Circle of One

By Spencer Davidson

MY LIFE

by GOLDA MEIR 480 pages. Putnam. $12.50.

There are few odder couples than Pope Paul VI and Golda Meir. The disparity overwhelmed even Mrs. Meir two years ago as she prepared for the first official meeting between an Israeli Premier and a Roman Catholic Pontiff. "Imagine," she remarked to her aides. "I, the daughter of Moshe Mabovitch, who was just an ordinary carpenter, am actually on my way to the Holy See to meet the Pope." "Don't forget," retorted her assistant, "carpenters have a special standing there." Now that Mrs. Meir has written her memoirs, this image of the Yiddisher mama as world figure--"I, Golda Meir, from Pinsk, Milwaukee and Tel Aviv"--dominates. The progress of that pique remains a compelling narrative.

The carpenter's daughter started life in pogrom-ridden Russia. The family was nonreligious but proud of its Jewishness. God did not choose the Jews as his people, the young Golda decided; rather, the Jews chose God: "The first people in history to have done something truly revolutionary." From Pinsk the Mabovitches emigrated to Milwaukee. At the Fourth Street School, still standing in the shadow of a brewery, Golda learned English to complement the Yiddish spoken at home and the Hebrew she would later speak with an accent. She yearned to become a schoolteacher, but Labor Zionism exerted a stronger pull. In 1921 she emigrated for the final time to the Yishuv, the Land of Israel.

The move to frontier Tel Aviv offered her a new citizenship--but cost her a husband. Morris Meyerson, whom she had met and married in Milwaukee, was less positive than his bride about Zionism. The marriage dissolved; the son and daughter remained with Golda and Morris disappeared into the shadows of history. He died in obscurity in Tel Aviv in 1951. Golda, changing her name to the Hebrew Meir ("Illuminate") at David Ben-Gurion's order, developed into "a public person and not a homebody." As the world knows, the former kibbutznik became political worker and global fund raiser for the Palestinian Jews. After Israel's independence in 1948, she progressed still higher: Ambassador to Moscow, Labor Minister, Foreign Minister, finally, Prime Minister for five years, a role which made her one of the world's most notable women.

In such demanding jobs she met and measured the world's other leaders.

John F. Kennedy surprised her with his unpresidential boyishness. Charles de Gaulle, she remembers, paid her an un precedented compliment at Kennedy's funeral by starting a conversation in English. John Foster Dulles was "that cold gray man obsessed with his own brinkmanship." Her associates get little more charity: Ben-Gurion is recalled as "not a man to whom one could be close."

As for Moshe Dayan: "Naturally he has his faults, and like his virtues they are not small ones." She is more lenient with Richard Nixon: "He did not break a single one of the promises to us." Her long time political antagonist, Henry Kissinger, is suddenly embraced for "his intellectual gifts, his patience and his perseverance."

Stark Note. At 77, Mrs. Meir is ca pable of self-assessment -- but not objectivity. In her own eyes she was inflex ible, but solely in matters that affected the welfare of Israel. Her celebrated in transigence occurred only in the eyes of "people who are not great admirers of mine." She was also a self-confident leader with "only a circle of one to con sult, myself." At the same time, after she became Premier, Mrs. Meir admits that she "could certainly understand the reservations of those people in the country who thought that a 70-year-old grandmother was hardly the perfect candidate to lead a 20-year-old state."

Such self-protective quasi candor is a characteristic of all political autobi ographies; Mrs. Meir's memory is no worse than the next leader's. What dis figures her book is an unbecoming -- and unfamiliar -- reticence, coupled with an artificial folksy tone. Her recollections too often sound like Molly Goldberg with portfolio, handing out 40,000 recipes for chicken soup on a U.S. visit or brewing 4 a.m. tea for herself and her bodyguards in the prime ministerial kitchen. More important, revelations that might have been expected have been dodged.

One reason for this reticence seems manifest: Mrs. Meir's career ended on a stark and bitter note. During the Yom Kippur War, it fell to her as Premier to assess intelligence reports of Arab intentions and, as a circle of one, decide at what point the Israeli army should be mobilized. She waited too long; before mobilization was finally ordered and the battle with Egypt and Syria stabilized, Israel had lost more men than in any war since 1948. "I should have listened to the warnings of my heart and ordered a call-up," she now admits. For Israel's First Lady, a homebody at last in her Tel Aviv semidetached, the accomplish ments and the anecdotes cannot cloak the final rue.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.