ISRAEL: The Man from Motol

Chaim Weizmann of Motol. Russia, son of Osher the timber merchant and Rachel, stood before the Knesset in Jerusalem, taking the oath of office as Israel’s first President in 2,000 years. In pain, his eyes seeing dimly through cataracts, he stumbled over the biblical phraseology in his Hebrew address, interjected: “I can’t go on.” But go on he did, to the end of the address and for almost four lonely and physically painful years afterward. One morning last week, a few days before his 78th birthday, his heart stopped, and Chaim Weizmann, the man, died.

Chaim Weizmann, the leader, died back in 1946, when he lost control of the world Zionist organization to the activists led by David Ben-Gurion. He had always opposed violence as a betrayal of the Jewish ethic, but Israel, perhaps necessarily, was born with war as the midwife. Weizmann was brushed aside and became a figurehead, enshrined, for past services, in a beautiful home in Rehovoth, surrounded by delicate Ming porcelains and modern French paintings.

National Home. For half a century before that, Weizmann was Zionism. His vibrant, eloquent voice, lowered for emphasis, cutting deftly through details to the essential, was one of the greatest one-man propaganda instruments in history. He turned even his genius for chemistry into a weapon for Zionism. In 1916, when British shells began falling short of the target for want of acetone, a basic component in manufacturing gunpowder, Weizmann, working night & day, discovered a new way of producing acetone in quantity. Gratefully, wartime Prime Minister David Lloyd George proffered personal honors; Weizmann graciously declined and said: “There is nothing I want for myself . . . I would like you to do something for my people.” He got the Balfour Declaration, which promised the Jews a national home in Palestine—a promise that was to bedevil British consciences for a generation.

Like the industrial tycoon who likes to call himself a simple country boy, Weizmann would introduce himself as a humble Jew from Motol. He was far more complex. The man from Motol, who came to England’s Manchester University as a chemistry lecturer at the age of 32, loved England and English ways. He moved about banquet halls, diplomatic conferences and secret meetings with the aplomb of a great lord, wore an air that had in it traces of Jewish ghetto life, Slavic exoticism and British rectitude. He had none of the frugal, self-denying asceticism of some nationalists. He loved good tailoring, fine linen, good food. He was probably the only President in history with a complete change of clothes in London, Geneva, New York and Tel Aviv.

Yet Motol was never too far off. Though Chaim Weizmann was fluent in seven languages, it was in Yiddish that he felt most at home. His humor too was peculiarly Yiddish; his stories the wry, comic-sad little folk tales that Jews tell to illustrate their precarious position in an oftentimes hostile world.

Drop the Handkerchief. Toward the end he seemed an outsider in the government which he, more than any other, had made possible. Israelis tell the story that at one of his rare public appearances last year, at an army parade, he dropped, a, handkerchief. An aide picked it up. “Thank you, thank you very much, thank you very much indeed,” said Weizmann. The puzzled aide pointed out that after all it was only a handkerchief. “You don’t understand,” replied Weizmann. “My handkerchief is terribly important to me. It’s the only thing in the country I can stick my nose into. Into everything else, it’s Ben-Gurion’s nose.”

Shortly before he died, Weizmann was sitting on a terrace, enjoying the view. He called one of his bodyguards. “My eyes are bad,” he said, pointing, “but is that a sentry walking with a police dog?” “Yes, sir,” the army man replied. “But that’s impossible,” said Weizmann. “In my youth in Russia, they used police dogs to track Jews down. Could it be that the Jews have changed?” He mused a while, then answered himself sardonically: “No, it must be that the police dogs have changed.”