Part 1

I have no idea which fairies - if any - positioned themselves at my cradle on the evening of September 6, 1921. However, some 60 years later I acquired the equivalent of not one but two fairy godmothers whom I grew to love and who have served me as role models in almost everything having to do with old age.

 Both Golda Meir and Dame Miriam Rothschild were in their seventies – by their unique reckoning, still in the prime of life - when I met them. Both had achieved the status of icons; powerful, effective, celebrated, they were women who had kept physical and mental decline to the minimum thanks largely to the ferocity of their determination to keep going, and their conviction that no one else could do what each of them did so well – and that what they did had to be done.

Apart from this profound commitment to their respective ideals, they had other attributes in common. In roughly equal measure, Golda, then the western world’s best-known grandmother, and Miriam, the eccentric aristocrat who was generally acknowledged as one of the finest naturalists alive, knew not only how to work hard and well but also how to present themselves to their audiences, how to cope with hindrances and how to do and be more than one thing at a time.

“Oh, yes,” I had said to the publisher. “Absolutely, yes! It will be a great privilege to help Mrs Meir with her autobiography. I’m very flattered that she’s accepted me!” And I duly presented myself, albeit with trepidation, at the Prime Minister’s residence in Jerusalem. We sat in the large official dining room while the Prime Minister – taking her usual place at the head of the table - wasted no time in making clear to me that writing an autobiography was the least important item on the list of challenges that faced her. In fact, she observed, neither she nor anyone else needed or wanted her autobiography. Also, I should know that she would have very little time for me, beginning right now. She smiled faintly and left the room.

It was not an auspicious beginning to a fruitful literary relationship.

True to the warning, we met very rarely. It was 1973. Golda was preoccupied by her awesome responsibilities, always busy and frequently not well, though I had no idea then how ill she was or how brave. In the few brief sessions she allowed me, she chose to interview me, interspersing her queries with names of people who, in her view, might be useful, and places which might yield what she termed “good” material about her.

Sitting opposite this formidable old lady, with the tight grey bun, orthopedic shoes and capacious handbag that had become so inseparably identified with her, listening to her as she dictated what she had decided were the really fascinating facts of her life, or those most suitable for publication, I despaired of the assignment I’d so blithely undertaken. Clearly the Prime Minister had no intention of telling me anything I didn’t already know and no interest whatsoever in this book so eagerly anticipated by the various major publishers who had purchased the world rights.

Obediently, I met everyone she sent me to, looked up everything she told me to look up, filled several notebooks with background research and whined all summer to the publisher, to Golda’s son and daughter, to close friends, about how badly the project was going and how hard it would be to keep this book from being yet another of those dreary VIP memoirs that are never actually read. I would have complained to more people but I felt that the least a ghost writer could do, even under these circumstances, was to remain ectoplasmic and silent.

“I could have told you how it would be,” said one of her closest advisors. “Too bad you didn’t come to talk to me before any contracts were signed.” It was neither the first nor the last time I was to hear those words.

Then came the autumn of that year, 1973, bringing with it the Yom Kippur War and near-disaster for Israel and for the old woman at its helm. When the war was finally over, a badly bloodied though victorious nation needed to know how it had happened and who was to blame. The government bore the brunt of the terrible anger and the bitter grief; more than 2,500 Israelis never returned from battle, heads had to roll and Golda, though not alone in the tumbril and officially cleared of direct responsibility, stonily packed up her office and went home.

“Get in touch with her,” commanded the publisher after a while “She’ll have lots of time for you now.”

“Ah,” said Golda, at the door of her small house in the suburbs of Tel Aviv. “It’s you again. Come on in.” This time, I felt more welcome; the book was all that was left to her. The authority, the fame, the unquestioning respect and submissiveness of most of the people with whom she worked, even the phalanx of young bodyguards who adored and protected her – all of it was over. Except The Book through which she could tell the story of her life and in so doing also much of the story, thus far, of the State of Israel. The publisher and others, she said, had told her it was her duty. If so, she would do it now that she had time.

“OK,” I said, “OK, Mrs Meir. Let’s go”

“OK,” she said. And we did.

She had changed, of course, but she wasn’t about to show it to anyone, not even to me. I came often to the little house, but never once saw her untidy, uncombed, or with un-manicured nails. She was who she was and what she had always been: proud, stubborn, sure of herself and now, at 75 and in all sorts of pain, infinitely dignified. When she chose, she was also witty and warm.

 As the weeks passed we grew close. Friends? Well, even now it seems a presumptuous claim for me to make, but something like that. Perhaps it was I who was, fleetingly, the Fairy Godmother. Dire historic events had made me one of the very few people she could totally trust, one of the few who still did her bidding; in short, one of her people. My reward was her dependence on me, more correctly on The Book, which was going to explain and vindicate her and, at the same time, Israel.

We spent months sitting opposite each other in her small living room, talking through clouds of smoke (both of us chain smokers) with coffee cups, plates of cake, brimming ashtrays and my tape recorder between us.

It wasn’t a picnic even then; some questions of mine went unanswered. She was a stern censor and brooked no argument; some of my questions made her angry and I was sorry I’d asked. When the French publisher’s emissary told me that they assumed there’d be some revelations about her private life, she said, “So there won’t be a French edition,” and won the round as she always did. She gave away no secrets; not the country’s, of course, not other peoples’ and certainly not her own. But she did tell me how she felt about all kinds of things, leaving me frequently surprised - and moved.

We gossiped a lot, laughed a little and once, returning from a telephone conversation with a father whose son had fallen in the war, she cried and I held her in my arms. But mostly we worked very hard and I was lost in admiration for her. If this is deep old age, I remember thinking on the way home one day, then bring it on. But of course, I was in my early fifties and what did I know ? Nonetheless, now that I’m there, I still wish I could be more like her. Now and then I try.

By way of a postscript: the Book did very well, went into many editions, was translated into many languages, triggered two plays and a movie and I think and hope that she found some surcease in its success.

( to be continued)