Golda Meir, the former Milwaukeean who became Israel’s fourth prime minister, chain-smoked long, non-filtered cigarettes, but didn’t have the yellow fingers many smokers develop and always smelled fresh.
She wore no makeup or jewelry and would never allow anybody else to wash her dishes. She spoke slowly in a Milwaukee accent colored by her Russian background, and clearly pronounced her R’s, unlike many New York Jews. And she liked her coffee black.
So who cares about these quirks of the woman who helped create Israel and led it through one of its greatest crises, the 1973 Yom Kippur War?
Tony and Emmy Awards-nominated and Obie-winning actress and singer Tovah Feldshuh cares. The Manhattanite spent two days here last week to learn these kinds of things and more, and to see the city in which the Russia-born Meir spent many of her formative years.
Feldshuh is scheduled to play Meir in “Golda’s Balcony,” a 90-minute, one-character drama by William Gibson, in a production planned to open on March 26 at the Manhattan Ensemble Theater in New York City’s Soho district.
“I’m here to own the part,” Feldshuh said in an interview on Jan. 22 during a break from research in the Golda Meir Library at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “That’s what I do: give life and dimension and truth to people who are not I.”
To do that for Meir will be a challenge. “This is the character who is the furthest from me physically,” said Feldshuh, a petite, New York native whose most recent film role was in “Kissing Jessica Stein” and who occasionally appears as a defense attorney on the television series “Law and Order.”
In 1973, when the play takes place, Meir was 75 and fleshy, and she had swollen ankles. The middle-aged Feldshuh has a trim figure and, at one point in the interview, proudly pulled up the legs of her slacks to show off slim runner’s calves. To look like Meir, Feldshuh said she will have to wear a wig and artificial eyebrows, and is set to begin work with a prosthetics expert to achieve the appropriate look for her legs and torso.
Even so, Feldshuh found in her research many “congruent points” between Meir’s personality and her own. They both love jokes and to laugh, love to be with people and dislike being alone and sleeping, Feldshuh said. Moreover, Meir seems to have shared with Feldshuh the traits of an “oral learner” — one who absorbs information better through speaking and hearing than through reading, and according to the actress, rarely wrote her speeches down.
Feldshuh decided “I need Milwaukee” to find the “parentheticals” of Meir’s personality, to see “Milwaukee through her eyes,” to meet people who knew her and to hear as much of the local accent as possible.
So with the theater’s sponsorship, Feldshuh got going. She called the Golda Meir Library, which put her in touch with the Milwaukee Jewish Federation and the Milwaukee Jewish Historical Society, which directed her to Tybie and Max Taglin, the proprietors of Taglin Enterprises/Access Milwaukee. “They opened the world,” said Feldshuh of the Taglins.
From Feldshuh’s base at the home of Cindy and Jerry Benjamin, the Taglins guided Feldshuh through the city, particularly the west side neighborhoods that contained the Jewish immigrant community in Meir’s time.
They also arranged for Feldshuh to meet with siblings Dr. Herman “Diney” Tuchman and Dorothy Weingrod. In telephone interviews, they told The Chronicle that their father, Isadore Tuchman, knew Meir when the two were teachers at the Folk Shule run by the Socialist and Labor Zionist movements in Milwaukee.
Meir subsequently was a guest at the Tuchman home whenever she came from Palestine/Israel to Milwaukee on fund-raising trips. Weingrod remembers that Meir “was part of our extended family” and was “a wonderful, warm, great lady.”
Armed with this knowledge plus tapes of Meir’s speechs, Feldshuh said she will begin working with a dialect coach to “go after her speech pattern,” which she described as “a melting pot of sound.” Overall, “I’m going to play her like a mother lion,” for Meir “relates to Israel as if it had come out of her very body. And that was a blessing for us,” Feldshuh said.
“It is an honor to play her,” she concluded. “I understand why Milwaukee is so proud of her.”
For information about the production and tickets, call the Manhattan Ensemble Theater, 212-925-1900.
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