Golda's Balcony, Valerie's Movie
First things first – let’s start with the obvious question.
No, Valerie Harper is not Jewish.
Yes, for years she was television’s Rhoda Morgenstern, who most decidedly was Jewish, and yes, she has the stereotypical look, voice, and mannerisms that make people who classify other people classify her immediately as one of us.
But no. She’s a lapsed Catholic/Lutheran with German-Italian-Scots-Irish roots. So then why has she devoted so much time and energy, first on stage and now on the big screen, to transforming herself into Golda Meir, the first (and so far the only) woman to be prime minister of Israel, in a filmed version of the long-running Broadway show “Golda’s Balcony”?
There are many answers – Valerie Harper is a storyteller, and Valerie Harper is one of her favorite roles. To begin with, she says, is that she was a Zionist since childhood, and learned it from her mother, at home in suburban New Jersey.
“I was a little girl, maybe 5 or 6 years old, and my mother was sitting at the table, crying,” she said. “This was something different, not something that she usually did. It was right after World War II, and she’s listening to the radio and really crying. She told me that ‘something terrible had happened in a place across the ocean called Europe. A group of people have been killed, murdered, wiped out. It’s terrible. They were killed because of who they were.’
“ ‘You know Eleanor Eisenberg down the block,’ ” Ms. Harper continued, still quoting her mother. “ ‘She could have been taken away and killed, and never seen again. Those people have to have their own country.’
“I’ve been a Zionist since then,” she said.
She is also a feminist, and Golda’s is the story of a woman, whose understanding of life wasn’t exactly the same as those of the men with whom she worked, although certainly her commitment to the Jewish state was every bit as strong. “She always went to the core of human behavior, and of reality,” Ms. Harper said. “She had such heart! She was such a grandmother, so kind, and faced so much brutality.”
“Golda’s Balcony,” an opened-up version of the popular play that starred Tovah Feldshuh in New York, is a one-person venture. In it, Ms. Harper plays Golda most of the time but slips into the bodies of the people who surrounded her as the elderly Golda looks back on her life and the enormous decisions she had to make as she took her country to war. “Her life is the life of the Jewish people of the 20th century,” Ms. Harper said. “For the first eight years of her life she lived in Russia; there were pogroms, the Cossacks burned her village, and her father, who was a carpenter, had to nail boards across the doors and windows to keep them out. And then she came to America in that wave of immigrants escaping Europe, coming to New York and being resettled in Milwaukee because they needed carpenters in the heartland. That was also the heartland of socialism. It was a really interesting petri dish. She became a Midwesterner; she talked with a slight Milwaukee twang along with a little Russian-Yiddish inflection.
“And then at 23 she heard Ben Gurion speak and took off for Palestine, cleared swamps, got malaria. And she and her husband were a lovely love story; they went to Palestine because she thought that she’d get him there and he’d fall in love with it and want to stay, will become the Zionist that she was, and he thought that he’d get her out of there after a few years, and also get her to love music. Of course it didn’t work that way, but they loved each other.” They lived separately but never divorced.
Meir was a realist, Ms. Harper continued, and she was funny. “Her Hebrew wasn’t great, but it was clear; she wasn’t an intellectual but she had laser-beam commitment. And she was tough and sometimes intransigent; she’d stand up to anybody. When she was asked what it was like to be a woman and prime minister, she’d say ‘I don’t know, I’ve never been a man.’ Discussing military strategy, she said ‘I can understand why the Arabs want us dead, but do they really expect us to cooperate?’”
Ms. Harper hopes that “Golda’s Balcony” will show non-Jews the love, passion, sweat, tears, and dedication to justice that went into the formation of the state of Israel. The movie’s a hybrid, not really a documentary but full of real archival footage and still photos, not really a fiction but certainly in some ways fictionalized. It opened in Los Angeles and New York in the fall, and Ms. Harper and her husband, producer Tony Caccioti, hope that synagogue groups will go to see it; they believe that both Jews and non-Jews will learn from its fond but clear-eyed take on Golda Meir.
As for Ms. Harper, the actress said that one reason she was drawn to play Golda is that she has “a Jewish neshama,” a Jewish soul. “I don’t know why,” she said. “Maybe it’s all the Jews I’ve known and worked with and loved – the accumulation of a lifetime – but the truth is also that I’m an actor, and what you do as an actor is pick those things in a character that are similar to you and use them. What’s dissimilar you leave out. Jew, Gentile – we’re all human beings, and that will be the salvation of the world, that we can all move together as human beings. Golda’s worldview will stand us in extraordinarily good stead, because she believed that human beings are human beings.”
