In settled societies, the question why you should have passed your childhood in one place rather than another is rarely of more than routine interest: a father’s change of job, a death in the family, a one-time migration from one country to another, a natural catastrophe. Something of that sort: straightforward, self-explanatory.
That was not my case. We—my parents, my sister, and I—were in London in the 1920’s. My sister and I were born there. Why? And why, then, did we leave? A proper answer to either question would be anything but straightforward and self-explanatory. It would have at least as much to do with large political events as with any of us as individuals. It would have something to do with political dissidence in Russia in czarist times and with the civil war thereafter, with political dissidence (of a wholly different kind) within Jewry, with the Zionist movement, with anti-Semitism in early 20th-century America, with World War I, and perhaps especially with the assumption of the Mandate for Palestine by Great Britain.
We were not immigrants to Britain. We were not members of the Anglo-Jewish community, nor did either of my parents make the slightest effort to join it. So far as they could be defined socially, and so far as their interests, perspectives, and habits of conduct were concerned, it is almost enough to say that they were of that distinctive and remarkable class—essentially a cultural, not an economic or professional or even, properly speaking, a political class—known as the Russian-Jewish intelligentsia. They were never to leave it, and were never to be transformed into something else.
Little enough has been written about these remarkable men and women of the turn-of-the-century Russian-Jewish intelligentsia, least of all in their exile: of their boundless energy, their intensity, their seriousness, the freedom with which they moved from one level of non-Jewish society to another, and the ease, betokening a kind of aristocracy, with which they were able to deal with whomever they encountered on whatever terms immediate circumstances seemed to require. But their supreme characteristic was their undeviating interest in public affairs, by and large to the detriment of all other concerns: income, literature, art, simple entertainment, or, not least, family. Virtually everything else came second to the common, consuming interest in public questions and public activities, or, not to put too fine a point on it, politics.
These, however, were not the politics of their new countries of residence, although they often tended, if only out of habit, to follow political events in England or France or Germany or the United States cautiously and from what might be termed a moral distance. Their true and abiding interest remained what it had been before their exile, before the first of the great wars of this century, before the calamitous October revolution swept them out of the political, social, and spiritual landscape in which they had been formed and to which they were accustomed. Their enduring interest and concern was the great Russo-Polish Jewish community from which they themselves stemmed, the most compact, most unselfconscious, most politically alert, and far and away the largest of all Jewish communities at the time. In their eyes, that community was virtually synonymous with Jewry itself.
True, this probably had something to do with the fact that within that community, the people of whom I am speaking, the intelligentsia, were far and away the liveliest and almost certainly the most important single element. And it would be neither unfair nor denigrating to say that so they themselves tended to think, and so they conducted themselves. It is not that they were arrogant or overbearing. But they did tend strongly to feel that they bore a distinct, public responsibility and that in some unspecified way they were accountable for the future of the Jewish people.
Many of them persisted in this view even after the cutting-off of the greater part of Russian Jewry from Jews elsewhere as the borders of the new Soviet state were made ever more hermetic and as they themselves began slowly to share the fate of all exiles. Yet in the end many were fated to see their own children acquire a fresh language and a fresh culture and, for the most part, fresh interests and concerns as well. This, in any event, was the case with all those who for reasons rooted in ideology or inertia or straightforward and immediate considerations of livelihood ended by staying put in what had initially been lands of temporary refuge, but which, with the passage of time, became lands of adoption.
In every respect except the very last my parents—my father especially—were typical enough. But that last respect was decisive. In my father’s mind, the question of settling in England seems never to have been seriously considered at all, at any stage. We, unlike most others, had yet another journey to make and another climate and landscape to enter and accommodate ourselves to. London from the first was to be an episode, a way-station.
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II
My mother, when she first reached England in 1920, still unmarried, was a very beautiful young woman: small figure, dark hair piled up in the style of the day, delicate features. Photographs provide ample evidence to back up what I myself could see, by a kind of extrapolation, many years later and what some in my parents’ circle wrote of her in their memoirs. That was enough to mark her out in that circle, but what made her exceptional were both her ancestry and her very recent past.
She came to Western Europe not directly from Russia, like everyone else, but from the United States, where she had been settled for a dozen years at least. Her family had migrated to the United States before the war and the revolution, and by stages, her eldest brother early enough to have gone prospecting (unsuccessfully) for gold in the Yukon and to have served in the United States Army in the Spanish-American War. Of him it was whispered in the family all the way down to my level that he had had to leave Russia because he had got a girl, and himself, into trouble. Eventually, he settled down as a pharmacist on Long Island and other brothers and sisters followed him to New York in due course. My grandfather, my mother, and my mother’s youngest sister were the last to arrive. But since my grandmother had died some years earlier and my grandfather caught pneumonia in the course of the sea passage and died virtually on arrival, my mother promptly found herself orphaned and in very hard times.
Yet she managed, with the aid and encouragement of one brother particularly, Joseph (Ossip), to keep head above water, to acquire English, and, within a few years, to make her way to Cornell University—a display of inner strength and determination that strikes me as the more remarkable the longer I wonder at it. There she studied while working as a typist and secretarial assistant to a certain Professor Comstock. She became sufficently prominent on campus to be chosen as a candidate for the Ford wartime peace mission to Europe—although she never participated in its journey because the imperial Russian embassy in Washington was outraged by her innocent request for a renewal of her passport for the purpose—and to be recruited into the well-bred stratum of the suffragette movement.
After graduation from Cornell she found work for herself as a journalist. Her journey to Europe finally materialized after the war when she set off with another young, and virtually untried, woman reporter, Dorothy Thompson—my mother being, for the moment, the leading and more confident, because more European, member of the pair. She wrote for a semi-popular New York newspaper until her marriage to my father, in London, at the end of 1920 terminated what might be called her American career.
My mother had liked the United States and to the end of her life looked back on her years there with warmth and a tinge of regret. Despite her hard, early times in New York, when she and her younger sister had no more than a few apples on which to feed themselves for days at a time, and despite at least one nasty episode which led her in time to the very different world my father inhabited, she had been happy in America. I think she saw herself as having been free—free to lead a life almost uncluttered by such constraints and considerations and responsibilities as the Old World imposed, that Old World out of which she had come and to which in 1920 she, one is tempted to say thoughtlessly, returned.
A certain thoughtlessness or absentmindedness was, indeed, one of her enduring characteristics. It gave an additional noble touch to that about her which connoted the lady. It was entirely typical of her that in all her years in the United States she had never bothered to take out citizenship papers, even though there was never any question at all in her mind or in the minds of any of her brothers of returning to Russia, and certainly none of sheltering under the Soviet wing. Once back in Europe, at any rate, she had to travel for many years on League of Nations “Nansen” passports, travel documents for the stateless—an awkward and at times humiliating business. On one occasion, when she was returning to the United States to visit her brothers, a New York immigration officer demanded to know whether she could read and write. My mother drew herself up to her full four feet eleven inches and replied with all the cold dignity that she could muster, “I am a graduate of Cornell University.” “Answer my question,” was the furious response. “Can you read and write?” “I can,” said my mother. “Read that,” said the officer, pointing to a luggage label. My mother obeyed. “C-u-n-a-r-d W-h-i-t-e S-t-a-r L-i-n-e,” she intoned and was permitted to land.
But what made my mother most unusual, infact unique, in the London circle which she and my father were joining in 1920, as well as in the much larger society of Russian Zionist activists to which my father had belonged for years and into which she now followed him, was her ancestry. Her maiden name was DePorte, recently deRussified from Portugalov, the form the family had adopted several generations earlier. Her own mother’s maiden name was Vital. A related family bore the name Malkiel. All were of Spanish and Portuguese origin. All came from Russia’s second capital city, Moscow, normally forbidden to Jews, but in which they, as “Merchants of the First Guild” and latterly as members of liberal professions, had been privileged to live as far back as any could remember—probably since early in the 19th century, conceivably earlier still. All were intensely proud of their distinctive origins and status, and of the multiple social differences between themselves and the rather common (as they saw them) Ashkenazi Jews who filled the towns and villages of the Pale of Settlement in western Russia and who formed the greater part by far of Russian Jewry.
The Vitals, tea merchants by occupation, were proudest of all by reason of the descent they traced (complete with family tree) from the great 16th-century kabbalist Haim Vital, himself the chief pupil of the most celebrated of all kabbalists, Rabbi Yitzhak Luria, the “Ari,” and for all practical purposes the monopolist of his teachings. But alas, my mother’s maternal grandfather was the last of the male Vital line. And so, when David Portugalov sought his eldest daughter Rachel’s hand, the old man tried to extract a promise that he be allowed to adopt the first male child of the union as his own. Portugalov refused. There was some argument and tension. In time it was agreed that all descendants of the union would, at least, bear Vital as their middle name. So it was with my mother and her brothers, my sister and myself, and most of my cousins of that branch of the family. The chapter was finally closed when I myself adopted Vital as my surname.
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My mother’s mother, Rachel, died a comparatively young woman when my mother was still a child. She too was a handsome woman—that much is evident from photographs. She was of conservative and protective temperament so far as the family was concerned, an observant Jewess and almost certainly (to judge from the scraps of memory my mother retained) a God-fearing one. Most things in Rachel harked back to the past: to 16th-century Safed, the seat of the Palestinian kabbalists, thence to Damascus and thence, with a mysterious leap, to imperial Moscow, but the whole preceded crucially by Calabria and Spain. All the bits and pieces of family and caste recollections were lent structure and coherence by virtue of absolute fidelity to ancestry, learning, fame, and the ancient Jewish principle of continuity with which they were informed.
Her husband, my grandfather David Osipovich Portugalov, was of a contrasting nature and of a very different, far less traditional breed. He was in many ways a man fully alert to the distinctive social and ideological currents of his own times in Russia. So were other members of his family, some of whom were university graduates when that was still very rare in Russian Jewry. At least one was a man of considerable distinction in his academic profession. Several were involved in contemporary revolutionary politics, one on the periphery of the group held responsible for the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. My grandfather was himself a lawyer of the higher degree, a status very roughly equivalent to an English barrister who has taken silk, and to which only a handful of Jews had been admitted. He had at least twice crossed the line between the politically permissible and impermissible, and had been exiled first for a term to Siberia and then, some years after his return to Moscow and to respectability, to the Jewish Pale of Settlement, to the town of Gomel. This may have been in the course of the great and peremptory banishment of Jews from Moscow in the late winter of 1891, or it may have been just before or just after. Whatever the date, in the case of David Osipovich what was significant was not just his ethnic identity but the fact that he had been (in the eyes of the authorities) an egregious, perhaps impertinent, defender of prisoners’ rights. For him and for his family, exile was a social punishment they never forgot.
The old Portugalov hated Gomel. He hated being set down among those whom he, in his pride, took to be inferior Jews of the (Ashkenazi) Pale. On the other hand, he never sought the ostensibly easy way out, namely, conversion. And to the end of his days he retained a fierce sense of national and class honor, which was at variance with his and his family’s material needs. His children long remembered the story of the difficult case he won for a rich and titled lady landowner of the region who, once favorable judgment had been handed down and he presented his bill, remonstrated that it was difficult for Jews not to overcharge and require their pound of flesh. My grandfather, enraged, tore up the bill and threw both its pieces and the countess out of his house. His behavior on this and similar occasions took on the quality of a model to which, I think, several of his sons and, to my sure knowledge, at least one of his grandsons openly subscribed to the end of their lives. A throwback to Spain and Portugal and Iberian notions of honor? Perhaps.
The pattern continued with his son Ossip, of all her brothers the one closest to my mother and also the one who, in America, went the farthest. He, too, had gotten into trouble with the Russian police for political activities and had to make his way to the United States to escape them. He was a good mathematician, and when he heard that a new university was opening its doors in Oklahoma in what was still Indian Territory and that admission there was easy and tuition free, he went. At Oklahoma he did very well and was offered a fellowship to pursue graduate studies at Princeton—quite as much as a young immigrant could hope for. Shortly after arrival at Princeton, upon being ushered into some dean’s presence, Ossip was met with a friendly face and a remark about the young man whose interview had preceded his. “We don’t want any more Jews like that, if we can help it, do we now?” said the dean, and proceeded to welcome Joseph Vital DePorte of whose identity he knew and suspected nothing. What my uncle said to the dean on that occasion, if anything, I do not know. But he resigned his fellowship and moved to Cornell. It was fully in the family tradition to do something like this, and accorded with the character of this shy and exceedingly sensitive man as well.
As it happens, a similar incident was to be repeated with more lasting consequences for my mother. Having enrolled herself in Cornell as an undergraduate, the pretty and interesting ex-Russian Barbara DePorte was soon recruited for one of the sororities. A year later, doing her own bit to bring in new members, she proposed a friend whose name was obviously Jewish. “Oh, Barbara, we can’t have her,” she was told by her closest friend at the sorority, the one who had recruited her; “she’s Jewish.” “But so am I,” said my mother, innocently. The response was one of dismay. “Well, please, don’t speak about it, then, please don’t tell anyone,” her friend implored. But my mother, the larger significance of the incident dawning upon her, resigned from the sorority. More, she began to take a certain interest in Jewish matters and went so far as to attend some Zionist meetings in New York. It was at one such meeting, probably late in 1919 or early in 1920, that she met my father, Meir Grossman.
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III
What my father and my mother had most deeply in common was Russia. After the harshness of New York and the gentility of Ithaca it was a breath of something familiar and warm that drew her to him. But it was not quite the same Russia. My father too came from a family settled outside the Pale, but on the frontiers of the country, in the Kuban region, north of the Caucasus—which was, as he liked to point out, Cossack country. Still, his Russian, like my mother’s, was excellent and devoid of regional or Jewish accent, in every sense his native tongue. More, he had already made his way as a journalist for an important St. Petersburg daily newspaper—which is to say that he had made his way in the non-Jewish world and on its terms.
So while his origins were provincial, there was a sense in which my father was of the category of Russian Jews, still very small, to which my mother, through her own father, also belonged: Jews who were near, or at the brink of, assimilation. However, not only his roots, but his whole social disposition, were distinctly and consciously Jewish in a way that my mother’s were not, or at any rate not to the same extent. The effect was to move him back from the brink—so far back, indeed, as to make of him a Jewish nationalist and, therefore, more of a modernist, more of a revolutionary in spirit, than any of the members of my maternal grandfather’s family.
He was, in other words, a Zionist. It was on this that his life turned—his life and, in direct consequence, the lives of all the rest of us.
He had been an early member of the Zionist socialist movement, Po’alei Zion, and a founder and leader of the Zionist students’ association, He-Haver. But such sympathy as he may once have had for Marxian socialism, let alone for its propagators, was wiped clean by what he saw of the Bolsheviks and experienced himself at their hands during the civil conflict in Russia (of which more below). Early in the Great War, having been rejected for military service by the authorities in the Kuban (because of relatively poor eyesight), he went to Copenhagen to represent his newspaper in that neutral capital and “listening post.”
It was to Copenhagen, too, that some Zionist political activity also gravitated at that time, for tenuous contact could still be maintained there among the branches of the movement otherwise cut off from each other by the war. But that was not all. Soon after the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, the official, elected leadership of the World Zionist Organization (WZO) had resolved on cleaving to neutrality and, to all intents and purposes, hibernating until the war was over and the case for some form of Jewish political autonomy in Palestine along with the right of immigration and settlement there could be brought before the peace conference that would surely follow. Lying low during the war would, they thought, avoid the risk of damage to the movement or to particular Jewish communities that might flow from a commitment to one or the other side while the war was being waged.
It was not an unreasonable policy, and it accorded very well with an ancient Jewish instinct for prudent avoidance of involvement in the quarrels of other, infinitely stronger nations. But it was not a policy that appealed to all temperaments. Nor did all think it wise politically. The world, some argued, was about to change, and radically. It was up to the Jews, like all other “submerged” peoples, to define and recognize their opportunity and seize it. There were risks, but then there was nothing to hope for so long as the Turks ruled Palestine: that had been demonstrated time after time. The only chance for a breakout from the dead-end in which the movement had found itself in the prewar years was contingent on an Allied victory. Therefore, it was both wise and honorable for the Zionists to align themselves with the Allies and make their contribution to the common effort. And there was the prospect of political reward in the aftermath.
This was not a popular view. Those who adopted it were a minority. Of these, some kept their thoughts to themselves, while others began to move privately along whatever lines of confidential action were open to them. Chaim Weizmann, in London, became the best known, most effective, and ultimately most powerful of this revived “diplomatic” school of Zionist activists. But the first loud and public call for a change had come from Vladimir Jabotinsky, and my father was among those—still exceedingly few—who immediately responded to it, electrified by Jabotinsky’s attempt to alter the movement’s direction, declare for the Allies, and raise a Jewish Legion to fight the Turks in Palestine. He was, in fact, Jabotinsky’s first real ally, for years one of his closest friends, and second only to Jabotinsky himself in the party—the Revisionist party—which the two were to form after the war and to which he, Grossman, was to lend his considerable organizational skills.
Yet my father’s Zionism, the creed which served him as a compass throughout his life and largely determined the channel through which his wife and children would be impelled to move, was always subordinate to—indeed, derivative of—his larger sense of, and feeling for, the Jewish people as a whole. Zionism was to be the means whereby Jewry could and should be rehabilitated. In his view, the territorial and political solution to the Jewish problem was the most efficacious, the most honorable, and therefore the most desirable and worthy. There were never any doubts in his mind on that score. It was fundamental. At the same time, his views on the condition and rehabilitation of the Jews were substantially broader than was usual in the Zionist camp.
For one thing, my father never ruled out other possibilities. It was characteristic of his natural tendency to face facts and deal with them as they were that upon the outbreak of the February Revolution in 1917 he returned to Russia, where the Jews were in their numbers, and upon the proclamation of a Ukrainian Republic and the grant of national-political rights to the Jews there he took a seat in the parliament as a representative of the Jewish minority. It was equally characteristic of his views that, partly to annoy staider Zionists, but partly in earnest, he liked to point out in later years that there was no reason why there should be only a single Jewish state. Wherever the Jews lived in large numbers, there they were entitled to opt for self-determination. After the founding of Israel in 1948, though he agreed with David Ben-Gurion on almost all major issues, he would consistently oppose the BenGurion argument that the Jewish Agency for Palestine and the Zionist Organization in its old form no longer had a raison d’être. On the contrary, my father thought, the Agency should continue to represent all Jewry and do so, moreover, outside Israel and away from the overwhelming presence and shadow of the sovereign Jewish government.
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He was in his early thirties when he came to New York, six years older than my mother. He had been sent there under the auspices of a variety of Jewish institutions to deliver a first-hand report on the fearful condition of the Jews in Russia, but especially in the Ukraine, as the civil war was drawing to a close. To the misery, homelessness, hunger, disease, and general disruption of orderly life which was the common lot of virtually all inhabitants of the old empire there had been now added for the Jews a huge wave of slaughter, notably at the hands of irregular Ukrainian bands and regular White Russian troops, Cossacks especially. My father had seen much. He had narrowly escaped a Bolshevik execution squad which had looked for him as a Zionist and Jewish nationalist and as a supporter—no doubt increasingly reluctant—of Ukrainian independence. He had then made his way through Finland to the West, like so many others before and after him: a messenger on behalf of the afflicted to the secure and relatively comfortable. He would never return to Russia, where a sentence of death awaited him, but would remain in the West to help do what could be done for the people whose welfare and whose dignity were and would always be his great undivided concern.
I am not sure that I ever knew my father quite as well as I knew my mother, although we were certainly very close in the last years of his life and his death was a shock from which I had great difficulty recovering. He was generally even-tempered. He was very frank. He had an exceedingly rare and well-justified reputation—even among his political opponents—for integrity, and he had an equally well-justified and equally rare reputation for gentlemanly behavior. This, however, never precluded frequently bitter and certainly passionate public attacks by him on the policy pursued by the elected leaders of the Zionist organization—a source of wonder to the many people who could not understand how courtesy and friendliness in personal relations could coexist with profound political disagreement. There was, too, a warmth and an optimism which on the face of things accorded ill with a long but in many ways less than fully successful career in public life. Much respected, especially in the last decade or so of his life, he was nevertheless perpetually excluded from the inner circle not only of government and official leadership, but of informal political influence.
In British politics such a man would probably have found a place for himself as a notable and respected back-bench critic of the established order. In Jewish public life there was as yet no room for vocal yet loyal opposition and least of all was there any notion that such people—mavericks and genuine independents—were of value to the health of the nation, and useful even to government itself when they could be drawn, as from time to time they must be, closer to the top table. But then one of the curses of Jewish public life, especially in the Zionist movement and later in Israel itself, has been that public figures have had nowhere to go in the event of defeat or failure. To resign or to be forced out is to march into the wilderness and there to be forgotten. Even in this respect my father was unusual in that he did not fear (for all that he did not much like) either defeat or retirement.
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IV
In october 1934 we left England for Palestine. When I say “we” I mean my mother, my sister, and me. My father was already there. It was my mother, not for the first time, who managed the winding up of our domestic affairs in London, supervised the packing of our furniture and other household effects, and set us on the long, tiring journey virtually unaided: traveling by train, ferry, and train again from London down to Marseilles. There we embarked on a Messageries Maritimes steamer, the Sphinx, bound first for Alexandria, then Jaffa (our destination), and finally Beirut. I remember nothing of the voyage itself except that the passengers were mostly French—colonial army officers and the like and their families—and that my sister and I were duly shocked to see children of our own age being provided with wine (mixed with water, to be sure) at meals. We did not go ashore at Alexandria, only watching the jugglers and divers who performed on the dockside for the passengers and, from the ship’s rail, registering our first sight, sound, and smell of the Levant—and most powerfully of all the impact of its blinding sunlight.
There was no dockside at Jaffa, any more than there is today, only an open roadstead and tiny harbor for police and customs launches, lighters, fishing boats, and other small vessels. We had to march down the ship’s ladder and jump or be carried or literally thrown into a lighter rolling in the swell below. All this was negotiated without mishap. My father was waiting in the customs shed and soon we all settled for some weeks in a little boarding house in Tel Aviv, a block or so from the sea front, until my parents found an apartment, our belongings arrived from London, and we were properly installed and set to begin afresh in a new country, a new language, a new climate, and—so far as my sister and I were concerned—among new people.
It strikes me now, after so many years, as characteristically curious about this transplantation that at no stage was it ever suggested to us, nor did it ever occur to us, that there was anything either remarkable or problematic about it. We never questioned it, never queried its need or desirability, least of all did we ever object to it. And while there had been absolutely nothing specific in my upbringing until then to prepare me for the move—neither indoctrination, nor instruction in the Hebrew language, nor any warning of things to come—it is plain to me now that I took it all as part of the natural order of things. I did so partly, no doubt, because that is generally how children do accommodate themselves to change so long as the family holds together (which was indubitably our case). But there was something else. Although my father never taught me to be a Zionist or a Jew, and although throughout my childhood and adolescence I remained remarkably free to think my own thoughts and go my own way, what was assumed to be proper in the realm of identity and loyalty and social and, ultimately, political behavior—all this was of the air we breathed.
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In fact, our unexplained move to Tel Aviv at this time had its immediate origins (as opposed to its long-term rationale) in a personal and political crisis in my father’s life which was also the great political crisis of the party he had done so much to help put together and run as second among equals. The first among equals was, of course, Vladimir Jabotinsky himself, the sometime boy-wonder of the Zionist movement, the spellbinding orator, the restless forager for new ideas, new programs, new roles for himself and above all new paths by which all of Jewry might make its way out of the deadly and desperate morass into which it was manifestly sinking virtually everywhere in Europe. Jabotinsky the man was now at the end of his tether. He had long since abandoned the seat he had briefly held in the official leadership of the Zionist Organization and, with my father and others, had led the new Revisionist party to astounding electoral successes. But he had been unable to achieve decisive mastery of the movement itself, nor could he hope for it.
At a crucial moment in the early 1930’s Jabotinsky had hesitated to rejoin the official Zionist leadership, even in his newly strengthened and reinvigorated position as leader of a major party. The opportunity for entry into the ruling coalition having been missed, the gates to the temple of power and influence closed before him once again. His response was to seek to lead the Revisionists out of the established order altogether, to set up a counter-movement, a “New Zionist Organization.” This was to be the instrument whereby Zionism would finally claw its way out of the tangle of real and imagined obligations in which both the British and the Zionists had bound themselves to each other, however asymmetrically, in the ever darker years that had followed the brief and uniquely splendid moment at the end of World War I when, with the Balfour Declaration, the entente between the two was consummated.
It was not that Jabotinsky, let alone my father or other founder-members of the Revisionist leadership, was in any serious sense anti-British. Nor did they ever accept that the British presence in Palestine was fundamentally illicit (as Menachem Begin, later to be Jabotinsky’s self-proclaimed heir, seems to have believed and did certainly argue). To the end of his life, Jabotinsky not only remained an admirer of many things English but wanted a renewal of the old wartime alliance. But he and his original companions did not believe, as they thought Weizmann and his closest associates believed, that any good was done by deference, by imitation, by allowing what had to be a true political relationship to lapse into one of manifest dependence and subordination, articulated by no more than personal connections and intercession in high places. It was, they thought, fatal to allow everything to hinge critically on the undoubted but nevertheless limited and declining talents and personal entrée of whoever it was who claimed to hold a key to the corridors of British power. The great claimant to possession of that key was, of course, Weizmann.
But if my father, like his colleagues, was critical of the Weizmann school, he was also adamantly against withdrawal from the established World Zionist Organization. He regarded its founding by Theodor Herzl in 1897, and its consolidation over the years as a free, national parliamentary movement without precedent in Jewish history, as an immense achievement. It was therefore exceedingly precious, and not to be damaged, but on the contrary, preserved. Nor was it to be held to account for the failings of whoever happened to lead or manipulate it at a particular moment. Accordingly, on this particular issue my father took the lead of opposition to Jabotinsky within the Revisionist party.
What was in my father’s eyes a discrete political issue became, so far as Jabotinsky himself was concerned, nothing less than a test of his leadership. In the event, within the leading circle of the party, and on the specific issue of breaking with the WZO or remaining within it, my father carried the day—always, be it stressed, without making any attempt to oust Jabotinsky himself. Alas for the Revisionists, for my father, for Jabotinsky himself, and for the Zionist movement as a whole, Jabotinsky refused to accept his senior colleagues’ view. Instead, he called in the party’s rank-and-file, where personal loyalty to him was rapidly assuming the character of a cult, and brought matters to a head—and to a final split—by reversing the decision. The New Zionist Organization then marched out of the WZO into the wilderness (from which, after Jabotinsky’s death and after World War II, and with my father’s help, it was to march back).
Only a rump of the party, led by my father and officially called the Jewish State party (but known popularly as the “Grossmanists”), remained within the WZO. There it served, virtually alone, as the loyal if often bitter opposition to the established leadership, by which at times it was ignored, at times respected, but always both resented and misunderstood. In an ambience in which tempers always ran high and political commitments and jealousies tended to last a lifetime, the “Grossmanist” party could not seriously hope to be more than marginal. And since its greatest strength lay in Lithuania (as Jabotinsky’s lay in Poland), the destruction of East European Jewry during World War II put paid to the career of this party as to virtually everything else in Zionism’s (and Jewry’s) heartland.
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I doubt whether my father ever fully recovered from the shock, the blighting of hopes, and the sorrow which the affair of the ruin of the Revisionist party most certainly caused him. He did not speak of it in later years, not to me in any event. Needless to say, I was unaware of anything of the sort at the time. Looking back, however, I have no doubt that it was the great turning point in his life, converting him in an instant from a central figure in a rising and potentially powerful element within the broader movement into an archetypical loner, at best the leader of a tiny band of loyalists fated to suffer steady political decline. Long before this prospect was clear and evident to him—if it was ever evident to him—he decided on a radical change of personal circumstances for himself and his family. He would delay no longer. Good and utterly genuine Zionist that he was, he would move permanently to the land of Israel.
Was the decision taken on an impulse, as a balm for his pain? Was it simply because the chief reason for remaining in London—namely, to run the central office of the Revisionist party—had now evaporated? Was it because he had in any case seriously to consider what, as a man in his middle forties, he would do with himself professionally in the wake of this crisis and had no possible ideological or sentimental or material justification for staying in England as a wholly or mainly private person? I do not know the precise answer to any of these questions. My sense is that all these considerations must have been in his mind.
But if it was a turning point in his life, it was equally—in some ways more drastically still—a turning point in the lives of his wife and children. For we were not only instantly plunged into a new country, a new society, and a new language, but swept up in the enterprise that, as my father had always believed, lay at the end of the road he had been traveling all his life: the new Jewish state itself.
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