A Land of Our Own: An Oral Autobiography of Golda Meir
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Author(s)/Editor(s)
Marie Syrkin was born in Bern, Switzerland on March 23, 1899. The daughter of labor Zionist leader Nahman Syrkin, Marie moved with her family to the United States in 1907. Graduating from Cornell University with a Master’s degree in literature, Syrkin taught at both the high school and collegiate level in New York City from 1925 to 1950 and at Brandeis University from 1950 to 1966. Syrkin supported the early labor movement in America during the 1920s and continued her activism as an advocate for Peace Now and American Professors for Peace in the Middle East in the mid-1960s. Syrkin’s first book, Your School, Your Children, studied the inner-workings of the American public school system. Along with A Land of Our Own, Syrkin edited two more books on Golda Meir including Golda Meir: Israel’s Leader and Golda Meir Speaks Out: The Speeches of Golda Meir. Marie Syrkin died on February 2nd, 1989 at the age of 89.1
Born Golda Mabovitch on May 3, 1898 in Kiev, Russia, Golda Meir and her family immigrated to the United States in 1906 and settled in Milwaukee. Meir graduated from high school, joined the Socialist-Zionist Poale Zion in 1915, and married Morris Myerson in 1917, leaving with him for Palestine in 1921. Once in Palestine, Meir quickly rose to a leadership position in the young labor movement and became the head of the Political Department of Histadrut. During the 1940s, Meir was chosen as the acting head of the Political Department of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem, which afforded her the opportunity to negotiate with the British over the creation of the state of Israel. After Israel was officially formed in 1948, Meir continued to rise to more prominent state positions from minister to Moscow in 1949 to Prime Minister in 1969, following the death of Prime Minister Levi Eshkol.2 She led the country through the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and eventually resigned in 1974 in favor of Yitzhak Rabin even though her labor party won the elections. Meir died on December 8, 1978 and was buried on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem.3
Summary
A Land of Our Own contains excerpts from interviews given by Golda Meir over a period of nearly thirty years. The narrative covers Meir’s life from the memories of her childhood in Milwaukee in the early 1910s, taken from a 1969 radio interview, to her thoughts in the midst of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, her defense of Israel’s forced extradition of Adolf Eichmann from Argentina in 1960, and her goals for and initial thoughts on assuming the position of Prime Minister in 1969.
Since most of the interviews used in the book were conducted with Meir during or soon after major events in Israeli and international history, the editor of A Land of Our Own, Marie Syrkin, gives the reader the opportunity to grasp Meir’s immediate emotional responses. For example, Meir responds to the British attack of the SS Exodus 1947, which forced holocaust survivors planning to immigrate to Palestine to return to Hamburg, Germany, “What has been happening over these past weeks, ever since Exodus 1947 reached the shores of Palestine and earlier…could not have taken place had not the world, after its victory over Hitler, continued to live in the moral climate created by Hitler”. 4 Compare that statement to her reflections on joining her first labor party, the Labor Zionist Poale Zion, in 1915: “Father did not object when I finally joined the Poale Zion. I had refused to join the party until I had firmly decided to go to Palestine. My ideas of Zionism at that time were quite primitive,” which is more detached and brings less emotion to such a momentous event in her life.5
Methodological Comparisons within the Oral Autobiography Genre
The creation of a cohesive chronological narrative utilizing interviews from different places and times is a technique that is unique to A Land of Our Own. When compared to Glen Alyn’s I Say Me for a Parable: The Oral Autobiography of Mance Lipscomb, Texas Bluesman, which was formed out of conversations Alyn had with Lipscomb at his home in Navasota, Texas in the last years of Lipscomb’s life, the story still resonates and Lipscomb brings life and raw emotion to events that occurred nearly half a century before the interviews were conducted. I Say Me For A Parable focuses more on Lipscomb’s personal life such as his early musical influences, a discussion of his family life, and even his pets. A Land of Our Own, on the other hand, fuses Meir’s life with the “life” of Israel, exploring both her personal life as well as her and Israel’s official stance on political issues such as the extradition of Adolf Eichmann and the status of labor unions in Israel in 1969, which results in a loss of personal identification in Meir’s own beliefs in some chapters in favor of the party line. When read alongside I Say Me For A Parable, the dual nature of A Land of Our Own hinders the book from being a true autobiography of Meir.6
In A Land of Our Own, Meir discusses her controversial stance on feminism. Although she is one of only a few women to become Prime Minister in any country, Meir argues that she is not a feminist: “All my adult life I have worked among men, and they have treated me on my merits. I never knew a man who gave into an argument of mine because I was a woman…and they had the open-mindedness and the manliness to accept my idea if they thought it was right”.7Even while she claims that she did not face any barriers due to her sex, Meir wrote an article in 1930 empathizing with the plight of the working mother who feel an “eternal inner division…this alternating feeling of unfulfilled duty – today toward her family, the next day toward her work – this is the burden of the working mother”.8 Sandy Polishuk’s Sticking to the Union: An Oral History of the Life and Times of Julia Ruuttila discusses a strong female leader in the labor movement, Julia Ruuttila, and like A Land of Our Own, Ruuttila also focuses more on discussing events within her varying union organizations than detailing her personal life. Ruuttila took a more active role in women’s rights issues in the mid to late 1950s including helping to create jobs in the lumber industry, supporting birth control and the right to abortion, and coming to the aid of a woman who was thrown out of a hospital immediately after giving birth because she could not afford to pay the bill in advance. Although Ruuttila speaks more about political issues and events that occurred within her various union organizations than her own life, the narrative does not experience the problems seen in A Land of Our Own, because Ruuttila made the party line her life, fighting injustice well into her eighties and claiming that the “love of her life was not a man but a union”. 9
Sources
- http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/syrkin-marie (Accessed May 12, 2009).
- Golda Meir, ed. Marie Syrkin, A Land of our Own: An Oral Autobiography of Golda Meir, (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973), 9-10.
- http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/meir.html (Accessed May 12, 2009).
- Meir, A Land of Our Own, 66-67.
- Ibid., 31.
- Glen Alyn, I Say Me for a Parable: The Oral Autobiography of Mance Lipscomb, Texas Bluesman, (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1993).
- Meir, A Land of Our Own, 240.
- Ibid., 45.
- Sandy Polishuk, Sticking to the Union: An Oral History of the Life and Times of Julia Ruuttila, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003),
