2

SCROLL OF FIRE

“I WILL BE AN EXCELLENT PHILOSOPHER”

Ben-Gurion left Płońsk before his friends did. But Fuchs, who left after him, was the first of the group to leave Poland. Before doing so, he and Ben-Gurion went to a photographer’s studio in Warsaw. As was common practice at the time, the two dressed in dark suits and black bow ties to have their portraits taken. The photographer placed them on a set reminiscent of the salon of an aristocratic mansion, and of course they looked quite formal and festive. Fuchs, with his thick mustache, broad of shoulder and almost a full head higher than Ben-Gurion, looks dominant, decisive, and full of paternal confidence. His right hand is stuck in the pocket of his jacket, his left arm is joined with Ben-Gurion’s right. It looks as if Fuchs is protecting and guiding him. Ben-Gurion looks slight, almost fragile. His left hand grips an elaborate tea table. His tense, boyish face radiates dependence and confidence in his older friend, and apparently also pride at having won the privilege of his friendship. To look into Fuchs’s eyes he would have had to raise his head.1

Fuchs’s move to London and later to New York pained him. “I feel so much alone, as if I have been left on a lonely and deserted island …,” Ben-Gurion wrote to him. “At night I dream that they have captured you and brought you back to Płońsk in chains.”2 Other than in the love letters he later wrote to his wife and a few other women, Ben-Gurion never bared his most intimate feelings toward another person, man or woman, the way he did in his youthful letters to Fuchs. “I miss you so much … Do you know that I am sometimes astounded by that and seek an answer, but for naught.” When he read Fuchs’s letters, he felt as if he were being “caressed,” he once wrote to him. Twenty-four hours later, Ben-Gurion was even more self-effacing and apologized for his previous letter. “What a ridiculously sentimental style,” he wrote. He called Fuchs “my big brother,” “my precious and my beloved,” and generally signed with his full formal name, David Yosef Gruen. Above his name he wrote “With the blessing of Zion.”*

Ben-Gurion’s memoirs create the impression that he went to Warsaw in keeping with his vow on the Płonka. “My plan was to train myself and to go to Palestine as an engineer,” he wrote. “I thought: the land needs builders—I will be an engineer.”3 But he wrote to Fuchs that he “could no longer be in Płońsk.” He explained that his love for Rachel Nelkin was “like a volcanic eruption” and that he imagined it blew him into the sky. But then he suddenly began having doubts about his feelings. “Am I truly in love?” he asked. The question had not let him sleep at night. Sometimes he was still amazed that such an idiotic question could even have come to mind, given the potency of his affection. Nevertheless, he slowly arrived at the awareness that he did not love her. “In my heart I continued to feel a strong emotion of love, but not for her,” he went on. Perhaps he preferred someone else, or perhaps he had in fact never loved her, he pondered. “It was the middle of the winter. I had been infinitely happy up to that time and miserable afterward … My heart pounded me so hard, remorse so troubled me, that I sometimes sat in bed for an entire night … and cried … That was one of the factors that impelled me to travel to Warsaw for the summer.”4

He went home to Płońsk for the Shavuot holiday; the day after, he gave a lecture there at an Ezra meeting. He spoke about Baruch Spinoza. The central idea of the talk was that, rather than God choosing the Jews, the Jews had chosen God. Most of his listeners did not understand what he was saying; his remarks were not organized, he recalled, because the idea had come to him just the night before. When he returned to Warsaw, he had a hard time getting on his feet economically. He asked acquaintances for loans, not wanting to ask his father. He barely had enough money to buy bread. Fortunately, he was still vegetarian.5

His father wanted him to pursue academic studies and become learned and famous. He would have liked to send him to study outside Poland, and would have been pleased if his son enrolled at the rabbinical seminary in Vienna. Unfortunately, he did not have the money to fund such dreams. Being an expert on petitioning the rich and the powerful, Gruen wrote to Theodor Herzl, whom he’d never met, to ask for his support. “I do not have the wherewithal to support my son, of whom I am as fond as the apple of my eye,” he wrote in flowery Hebrew replete with flattery. To bolster his request, he praised his son’s acuity in Talmud, Russian, and mathematics. While his son desired to learn, all schools were closed to him because “he is a Hebrew.” He cast this as a Jewish problem deserving of Herzl’s attention. “What are we to do with our unfortunate children, whose superior talents are dissipating and going to waste?†6

Jews did indeed have a hard time enrolling in Polish institutions of higher education, but Warsaw was home to a technological college founded by and named for a Jewish philanthropist, Hipolit Wawelberg. Ben-Gurion applied. The entrance examination was rigorous; Ben-Gurion told Fuchs about mutual acquaintances of theirs who did not pass. The college gave preference to candidates with professional experience of some sort. “I have no knowledge of any sort of work,” Ben-Gurion noted. “You can no longer get in with a forged diploma, because they are very scrupulous about this now.” It seems to have been the first time he ever considered engaging in fraud.

His financial tribulations did not last long. A young man from Płońsk who had decided to go to America handed over to Ben-Gurion his job as a teacher in a modern heder. Ben-Gurion began, for the first time in his life, to receive a salary. He took private lessons in Russian, mathematics, and physics, and believed that in a year’s time he would be accepted at Wawelberg. “I can say that I am happy, as I am now totally independent,” he wrote. He lived in a rented room that he shared with another young man, Ya’akov Bugato. He inventoried the room for Fuchs: two iron beds on either side of a window, a desk with books, “cooking machines,” and teakettles. The walls were decorated with pictures and drawings, the floor was always swept, and everything was spic and span.

Once, he could not hold back, and despite Fuchs’s low opinion of his poetic abilities, Ben-Gurion sent him a short lyric he had written: “Facing the coming future we rejoice; in the bosom of hope we play, because it will bring us only the good and the exalted.” And one more thing, he added: “Recently, the thought that I have a great philosophical talent has given me no respite … It seems to me that in the future I will be an excellent philosopher.” In fact, he didn’t yet know what to do with himself. “I have wondered a great deal whether I have any talent, and for what,” he wrote to Fuchs. If he only knew how to overcome that “profound lack” in his heart that he could not name, he wrote.

His landlord had two daughters, both in high school. One of them captured Ben-Gurion’s heart; she was “innocent, spirited, and natural.” He wrote that he had “a bit of a weakness for her,” but it was more than that. “Mute longings whisper the intimations of hidden secrets in my ears and then I feel in my heart a sentiment of love that is so huge, as mighty as an autumn storm, and I yearn and wish and at times I long to weep on her bosom and pour out into her soul all the longings and hopes unknown even to myself.”7

Fuchs’s letters from London were pessimistic in the extreme. At one point, the word in Płońsk was that he was wavering between two options—becoming a tailor or an ironer. Ben-Gurion responded with almost the same words that Zemach used: “Did you think that London would welcome you with roasted squabs?” Zemach told Fuchs not to send any more such letters. For his part, Ben-Gurion tried to buck up his spirits. “Melancholy is a natural sentiment, quite understandable,” he told him patronizingly. He suggested that his friend write to him about everything that weighed on his heart. He also suggested that Fuchs learn English and get involved in Zionist groups. “What do you hear in London about Herzl’s illness?” he asked.8 Herzl died five days later. “We wept like children who had suddenly been orphaned of their father,” Zemach wrote. Levkowitz was so upset that he completely lost control of himself, running through the streets of Płońsk like a madman, as startled passersby looked on. When he reached home, he began to wail. His frightened family could not calm him down; he wept all night.9 Ben-Gurion went back to Płońsk and eulogized Herzl at his family’s synagogue.10

He coupled Herzl’s death with his personal predicament. A few days later, his roommate, Ya’akov Bugato, decided to leave. “I am left alone and forsaken,” he lamented in a letter he sent to Fuchs the day after Herzl’s death. “O, how great is my sorrow … and how terrible it is to suffer so much that, in my loneliness, my heart explodes into fragments.” He promised Fuchs that he would send his response to Herzl’s death in a long letter a few days hence, and he did so.

“O, horrible, scorching thought!” he began. He described Herzl as “the instrument of the gods,” comparing him to a list of figures from Jewish history, among them Judah Maccabee and King David. “Only once in thousands of years is such an incredible man born,” he wrote. But he asserted that he believed, “more than ever,” in the victory of Zionism. “In the land of poetry and truth, of flowers and the visions of the prophets,” he wrote, “a sacred river” flows under a wondrous, shining blue sky, and this river in ancient times heard the song of the shepherds and magical love, and in that land a new “poet of God” would arise who would play on the cords of the heart, singing a sublime song of a “small-large nation” that had been reborn.‡

He had actually not intended to put all this down, Ben-Gurion told Fuchs, again in an apologetic tone. What he had wanted to do was say more about his loneliness, now that his roommate had gone. “Loneliness apparently affects the nerves and the imagination to the point that it is impossible to stop and get control of the tempestuous spirit … Yes, I will be alone all summer, because Ya’akov Bugato will certainly not come back before winter, and after that, who knows …” A few days later, he again bemoaned his loneliness. He sometimes told Fuchs about mutual acquaintances who were making preparations to immigrate to America.11

To get accepted to Wawelberg he had to study useless subjects that he found horribly boring, such as Russian history, Christianity, and elementary geography, he told Fuchs. It was a very heavy burden, and as a result, he had decided to apply to a private technological school, not as good as Wawelberg. The problem was that the private institution only accepted students up to the age of seventeen, and he was already almost eighteen. He had no compunctions about submitting false documents: “My father is trying to change my birth certificate.” He assumed he would be accepted; his studies would take three years. The school offered three programs, in construction, technology, and chemistry; he intended to choose technology. His father seems to have managed to obtain a new birth certificate.12

“WHAT SHOULD I DO?”

In September 1904, Ben-Gurion wrote that he was despondent over any number of things that were troubling him. “Many possibilities and thoughts” were running through his head, he wrote three days later. One possibility was settling in Palestine. He estimated that it was the most likely possibility, largely for economic reasons: to live in a European country he would have to ask for assistance from his father, which he did not want to do. America was also a possibility, but there he would probably have to go into commerce, and that was not an option. “I am not fit for that and I cannot bear business,” he said. He did not want to remain in Poland. As such, he faced the “well-known question,” as he wrote: “What should I do?”

For the time being, he intended to continue to do all he could to get into college. He was not sure he would succeed. “If I am not accepted … I don’t know what I will do,” he wrote. He tried to persuade himself that he wanted to settle in Palestine more than anything else, even if it meant being a teacher there. But for now he was not making a decision and saw no reason to rush—he had enough time to think about it. “I still have enough time to study for four years before being called up for military service,” he wrote a friend in November 1904. In December, he took another tack: he wrote that, had he the money for his passage, he would go to Palestine that very winter. He presumed that he would not be accepted to the technical school and that he would then embark.13

Four days later, everything was clear to him. “Next summer I will certainly go to the Land of Israel,” he declared, explaining that it was the only way to help the wretched nation that was approaching horrible destruction. “Let us not deceive ourselves with empty clichés! Our situation is so terrible, so horrible! And ours is perhaps the most dangerous era in our history!”14 It was apparently a fairly sudden epiphany; just a day or two earlier, going to Palestine was at most one option among many, and not necessarily at the top of the list. Even now, he did not see himself as duty-bound to provide his wretched nation with concrete assistance in Palestine—not yet. “As for myself, I know nothing,” he wrote in January 1905. “Some say that it will be easier to get into school this year, while others say the opposite.”15

Fuchs could well have received the impression that his friend was casting about for excuses to evade a decision. “On the one hand I see the great urgency to work in the Land of Israel today,” Ben-Gurion wrote. By this he apparently meant political work. “Organizing the national and vigorous forces and coordinating them.” The future depended on that, he maintained. On the other hand, he wrote, he still hoped to obtain an education in technology and engineering. “I don’t know today what to choose,” he wrote. For the moment, it seemed as if it all depended on Fuchs: “If you were to go, then I would also make an effort to get there.” It was important to him that Fuchs not have any doubts about his Zionist commitment. He was determined to pursue his studies, he wrote ten days after his previous letter, but added: “Believe me, without the hope of the larger project of working in our land, I would have already cast aside the idea of finishing my education.”16 And so it was that Shlomo Zemach set out before he did.

During that same period, and probably under the impact of Herzl’s death, Zemach’s desire to fulfill the oath at the Płonka surged. His first step was to send a letter to a man whose articles he sometimes read in Hatzefirah, a farmer and writer named Moshe Smilansky. Zemach asked him about finding work in Palestine; Smilansky replied that he should come to the country first and then seek work. Zionism offered an opening to get out, to flee, but he was waiting for the right time, Zemach wrote.17

Legally, he was still a minor. He had no documents that would enable him to leave Poland without his parents’ consent, and he had no money, either. Neither did he want to abandon his beloved Shoshana, all the more so given that in their small town, where there were no secrets, everyone knew that the Fuchses were seeking a husband for her. The difficulties of emigrating were a central subject of discussion among the town’s youth. One of them asked for Zemach’s help—Shlomo Levkowitz. It was not easy for Levkowitz to do so. He had not forgotten Zemach’s habit of disparaging him and his father. But he was very much alone. He had no friends to confide in. To his astonishment, Zemach did not scorn him. On the contrary, the two shook hands and, “from one friend’s heart to another,” as Levkowitz wrote, began to plan their departure.

The more they discussed the details, the clearer it became to them that it would be difficult for them to leave together. Then the rivalry began—each one wanted to be first. Levkowitz first tried the easy way. He asked his father’s permission to settle in Palestine, along with a loan to cover the travel expenses, which he promised to pay back. If he were to fail to find work in agriculture, he could always revert to his profession as a baker, he assured his father. After all, people eat bread all over the world. His father refused. The Zionists, he contended, were bringing a huge catastrophe on themselves and on the Jewish people, and he would not allow his son to take part in such madness. The break between the two, which had opened when Levkowitz began to abandon religious observance and study, grew wider.18

In the midst of this, a salacious rumor began to run through the town—Zemach had stolen three hundred rubles from his father and absconded from the country. Zemach’s father had begun to bring him into the business, he later related. One day he gave him three hundred rubles—a huge sum at the time—to deposit in the bank. “When I received those three hundred rubles and held them in my hands, it was instantly clear to me that the hour I had been waiting for had arrived.” Zemach probably would not have “actually stolen” the money, he said, but when the rubles fell into his lap, he could not resist the temptation. On the way to catch the carriage out of Płońsk, he by chance encountered Lipa Taub, to whom he gave a letter to convey to his father. A few hours later, he was in Ben-Gurion’s room in Warsaw.

He disappeared without saying a word to Levkowitz, who was furious, and who later wrote that he was jealous, insulted, amazed, but also truly happy that Zemach had finally managed to make his dream come true.19 The insult ran deep also because Zemach had not acted alone—Ben-Gurion had helped him.

As expected, Zemach’s father tried to stop his son; a day later, he also appeared at Ben-Gurion’s room in Warsaw. Ben-Gurion told him that Shlomo was already gone. That wasn’t true, and Ben-Gurion was not even sure whether his friend’s father believed him. Whatever the case, he turned on his heels and went back to Płońsk. Zemach reached Palestine. His getaway, and the letters he began to send from Palestine, caused a stir in the town. Ben-Gurion reckoned that they began to change people’s minds, and people began to think of going to Palestine rather than America. “Our Shlomo is a star!!!” he wrote to Fuchs.

In the end, Ben-Gurion did not matriculate. Not because he was a Hebrew, as his father wrote to Herzl, but because he, like other Jewish candidates, did not meet the requirements for the technical college.20 He tried to adjust to his failure and not lose hope, and continued to study, and to read Goethe, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy. From time to time he went home for a visit, but Płońsk bored him as well.21

Zemach wrote that all of Ben-Gurion’s talk about wanting to study was meaningless, because Ben-Gurion lacked the patience, diligence, orderliness, and systematic approach that a course of study required. As compensation to himself, Zemach maintained, Ben-Gurion got involved in socialist Zionist political activity.22 Ben-Gurion himself wrote to Fuchs: “It’s as they say—if I don’t succeed in being a woodcutter, I’ll be … a Cabinet minister.” In the paragraph that followed, he added: “I have been called to take part in founding an organization for the dissemination of Zionism.”

“COLD DESPAIR, AS AWFUL AS DEATH”

Following Herzl’s death in the summer of 1904, the Zionist Congress shelved the Uganda proposal. But the controversy surrounding it continued, including among the people who invited Ben-Gurion to take part in founding the new organization in Warsaw. It was his first brush with politics. They called a general meeting, chose a leadership committee, and began to draft a manifesto. Everything seemed promising at the start. The manifesto proclaimed the organization’s goal of spreading Zionism and expanding the use of the Hebrew language. The committee decided to establish a library and to collect books for it. That happened on Rosh Hashanah. But just two weeks later, when the Sukkot holiday arrived, the whole thing had “dissipated like froth on water,” as Ben-Gurion wrote to Fuchs.

His disappointment ran deep; it was very emotional and personal. For a moment he had doubts about Zionism, and as was his habit he expressed this by pulling out all linguistic and lexical stops: “Doubts and uncertainty are sucking my seething blood and sapping my fortitude, and sometimes they infuse my soul with cold despair, as awful as death.”23 As usual, he sought encouragement from Fuchs. “Brother!” he wrote. “Maybe you can restore my simple, intense, and flawless faith whenever I have a doubt or a thought of despair?”24

He needed something to divert his thoughts, and knew what that should be. “I am thirsty for work,” he wrote, “work that I can put my whole soul into, work that will rob me of all my senses, all my thoughts, that will obliterate all my strident emotions, make me forget all the vexing, cursed questions.” In the meantime, he read a lot of newspapers and shared the things that interested him with Fuchs. He also followed political developments in the Zionist Organization, including the upcoming election of Herzl’s successor.§25

One candidate, Max Nordau, believed that the new president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, would further Zionist goals. Ben-Gurion asked Fuchs how America’s Jews had voted, the first time he took an interest in this subject. He sent Fuchs regular reports on the state of Zionism in Warsaw. Then revolution broke out there.26

The uprising took the form of a groundswell of strikes and riots that swept through the Russian Empire, reaching to Warsaw. The czar’s military forces put down the uprising with overwhelming force. Ben-Gurion turned out to have natural journalistic talent; his letters expertly interweave opinionated factual accounts of events, personal experience, and colorful observations, all written in flowing and clear Hebrew. He described the bodies of demonstrators lying in the streets; no one collected them.

Ben-Gurion would later say that he had supported the uprising. “I was a revolutionary,” he related, “but when the uprising broke out, an empty spot remained in my heart. Because I knew that, while the revolution might liberate Russia, it would not do so for the Jewish people.” Using more measured language, Hatzefirah expressed similar disappointment. The uprising was followed by a wave of hundreds of pogroms, which continued the following year, directed against Jews, in particular in Ukraine. Thousands were killed.27

In March 1905, Ben-Gurion sent a letter to Menachem Ussishkin, one of the leaders of the Zionist movement, to ask his advice. He said he was writing in the name of a group of young single men who wanted to immigrate to Palestine.

Ussishkin had led the fight against the Uganda plan, and also maintained that Zionist activism should not be limited to diplomatic contacts. He demanded Jewish settlement in Palestine even before international agreement on a Jewish state could be obtained. Ben-Gurion’s letter might possibly have been aimed at making it easier for him to get to Palestine, perhaps with his expenses paid by the Zionist Organization. Young Jews, friends of his included, had gone to Palestine of their own volition. But Ben-Gurion wrote: “We do not want, and are not free, to make a move of such great importance at our own initiative.”

Ben-Gurion sent Ussishkin’s political program to Fuchs. The Seventh Zionist Congress was scheduled to convene four months hence in Basel. Ben-Gurion wanted to be there, making his first-ever trip outside Poland. It was an opportunity to reunite with Fuchs. “Try to be a delegate to the Congress,” Ben-Gurion told him two weeks after writing to Ussishkin. “It could be that I will be in Switzerland in the summer and then we can see each other.”

That did not happen, and within a few months Ben-Gurion was displaying an almost suicidal frame of mind. “I can’t find any interest in living anymore,” he wrote. In the past he had been full of confidence in life and in other people, full of a strong faith in the victory of his ideals, in the rule of truth and justice. But there were moments, “and they are many and frequent,” in which everything seemed insipid, tedious, dismal, and futile. On such days he tended to associate his personal plight with that of the Jewish people and to see Zionism as the solution for both. Sometimes it raised him to the heights of euphoria, but when he plunged into the abyss of depression, Zionism was not always enough. “Sometimes bitter, horrible doubts rise in my heart and a horrible despair gnaws like a mosquito at my brain and sucks my blood like a leech until the bile pours out and terror overcomes me,” he wrote to Fuchs. “I ask for nothing of life, I want neither pleasures nor education, not honor and not love, I’ll give it all up, all I want is one thing—hope!!! I ask for the ability to hope and believe and then I am prepared to bear the hardest labor and the heaviest yoke!” He apologized again for burdening Fuchs with his mental agonies. “Forgive me, my love,” he asked.28

Zemach also missed Fuchs and needed him, as he wrote over and over again from Palestine. He dreamed of the three of them living together in the Land of Israel and marshaled his best skills to persuade Fuchs to come. He appealed to his Zionist duty and tried to coax his friend with a shared memory that was dear to both of them—had they not wept together when they heard of the Uganda plan?29 Fuchs had trouble understanding what had brought Zemach to become a farmhand in Palestine. “It seems to me that you can have been even more useful to your people and the land in a higher and more spiritual calling than working the land,” he wrote to his friend. “Because labor is something anyone can do. A person with a sharp mind is more beneficial in public, intellectual, or general work.”30 Zemach replied with a long exposition about the virtue of working the land. The longing to return to nature indeed stood at the center of the ethos and myth fostered by the Zionist movement.31

But it was an entirely hypothetical argument. Fuchs had chosen a different path from his friends, seeking his fortune in New York, where he planned to study dentistry. In doing so, he took the advice of his friend, who had himself not yet decided whether to settle in Palestine. Of course you should go to America, Ben-Gurion wrote to him, especially since your parents have now changed their position and have offered their consent. In the meantime, soon after his arrival in New York, Fuchs began publishing articles in a Hebrew-language weekly, Hadegel. Ben-Gurion wrote to him in a humoristic tone that is evident almost exclusively in his youthful letters to Fuchs: “The article’s style is so fine that I have my doubts about whether you wrote it,” he joked with his friend. If Fuchs were to indeed make his home permanently in New York, he ought to put out a Hebrew newspaper there, Ben-Gurion wrote, offering himself as the new publication’s Polish correspondent.32

From Zemach, Fuchs heard the opposite: “Don’t take David Gruen’s advice.” Zemach pleaded with him as a friend, brother, and beloved; in one final effort he tried to buy his company, offering to send him the money for his passage to Palestine.33 Fuchs remained in America. That was the historical choice that Zionism offered to the world’s Jews; most of them preferred not to settle in Palestine. Ben-Gurion was still unsure.

In the meantime, Ben-Gurion made his way into the Zionist labor movement in Warsaw—a conglomerate of dozens of groupings, many of which never achieved prominence, though some would later gain significant political power in Israel.

One of the groups Ben-Gurion encountered was the Bund, which offered a socialist alternative to Zionism. Like the Zionists, the Bund also maintained that the Jews constituted a nation, but the Bundists did not see the Jews as a nation in exile. Instead, they maintained, the homelands of Jewish communities were the countries in which they resided. As part of this, the movement fostered the Yiddish language. In 1906 the Bund had tens of thousands of supporters in Poland, making it a bitter rival of the Zionists. The Bund also organized the Jews for self-defense.34 Seeking to combine his Zionist faith with the rising tide of Jewish socialism, Ben-Gurion found his way to a young man of his age who conducted an ideological-political discussion group in his mother’s house. The youth’s name was Yitzhak Tabenkin; he was handsome and charismatic, with a talent for persuasion. Like Ben-Gurion, he had not had much formal schooling; neither did he generally work. He read a lot of books. The members of the group called themselves Po’alei Zion, the Workers of Zion.

Po’alei Zion belonged to the plethora of circles, cells, organizations, clubs, parties, and factions that appeared in Jewish Warsaw, as the old order began to collapse. Like Hovevei Zion before them, Po’alei Zion made its first appearance in the form of independent societies that operated at first without any central coordination. The members engaged in fiery ideological debates day and night, using concepts borrowed in part from socialist discourse, for which the Hebrew language did not yet have words.

Still, Ben-Gurion, whose work as a teacher and preparatory studies left him with a fair amount of free time, jumped into the fray with all his heart. The participants in these deliberations frequently resigned from associations and returned to them and left again; factions split into fragments, which united and split again.35

In December 1905, Po’alei Zion held a convention of the party’s Polish branch, which Ben-Gurion attended as the delegate from Płońsk. Everyone else there was more senior in the movement than he, a marginal figure. But he learned much political craft there and found his place in the party.

Ben-Gurion’s final months in Warsaw seem to have been pretty wild. Sometimes the police arrested him and he spent several weeks in prison. He was arrested the first time, he said, because he had let his hair grow, leading the police to think he was a revolutionary.

The second arrest had to do with his attempt to mediate a conflict in the small-town Jewish community of Racionz over the choice of a new rabbi. He seems to have gone into his father’s line of work, seeking to resolve disputes through arbitration, mediation, and compromise. In both cases he seems to have been released thanks to his father’s connections. According to one source, he also worked as a member of a Po’alei Zion tribunal. A few weeks later, his doctor ordered him to set his studies aside, he related, and his father brought him back to Płońsk. The town was also safer than Warsaw, where violence was still raging.36

“WE’D GO AROUND WITH PISTOLS”

A short time after his return home, Ben-Gurion told Fuchs that Zionism was doing much better in Płońsk. He told of the establishment of a Central Committee that was meant to take responsibility for “the general management and oversight of community affairs.”

He had decided to return to Płońsk, he said, because the Bund had sent its people there to enlist craftsmen’s apprentices; in Ben-Gurion’s words, the Bund was “attacking” Płońsk. “I hastened to Płońsk to uproot this affliction from our town,” he wrote.37 He brought with him the methods of political action that he had learned in Warsaw. Like other organizations, Po’alei Zion needed money to fund its work, which included purchasing arms, establishing strike funds, and organizing rallies, as well as to cover travel expenses, publicity, and publications. The same was true in Płońsk. “We’d go around with pistols,” Ben-Gurion later recalled. He organized strapping young men who imposed a reign of terror in town. “We would go to rich householders, place the pistol on the table, and start talking about money.” One of his compatriots, Yehezkel Blatnik-Yosifon, recalled: “The arms in the organization’s possession made it possible to put pressure on employers to improve the living conditions of Jewish workers.”

Płońsk was a center of the garment industry. The working conditions were harsh. Ben-Gurion commenced negotiations with the employers. He demanded a twelve-hour workday. The talks failed and the workers went on strike. The strike turned violent and the police had to intervene. Some of the strikers were put on trial, but in the end Po’alei Zion went down in Płońsk history: it won the battle.

With pogroms prevalent, Ben-Gurion hid a stash of weapons in his father’s house, in case the Jews of Płońsk needed to defend themselves.38 He and his brother Avraham were both members of the committee, along with Shlomo Levkowitz and two others.39 In June 1905, Levkowitz left for Palestine as well.

Levkowitz described his departure as a traumatic experience. He also stole money from his father to pay for his trip, but his father discovered the crime before he left, raged at him, and forced him to return the money. “Here are two people who love each other purely, each is capable of sacrificing himself for the other, and they stand like two enemies who cannot be reconciled,” Levkowitz later wrote of himself and his father. He sank into depression and isolation. In the end he fled. He reached the carriage at the last minute, hoping to get away without being seen, but then his mother appeared, called out his name, grabbed his coat, and tried to pull him out. The carriage set off.40

All three of Ben-Gurion’s boyhood friends had now left. At the branch of Po’alei Zion that he had founded, he was the person who called the shots, for the first time in his life. Zemach taunted him. Zemach himself was living in the land of Judea, gazing at the rising moon, he wrote to Fuchs, while Ben-Gurion was playing at politics in Płońsk: “David is surely setting up some association in Płońsk and speaking with terrible zeal about ‘the people and the land,’ ‘freedom and slavery,’ ‘the strong and the weak,’ ‘assimilation and self-awareness,’ ‘cosmopolitanism and nationalism,’ and other such issues.” In another letter from the same period, Zemach wrote of Ben-Gurion: “He seems to have attained his goal, more than any of us.”41 He was right.

Ben-Gurion took the members of Ezra, the organization he had founded with his friends at the age of fourteen, and the Po’alei Zion cell he established in Płońsk at the age of nineteen, and combined them into a single force. “I added socialism to my Zionism” was how he later put it.

From time to time the Bund and Po’alei Zion held public debates in the town’s main synagogue. Ben-Gurion was not a charismatic orator—he had a squeaky voice. He supposed, however, that he had a “local-patriotic” advantage by virtue of the fact that he was a native. The Bundist was an outsider. The debates were often tense; Ben-Gurion took a bodyguard with him. “Both sides came armed with pistols, as was common practice in those times,” he wrote. The debates were attended by many of the town’s inhabitants; some even closed up their stores.

Ben-Gurion received a lot of attention and his name appeared in a newspaper, apparently for the first time. A Bund publication wrote that Ben-Gurion began to shout during one of the debates, “We have weapons and we will kill you all like dogs.” It called him a hooligan. “And I beat the Bund,” Ben-Gurion boasted. “I ejected the Bund from Płońsk.” The short boy who had never been happy, who as a youth failed in every endeavor and was on the verge of suicidal depression, was now a thuggish labor boss in a small town. And he still wasn’t happy.42

Shlomo Zemach had in the meantime tried his hand at farm labor in Palestine; it was very difficult. Nothing had prepared him for such work. His initial period there was profoundly disappointing. He encountered too many Arabs, too many Jews who employed Arabs and Haredim who opposed Zionism, and too many eccentrics of all kinds. He wrote that, at the time, he was a “gentle, naïve, and virtuous boy.” When he saw the land in all its ugliness, he was shaken to the bottom of his soul. In his misery, he did what Ben-Gurion had done in Warsaw—he sent heartbreaking letters to Fuchs and joined the founders of a new labor party—in his case Hapo’el Hatza’ir, the Young Worker.

A few months after leaving Płońsk, in the summer of 1906, Zemach received a letter that bucked up his spirits. His father forgave him, invited him to come home, and sent him money for the journey. Something else also drew him to Płońsk; he had fallen out of love with Shoshana Fuchs. “I had to notify the girl that there was no longer any love between us, and I did not want to do that in writing, but rather to explain everything to her face-to-face.”

Upon his arrival, an argument broke out between him and Ben-Gurion over their two parties—which was the correct ideology, that of Po’alei Zion or that of Hapo’el Hatza’ir? Ben-Gurion proposed uniting the two. Zemach said that, unlike Po’alei Zion, his movement refused to “recognize Yiddish” and did not accept Marxism. As such, their differences could not be papered over. Six weeks later, Zemach decided to return to Palestine, and Ben-Gurion resolved to go with him. Rachel Nelkin joined them.

She was now eighteen; Ben-Gurion was almost twenty. She enlisted in his party. Two of her brothers immigrated to America. One of them sent her fervid Zionist letters and told her that they had founded a Zionist association called Halutzei Zion, the Pioneers of Zion. Shmuel Fuchs joined them. They also founded a new newspaper together, Der Yiddisher Kempfer, meaning “The Jewish Fighter.”43 “They all shared the dream of going to Palestine, but they did not have the strength, because American life blinded them, Rachel Nelkin wrote.44

“THE SOLE, LAST RECOURSE”

There is no way of knowing if Ben-Gurion would have settled in Palestine without Rachel; Zionist ideology was not his only motivation. In any case, her decision made his easier. In his memoirs he explained that he delayed only because of Zemach’s visit, planning to return with him. Avigdor Gruen was not happy. “This decision of mine was a deep disappointment for him,” Ben-Gurion wrote; his father had not given up his dream that his David would be learned and famous.45 Nevertheless, he gave his son his blessing. Before his departure, everybody gathered in the yard of the Gruen home and had their picture taken under the Zionist flag. As one might expect, in the photograph they look festive, but none of them looks happy. Ben-Gurion sits between two girls, Rachel and another.46 “The mood was fraught,” she later recalled. There was also a party, where farewell speeches were made. “Everyone shed tears and tried to be happy and enjoy themselves,” she wrote. Before the party broke up, they sang the Po’alei Zion anthem, in Yiddish. Her brother Elazar wrote from New York: “You are firm of mind and prepared to give your soul for our people and our land.” She hadn’t a clue what she would do in Palestine, just that she wanted to live there and help make the desert bloom.47 Ben-Gurion wrote to Berdyczewski’s son that he was going to Palestine “as a Zionist, pioneer, and socialist.”**48

But his Rachel knew the truth. Neither of them left Płońsk as a pioneer. “I came in despair, or more correctly out of despair,” he once wrote to her.49 He later wrote something similar to Shlomo Levkowitz. It was not a sense of calling or a pioneering imperative that motivated him—he sought and found a way to redeem himself, to bring about a change in a life he had grown disgusted with. He did it all for himself. It was, as he put it, “the normal selfishness” of a young person who felt that the ground was being pulled out from under him, and it was the only way out he could find.50 Ben-Gurion had a sense of national despair, alongside the disappointment he often felt about his personal life. It was, he wrote, “complete and utter despair of the Exile, as well as of Zionism and socialism as they were in those days.” The failure of the 1905 revolution in Russia also depressed him. “And out of this fourfold despair I immigrated to Palestine,” he related. “I believed that here was the sole, last recourse.”††51

There is one reason to believe that she might have taken this step even if Ben-Gurion had decided to remain in Płońsk. A few months before they set out, a young man who was passing through town on his way to Palestine visited her stepfather’s home. His name was Yehezkel Halbovski, who would change his name to Beit Halahmi. She described him as a handsome boy with a delicate face, blue eyes, and curls. “I can now reveal that he attracted me,” she wrote many years later. He recalled her as a tall, fair girl with black eyes.52 Ben-Gurion could have known about Rachel’s new love.

On one of their last days in Płońsk, Ben-Gurion copied into a square-ruled notebook an epic love poem that Hayim Nahman Bialik had published a few months earlier, “The Scroll of Fire.” It is a very long mythological work whose heroes are the last survivors of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem—two hundred young men and two hundred young women who find their way to an uninhabited island. All of them are naked. At the center of the poem are two boys “equal in stature and strength.”53 One is a gentle boy with fair eyes who looks to the skies, searching for his star. The second is intimidating and angry-browed, and he looks to the earth, “seeking his lost soul.”

Later in the poem, the fair-eyed boy encounters one of the girls, which leads to a long monologue spoken by him. He relates that he has lost his father, that he is “young and alone and dreaming.” The girl teaches him the pain of silence and the tortures of love. “My eyes devoured her bared white flesh and my soul tremblingly groped her virgin breasts,” he says, “and in my tossings at night I sought you in my place of rest.” He laments losing his youth, which he likens to losing a friend: “And I still chase and cling to him like a child, hugging and kissing his legs, catching the hem of his robe, and squirm and roar ‘Don’t leave me!’” He feels like a dog, and a slave. He searches for his beloved, but she, too, has disappeared. In his pain he shouts: “Fire, fire, fire!” In the end, he finds the fire in his heart and sets out to bring it to his exiled brethren and cries out for them, and no one can withstand his piercing gaze. He is alien, an enigma to all of them.

Bialik’s “Scroll of Fire” has been termed by some a Zionist epic and a lyric of forbidden love, replete with erotic symbols, composed under the influence of Polish romanticism.54 Ben-Gurion copied out the poem in a fine hand, word for word, taking special care with the punctuation. It covered thirty pages in the notebook. And he sent it to Shmuel Fuchs.

* Zemach, Fuchs, and Ben-Gurion once sent entries to a short-story contest sponsored by Hatzefirah. All three had literary ambitions. Zemach had translated a poem by Goethe into Hebrew at the age of thirteen. Ben-Gurion also tried his hand at poetry. Fuchs criticized the poems and Ben-Gurion immediately gave up. “Your severe criticism of my poems managed to excise my error before it took root in my heart,” he wrote. (Ben-Gurion to Shmuel Fuchs, June 15, 1904, in Erez 1971, p. 15; Zemach 1983, pp. 17, 29ff.)

† Some seventy years later, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion remarked, “I don’t know if my father received a response from Herzl. I suppose he did not.” He said that his father never told him about this letter. It was discovered in the Central Zionist Archives half a century after it was written. (Ben-Gurion to George Herlitz, Nov. 5, 1950, BGA; Ben-Gurion to his wife and children, May 14, 1942, BGA.)

‡ Asked, seventy years later, about this outburst of romantic sensibility, former prime minister Ben-Gurion sounded embarrassed. “I was young,” he explained, and maintained that it was the last time he ever wrote anything of the sort.

§ Membership in the organization was open to all Jews of the world. There was a membership fee collected from the sale of the so-called Zionist shekel. National delegations at the Zionist Congress elected the organization’s executive bodies, which were headed by the president. The organization would later come to be known as the World Zionist Organization.

** The term “pioneer” (halutz) was taken from the Bible, where it appears in a military context. The literal translation of the word’s biblical root reached French and from there entered many languages: “avant-garde,” the advance force that precedes or leads the main force. Ben-Gurion referred to the pioneers as “the army of Zionist realization.” (Ben-Gurion 1971a, p. 336.)