”4 On every occasion when Ben-Gurion, as prime minister of Israel, wanted to console a friend on the death of his or her mother, he always mentioned the loss of his own mother. In a letter to Golda Meir following her mother’s death, he wrote that a mother “is the most intimate of things, second to none,” and with her passing “something unparalleled in love, loyalty, the most intimate bond, is cruelly torn from the soul, the heart, and will eternally be a precious, irreplaceable treasure.”5 He would give his age at his mother’s death as younger than it really was—“My mother died when I was ten”—to underscore the misery of the little boy bereft of motherly love.
His idealization of his mother and clinging to her memory suggest that although Avigdor was a devoted father and Duvche his favorite son, relations in the house on Goat Alley were not warm, and the boy lacked love and affection. He first discovered the thrill of love for a member of the opposite sex at twelve, but this seems to have been just worship from afar. It is unclear whether the object of this first love was Rachel Nelkin, the town beauty, for whom he developed real feelings several years later, or another girl. Plonsk Jewish society was very conservative, and attachments between the sexes were usually expressed solely by an exchange of yearning glances.
Ben-Gurion’s relations with his Ezra friends seem to have gone deeper, as suggested by his emotional, revealing letters to Fuchs. He was unabashedly sentimental and tried his hand at writing poetry, but in light of his friends’ criticism quickly realized he would not gain fame as a poet. He showed an interest in philosophy and believed he had a future as a philosopher. He lectured at Ezra on Baruch Spinoza, hotly disputing the philosopher’s concept of the Chosen People—a subject he returned to in his old age. Among the Zionist thinkers he respected Ahad Ha’am as a pure-minded writer and an important critic, but his heart lay with Micha Yosef Berdyczewski, Ahad Ha’am’s sworn adversary and the man who introduced Nietzschean ideas into the Jewish milieu. Shlomo Zemach later wrote: “We, the young people of Plonsk, would walk down Ploczk Street with the Nietzschean phrases we learned from Berdyczewski on our lips, and pondered life as death and death as life, not understanding much about it, yet taking in something of it.”6 The new Hebrew literature and poetry were full of vitalistic ideas that fired the youths and led them to embrace Zionism as an expression of the desire to breathe the instinct of life and willpower into the Jewish people and change their image.
In 1904 Herzl died. It was a terrible blow. The man who by the force of his will and energy had created the Jewish people’s national movement and the tools to implement its aspirations, and defined its objective—a Jewish state in Palestine—was suddenly no more. It was as if a comet had flashed into being, burned for less than a decade, then was suddenly extinguished, leaving no one in Jewish public life who might be his successor. Ben-Gurion’s letter to Fuchs following Herzl’s death reflects the depth of the emotion roused by the leader’s passing and hints at young David Green’s opinion of the qualities a leader should have. “There will never be another man as wonderful as he who combined the heroism of the Maccabeans with the stratagems of David, the courage of Rabbi Akiva who died with the word ‘One’ on his lips and the humility of Hillel, the beauty of Rabbi Yehuda Hanassi, and the fiery love of Rabbi Yehuda Halevi.” Courage, cunning, self-sacrifice, humility, and love of the nation—these were the traits he enumerated. Then he added: “The desire to strive for the rebirth delegated to us by the man with the will of the gods will burn within us until completion of the great task, for which the great leader sacrificed his illustrious life.”7 The typically Nietzschean expression he used, “the man with the will of the gods,” alludes to a leader’s most notable quality—willpower—linking it to the legacy Herzl has supposedly left young people: the task of navigating the ship of Zionism to a safe harbor. And indeed, accepting the mission of realizing Zionism as a personal undertaking was one of the qualities characterizing the people of the Second Aliya (wave of immigration), which began that year.
However, despite the dramatic decision to emigrate made on the bank of the River Plonka, and even after Herzl’s death, David Green was in no hurry. He wanted first to acquire a higher education and a diploma in engineering or a similar field. He had his sights set on the Warsaw Mechanical-Technical School, founded by Jewish philanthropist Hyppolite Wawelberg in order to enable Jews to study. But to be accepted he had to study Russian and mathematics, and instruction in these subjects in Plonsk was not at the required level. It is also probable that his father could not continue supporting him. So at eighteen David Green left home for the first time and traveled to the big city, Warsaw. For young Jews, leaving their parents’ home was a traumatic experience that entailed leaving behind everything that “home” symbolized—faith, tradition, parental authority—and standing on one’s own two feet without financial support. This crisis usually occurred at a younger age, but Ben-Gurion lived at home until he was eighteen, even though there was no good reason why he did not leave earlier, except possibly his attachment to Rachel Nelkin.
Moving to Warsaw did not mean leaving the tight-knit Jewish society he was used to. In Jewish Warsaw he was surrounded by familiar scenes, so much that he was not particularly impressed by the city. He did exchange his kapota for a student’s short jacket and peaked cap. Nonetheless, whenever he went back home for a visit he would revert to traditional attire—suggesting that his parting from traditional society was not traumatic, but also not complete. He found a teaching position in Warsaw and was able to support himself. He studied diligently, and although he tried several times to get into Wawelberg’s school, he was unsuccessful. In the meantime the quota applied in this school, which was originally intended for Jewish students, became more stringent, so that only those who had graduated from gymnasium stood any chance of getting in. Each time one of his attempts failed, the idea of going to Palestine resurfaced, but he still harbored hopes of acquiring an education first. He explained his stubborn persistence by saying he wanted “to work in a broad framework in our land,” but did not say what this meant.8
Ben-Gurion as a youth in Warsaw, beginning of the twentieth century (Courtesy of the Lavon Institute for Labor Movement Research)
Meanwhile Plonsk was in a furor: Shlomo Zemach, the Jewish school’s most diligent and outstanding student, had taken some money his father had in the house, fled his home, and used the funds for passage to Palestine. He stopped off in Warsaw, where he could get information on illegal border crossings and catch a train to the Austrian border, and saw Ben-Gurion. Zemach senior soon followed on his heels. Ben-Gurion loved describing a fictional scene in which the father came to his room in Warsaw and pleaded with him to reveal his son’s whereabouts, even kneeling and hugging Ben-Gurion’s knees. Ben-Gurion’s imagination portrayed this proud, distinguished man who opposed his son’s friendship with the son of the Winkeladvokat being forced to abase himself. But in a letter to Fuchs he described what actually happened: Zemach came to Ben-Gurion’s room, and during a courteous conversation tried to get him to reveal Shlomo’s whereabouts. Ben-Gurion claimed that Shlomo had already left, and after a further exchange Zemach gave up and returned to Plonsk.
Shlomo Zemach immigrated to Palestine at the end of 1904, one of the first in the wave known as the Second Aliya. Like the other immigrants from Plonsk he was driven not by the pogroms or by existential anxiety, but by the belief that the Jewish people’s rebirth would be brought about by returning to their homeland, where they would live a natural life and till the soil. Zemach’s immigration had a snowball effect; he was followed by quite a few young people from distinguished Plonsk families and also from poorer ones. The fact that Shlomo Zemach was the hero of the hour in Plonsk was probably not exactly music to David’s ears, for there was a persistent, though covert, rivalry between him and his handsome friend. However, he had not yet decided when he would go to Palestine.
In January the Russian Revolution of 1905 began in Warsaw. Ben-Gurion was not involved in the strikes and demonstrations that took place, but during these events the Polish Poalei Zion (Workers of Zion) party was founded in Warsaw. It held its first conference in the home of Yitzhak Tabenkin, Ben-Gurion’s future friend and political adversary. Ben-Gurion attended the founding conference and joined the party. It was the first time he had shown any interest in politics. Poalei Zion combined Zionism and Marxist Socialism according to the doctrine of Ber Borochov, a young genius who successfully united internationalism and nationalism, the coming world revolution, and the redemption of the Jewish nation.
It is doubtful that Ben-Gurion was acquainted with the Marxist formulas that Poalei Zion adopted. As far as we know he did not read radical Russian polemical literature as did other young, left-leaning Jews, nor was he familiar with the accepted political style. But he quickly learned the socialist jargon and became a superb debater, even though his grasp of Marxism was probably very shallow. He accepted as self-evident the class war concept, the moral superiority of the revolutionaries and the revolution as opposed to the ruling classes, and the socialist image of the future. But with respect to the realization of Zionism, it is doubtful that he accepted Borochov’s perception that historical necessity led the Jews, with ironclad logic, to Palestine of all places. Some fifty years later he claimed that before immigrating to Palestine he had not read even one of Borochov’s articles. He was probably prepared to accept Borochov’s concept that, because the Diaspora Jews would not be allowed to join the proletariat due to opposition among local populations, they were doomed to be crushed in the future titanic struggle between capitalists and proletariat. Beyond that, however, his perception of Zionism was based not on necessity but on Berdyczewski’s concept of will.
Suddenly life had direction and content. He exchanged his student garb for a revolutionary side-buttoned Russian shirt and peaked cap, and he let his hair grow long. He attended meetings, traveled to distribute propaganda materials, and enjoyed the thrill of risking being caught for revolutionary activity. And he was indeed caught and arrested. The first time, his party comrades managed to bribe an official to give them the forbidden material that had been found on him, and he was released due to lack of evidence. On the second occasion his father came to his rescue and persuaded a police officer to let him go.
Revolutionary radicalization brought the Bund to Plonsk, where its members preached their Jewish-Socialist ideology among the Jewish workers and the poorer Jews. Ben-Gurion returned to Plonsk in his new character of a Zionist-Socialist activist and embarked on an all-out war against the Bund, which advocated that the Jews remain in Russia and take part in the coming general revolution, which would end their misery. The residents of Plonsk enjoyed seeing their favorite son Duvche tearing a Bundist outside agitator to pieces in debates. Meanwhile, there was fear of a pogrom, and David Green proudly sported a pistol and organized the apprentices to join Poalei Zion and for self-defense. He instructed his Ezra friends in the use of weapons. Arms belonging to the Jews were cached in Avigdor Green’s house and miraculously not discovered in a police search. In the spirit of revolutionary foment David successfully organized an apprentices’ strike for a twelve-hour day—a change that was eventually willingly accepted by their artisan employers.
In contrast with the quietness of the previous years, the almost frenetic activity of the new member of Poalei Zion was particularly notable. Ben-Gurion’s energy, which was to become his hallmark, had apparently lain dormant and unexploited until he discovered political activity. He had found his vocation.
In the summer of 1906 Shlomo Zemach, who had reconciled with his father, returned to Plonsk for a visit. On his journey back to Palestine he was joined by several Plonsk Jews, including the wife of Simcha Aizik, the Hasid who had been hounded because of his Zionism and was already in Palestine, and Aizik’s beautiful stepdaughter Rachel Nelkin, whom David Green loved. Ben-Gurion joined them, having concluded that there was nothing more to look forward to in the Russian Empire. As a Poalei Zion activist, he would be better off in Palestine. His father supported his wishes and even paid for his passage. The parting celebration, held in Rachel Nelkin’s home, concluded with the singing of “The Oath,” the moving Yiddish anthem of Poalei Zion that had been composed for the Sixth Zionist Congress and spread rapidly throughout the Pale of Settlement and beyond. The immigrants traveled by coach to the railway station at Modlin Fortress, and from there set out for Warsaw, Odessa, and thence by sea to Jaffa. Rachel’s and David’s feelings for each other were evident, so the girl’s mother made sure to sleep between them aboard ship to avoid gossip.
