ISRAEL: With Psalms & Spades

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In 1906 the British statesman Lord Balfour met a young Russian-Jewish chemist. For more than an hour, he listened while the young man in passionate broken English tried to explain what Zionism was all about. Finally Balfour said: "Are there many Jews who think like you?" The young man, whose name was Chaim Weizmann, replied: "I believe I speak the mind of millions of Jews whom you will never see and who cannot speak for themselves, but with whom I could pave the streets of the country I come from." Balfour looked thoughtful. "If that is so," he replied, "you will one day be a force."

Last week, Dr. Chaim Weizmann, now 74, ailing, and President of the Provisional Government of Israel, gave the world his life story (Trial and Error; Harper; $5). It was also the life story of Zionism. In & out of the action weaves a dramatic subplot: the ironic love story of Weizmann's devotion to Great Britain, which began with high-minded platonic exchanges and ended with bloody fighting in the desert, where (between them) the British and the Zionists had produced an infant state.

Hot-Air Factories. Like the movement he headed for over 20 years, Chaim Weizmann was born in one of the darkest corners of the Pale of Settlement, where the Russian Czars allowed the Jews to live. His father was a small timber merchant in the muddy village of Motol in the Pripet Marshes. One of twelve brothers & sisters, he went to school in the one-room village cheder, where the rabbi's goat stumbled about among the drying wash and tumbling babies. There and later in Pinsk, young Weizmann studied the Torah, got his first furtive glimpses of scientific books (forbidden in the orthodox cheder), and argued Zionism, socialism and anarchism with his friends. The Weizmann home was almost always in an uproar. "They've got to be fed," Chaim's mother would cry from the kitchen, "or they won't have the strength to shout."

Later, as a student in the universities of Germany and Switzerland, young Weizmann met the leaders of Russian Zionism: Achad Ha-am ("One of the People"), the Gandhi of the Jewish renaissance, and Menachem Mendel Ussishkin, its practical leader. He also met Western Jews: assimilationists who wanted no part of Zionism ; dedicated Jews, like Theodore Herzl, founder of the Zionist Congress; elegant English Jews, like Sir Francis Montefiore, who wore white gloves to Congress meetings because he had to shake so many hands.

In the cafés of Geneva and Bern ("hot-air factories," his friend Ussishkin called them), Weizmann continued to argue. He fought assimilationists and Marxist revolutionaries alike. When Lenin, Trotsky and Plekhanov (who frequented the same cafés) heard of his "counter revolutionary" talk, Plekhanov, in a rage, objected. Weizmann shot back: "But Monsieur Plekhanov, you are not the Czar."

But talk was not enough. For Weizmann, the chemist, Zionism was "something organic, which had to grow like a plant." The plant, he felt, could grow only in Palestine and only by physical Jewish achievements in Palestine. He based his philosophy of action on Goethe's famous saying:

Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen.*