Golda Meir

Born Goldie Mabovitch in Kyiv in the Russian Empire, she arrived in Milwaukee in 1906 at eight and grew up on Walnut Street, already minding her mother’s grocery while English was still new. When the city required children to buy brand-new schoolbooks, the ten-year-old rented a hall with classmate Regina Hamburger, recited Yiddish poems for the American Young Sisters Society, and later called the Packen Hall fundraiser her first “public work.” She was Fourth Street School valedictorian, fought her parents’ marriage plans to attend North Division High, fled briefly to Denver for Zionist parlor debates, then came home to clerk at Schuster’s, teach Yiddish at the Abraham Lincoln House, and punch a Milwaukee Public Library clock for twenty cents an hour.

She married Morris Meyerson on Christmas Eve 1917 on the condition they would go to Palestine, and they sailed on March 28, 1921. Milwaukee kept the receipts: the Fourth Street School and the UWM library both carry her name. City Librarian Charles McLenegan had hired her as a substitute library assistant on March 15, 1917; she resigned, worked six weeks at the Chicago Public Library, returned at a higher rate, and left the system for good on May 13, 1918. The 1920 city directory still listed her at Gridley Dairy. Every house she, her parents, and Morris lived in was later razed for urban renewal and what became I-43.

On October 3, 1969, as Israeli prime minister, she slipped a four-hour hometown stop into a White House itinerary, hugged children in her old classroom, and told the city it was where she learned what freedom felt like. She died in Jerusalem on December 8, 1978. The Milwaukee years are the raise, not a birth certificate: the grocery, the school, the library, and the 1969 return are the claim.