Chaim Weizmann: A Biography

By Jehuda Reinharz, Motti Golani and Haim Watzman

A magisterial biography of Israel’s first president.
 
In Chaim Weizmann: A Biography, Jehuda Reinharz and Motti Golani show how Weizmann, a leader of the World Zionist Organization who became the first president of Israel, advocated for a Jewish state by gaining the support of influential politicians and statesmen as well as Jews around the world. Beginning with his childhood in Belorussia and concluding with his tenure as president, Reinharz and Golani describe how a Russian Jew, who immigrated to the United Kingdom in the early twentieth century, was able to advance the goals of Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist Organization. Weizmann is also shown as a man of human foibles—his infatuations, political machinations, and elitism—as well as a man of admirable qualities—intelligence, wit, charisma, and dedication.
 
Weizmann, who came to the UK to work as a biochemist, was in regular communication with British political figures, including prime ministers Arthur James Balfour, David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, and Ramsay MacDonald. He also met presidents of the United States from Woodrow Wilson to Harry Truman. His success in earning the support of British political figures helped lead to the Balfour Declaration, which advocated for a “national home” for the Jewish people in Palestine.

As the authors show in this authoritative account of Weizmann’s life, Weizmann was guided by the belief that “Zion shall be redeemed in justice,” a phrase that recurs often in his writings.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Release date: May 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9781684581979

Book preview

Chaim Weizmann

A Biography

JEHUDA REINHARZ & MOTTI GOLANI

BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY PRESS

Waltham, Massachusetts

Brandeis University Press

© 2024 by Jehuda Reinharz and Motti Golani

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Designed by Richard Hendel

Typeset in Utopia by Passumpsic Publishing

For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Brandeis University Press, 415 South Street, Waltham MA 02453, or visit brandeisuniversitypress.com

Library of Congress Cataloging- in-publishing Data

NAMES: Golani, Moṭi, author. | Reinharz, Jehuda, author.

TITLE: Chaim Weizmann: a biography / Jehuda Reinharz and Motti Golani.

OTHER TITLES: Av ha-meyased. English

DESCRIPTION: Waltham, Masssachusetts: Brandeis University Press, [2024] | Translation of: ha-Av ha-meyased: Ḥayim Ṿaitsman, biyografyah, 1922–1959. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

SUMMARY: A magisterial biography of Israel’s first president. Beginning with his childhood in Belorussia and concluding with his tenure as president, Reinharz and Golani describe how a Russian Jew, who immigrated to the United Kingdom in the early twentieth century, was able to advance the goals of Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist Organization. —Provided by publisher.

IDENTIFIERS: LCCN 2023049719 (print) | LCCN 2023049720 (ebook) | ISBN 9781684581962 (cloth) | ISBN 9781684581979 (ebook)

SUBJECTS: LCSH: Weizmann, Chaim, 1874–1952. | Presidents —Israel—Biography. | Statesmen —Israel —Biography. | Israel —Politics and

government —1948–1967. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Jewish | HISTORY / Middle East / Israel & Palestine

CLASSIFICATION: LCC DS125.3.W45 G6513 2024 (print) |

LCC DS125.3.W45 (ebook) |

DDC 956.9405/2092 [B] —dc23/eng/20240117

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023049719

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023049720

5 4 3 2 1

All photographs unless otherwise credited are courtesy of The Weizmann Archives.

For our grandchildren Amalia, Jago, Maayan, and Guy

The President of the State of Israel is the only head of state —I think in many generations —who was not made by the state, but rather made the state.

— DAVID BEN-GURION,

prime minister and defense minister, at the dedication of the Weizmann Institute, Rehovot, November 2, 1949

CONTENTS

Preface: Toward a Weizmann Biography

1. Eastern European Beginnings

2. On the Path to Leadership

3. Conflicting Loyalties

4. The Uganda Controversy

5. New Beginnings

6. Synthetic Zionism

7. Failed Professorship

8. The Great War

9. Acetone in the Service of Zionism

10. Between Exile and Redemption

11. From Letter to Balfour Declaration

12. Laying the Cornerstone of the Hebrew University

13. The Road to San Remo

14. The Break with American Zionism

15. Lobbying for Palestine

16. Labor Pains

17. If We Don’t Have America

18. Lewis and Baffy

19. The Third Era of Zionism

20. On the World Stage

21. A Place of His Own

22. The Valleys and the Hills

23. War Again

24. Zionism of the Weak

25. A Golden Autumn

26. You May View the Land from a Distance

27. The Contours of Memory

Notes

Bibliography

Index

PREFACE

Toward a Weizmann Biography

Chaim Weizmann assumed the reins of the World Zionist Organization in 1920. At that juncture it was in the throes of a severe crisis. Fewer than three decades later, Weizmann was on the verge of achieving his goal of establishing an independent Jewish state.

This book portrays how this Anglicized Russian Jew took the Zionist vision articulated by Theodor Herzl at the turn of the nineteenth century and turned it from dream into deed.

Weizmann accomplished this without the sustained backing of either a great power or an international organization, such as the League of Nations or its successor, the United Nations. Nor did he benefit from a tradition of sovereign political and diplomatic conduct within the Zionist organization. Weizmann proved himself a master of the art of politics and diplomacy, but that was hardly sufficient. He was bold and intelligent and a glutton for hard work. He was also lucky, but luck would not have helped had he not been expert at capitalizing on the opportunities luck provided. He preferred to be a one-man show, but fully exploited his awe-inspiring talent for gaining the support of highly placed politicians, influential thought leaders, and the wealthy—including many who did not subscribe to Zionism.

Weizmann’s story cannot be told properly using only the documents and sources available in physical and virtual archives and libraries. To equip ourselves to tell it, we, the authors, have walked in Weizmann’s footsteps. To see the world through the eyes of this consummate peripatetic, we did our best literally to retrace his travels. We could not match his pace, but we learned many things.

We could not, however, fully experience his lived environment. Few, if any, people who worked intimately with Weizmann and whose testimony is of value remain alive today. While such testimonies do not generally offer precision of details and contexts, they are invaluable for providing color and ambience. We benefited from four interviews of high quality. The first was with David Weizmann of Reading, England. David, born in 1940, is the only grandchild of Chaim and Vera Weizmann, the son of their eldest son, Benjy. I’ll wait for you on the platform at the train station, David wrote, with a black and white dog, so that it will be easy to identify me. There was no need for the dog. It was as if Chaim Weizmann himself had materialized on the platform. The conversations with David were in many ways almost like ones with Weizmann himself. A second important meeting was with Adam Ferguson, the grandson of Blanche Dugdale, better known as Baffy, the devoted niece and surrogate daughter to the childless Arthur James Balfour. Balfour’s only rival for her love and fidelity was Weizmann. Adam, a playwright, historian, and former member of the European Parliament, who was eighty years old when we met in 2012, excelled at describing the ambience and colors of Weizmann’s London. He took us on a riveting tour and was careful, at times, to tell us I don’t know, an admission that enhanced the value of his testimony. No less important were our conversations with Janet Lieberman, Weizmann’s secretary from 1917 to 1929, and with Reuma Weizman, the widow of Chaim and Vera’s nephew Ezer Weizman, the son of Chaim’s younger brother Chilik. These people made a greater contribution to this biography than they may realize, and we thank them. We are also grateful to Mandy Moross, who rescued the letters of Harold Davies, Weizmann’s laboratory assistant from his University of Manchester days prior to World War I until 1948, on the eve of the establishment of the Weizmann Institute. Zalman Abramov, a good friend and longtime board chair of Yad Chaim Weizmann, warmly supported this biographical project over many years.

The more our work progressed and the longer we spent with Weizmann, the more we realized that we could not put too much weight on his autobiography, Trial and Error. This might seem counterintuitive. After all, what should a biographer welcome more than a clear and orderly account from the protagonist himself? Trial and Error is, after all, well-written and compelling, published to great acclaim, and a bestseller. Even today, many of our colleagues take it to be reliable.¹ Weizmann’s memoir is indeed an excellent source for the events of his boyhood, youth, student years, and even his time as a rising Jewish and Zionist leader prior to 1920, when he acceded to the presidency of the World Zionist Organization. But it is problematic when it comes to understanding Weizmann at the height of his powers, from 1920 onward. For the years in which Weizmann became a more central figure in Britain and the Zionist and the Jewish worlds, other sources turned out to be, in our estimation, more reliable.

Weizmann’s Trial and Error is a work that suffers from all the genre’s drawbacks. It is tendentious, based mostly on memory, and aimed at cementing his legacy. Indeed, Weizmann began working on it during the weeks of anger and resentment that followed the Zionist Congress in Basel in the summer of 1931, when, after eleven years as the World Zionist Organization president, he was not reelected. He continued to work on it on and off until the beginning of the 1940s, but when his son Michael, a Royal Air Force pilot, went missing at sea in February 1942, Weizmann laid the manuscript aside. He returned to it in the spring and summer of 1947, after a rebuff at the Zionist Congress of December 1946.

Concern about how one would be remembered was rife in the British elite Weizmann lived among. As he sought to mold his place in history, he had to grapple with how he was portrayed in the works of others, both enemies and friends. He could not, for example, disregard the extensive biography of Arthur Balfour that his niece, Baffy, embarked on after his death in 1930. Vera Khatzman, Weizmann’s lover from 1900 and wife from 1906, played a significant role. In February 1965 she ordered Boris Guriel, formerly of Israel’s intelligence services and then the director of Yad Chaim Weizmann and the curator of the late president’s archive, to destroy her papers at his discretion. She permitted him to give selected letters to her son and grandson, if they asked for them. They did not, as far as is known. A year later Vera told Guriel that her letter was no longer in force and that she was seeking to deposit her papers with someone else—in other words, to remove them from the public eye. This does not seem to have been a matter of a personal break between them, but rather an attempt to cover up a trail; perhaps it was instigated by Guriel himself. Guriel retained an important role in Vera’s work on her own memoir, which was published after her death in September 1966. She even thanked him in the book’s prologue.²

Whether the initiative came from Guriel or from another quarter, Vera’s instructions were carried out with impeccable professional care, as we discovered. Nothing remains of her papers except selected items of a very particular sort, mostly from the years she spent at Weizmann’s side during the period he served as the president of the World Zionist Organization from 1920 to 1946 (with a hiatus from 1931 to 1935). Vera wanted their marriage to go down in history as a harmonious one, the opposite of the truth. She had her reasons, as readers will discover in the story about her relationship with Chaim. Whoever concealed or destroyed the material knew how sensitive the operation was and seems to have taken care to create a cover story, although not an airtight one, as will be seen. A few of her letters were set aside to serve the family as souvenirs, and to be seen by future historians and biographers. In these documents, Vera comes across as an exemplary wife concerned only with supporting her husband.³

But that was not all. She also produced her own autobiography, one that manipulates the facts even more starkly than Weizmann himself did. The bottom line is that what we know about Vera, whose role in Weizmann’s life was of great importance, is due largely thanks to her husband’s missives to her. When she did away with her papers, she did a disservice to her own story.⁴

Weizmann himself left an impressive correspondence, preserved largely thanks to the project to publish his complete letters. This project, which includes fascinating annotations by the editors, runs to twenty-three volumes and is a treasure trove for the biographer. The project was begun by friends of his who, after his death, established a research center and archive, Yad Chaim Weizmann, and in particular Meyer Weisgal, to whom Weizmann assigned the task of collecting his letters and papers and making them available to the public. The result is a copious archive, an extraordinary source for all who seek to study Weizmann and his times. The archive contains an abundance of material that did not make it into the published volumes of his letters, alongside material from a wide variety of sources and other archives. For the present biography, it was of inestimable assistance. We have cited Weizmann’s letters in this work only by the name of their addressee and their date, by which they can be located in the archive, unless otherwise stated. We are grateful to the former directors of the archive, Nehama Chalom and Merav Segal, and to their devoted staff, with particular thanks to Keren Raz and Lior Hecht-Yaakobi, as well as to the volunteers who assist them, for their professionalism and unswerving dependability. Their conviviality and eagerness to assist us has not dimmed with time.⁵

A biographer must have knowledge of his protagonist’s professional field. Weizmann was a chemist. We thus needed to understand Weizmann’s importance as a scientist and the metaphors that he frequently borrowed from chemistry and the natural sciences as a whole. Four people were of particular help in this task. The first was Weizmann himself, who left the world of research at the end of World War I. His scientific involvement from that time until his death was principally on the entrepreneurial and business side. No less important were Philip Elving, a professor at the University of Michigan who began his scientific career in one of Weizmann’s laboratories; Saul Cohen of Brandeis University; and Dov Barak of Tel Aviv University. The three of them understood our plight as historians and provided vital assistance. They were backed by Shaul Katzir of Tel Aviv University. We owe them a large debt of gratitude.

Supplementary archival work was done in London, Oxford, Jerusalem, Geneva, Manchester, New York, Washington, Boston, and Cincinnati. We would like to thank the staffs of these archives. Richard Crossman, former member of the British Parliament for the Labour Party and a close friend of Weizmann’s during the latter part of his life, began working on a biography of his own. He was not able to complete it, but left us informative outlines and early drafts. We benefited also from the advice and experience of Norman Rose, whose biography of Weizmann appeared in the 1980s.⁶ We owe special thanks to Ben Halpern, who had no equal in his knowledge of Zionist history. He carefully read the draft of the first two original volumes of this biography. Meir Chazan of Tel Aviv University read important parts of the text and offered valuable comments. We deeply appreciate the assistance we received from members of the Yad Chaim Weizmann staff who assisted us at the time this biography was being written: Edly Dollar, Navit Kopelis, Tami Ashkenazi, and Michal Schwarzman. The same goes for the leaders of the Weizmann Institute of Science during our research —Daniel Zajfman, its president, and his deputy, Israel Bar-Joseph, for their patience, support, and confidence over a very long period. Innumerable conversations with friends and colleagues working in history and related fields who listened to and talked with us, and shared their knowledge, were an important and fundamental part of our work on Weizmann’s life story. We have not forgotten any of them, but they are too numerous to name. We do want, however, to mention in particular, in alphabetical order: Chimen Abramsky, Ami Ayalon, Eitan Bar-Yosef, Yaakov Barnai, Gabi Bonwitt, Matti Ben-Tsur, Arie Dubnov, Shmuel Ettinger, ChaeRan Y. Freeze, Evyatar Friesel, Amir Goldstein, Michael Heyman, Walter Laqueur, Motti Mark, Ezra Mendelsohn, Derek Penslar, Yaacov Shavit, Shabtai Teveth, and David Vital. Essential assistance, in the form of advice and documents, was provided by three other colleagues: Laura Jockusch, Gary Zola, and Mark Raider. Special thanks are due to Yaron Balslev for his assistance in deciphering the weather conditions on February 11 and 12, 1942, the day Michael Weizmann’s plane disappeared. We also thank Amit Getzel and Ehud Cohen, who helped us with the arduous labor of updating the biography’s scholarly apparatus. We are also grateful to the students in the seminars on Weizmann in Tel Aviv University’s Department of Jewish History and the members of the Inter-University Mandate Israeli Researchers Forum, who were a great sounding board for our ideas. Aron Shai, Eyal Zisser, and Leo Corry provided us with some documents without which we would not have been able to complete this book. Ron Zweig of New York University, Avi Shlaim and Eugene Rogan of Oxford, Johannes Beke of Heidelberg University, and Moshe Vigdor, the director-general of the Mandel Foundation in Israel, helped in various ways. Thanks to Ariel Weiss, the former chief executive of Yad Hanadiv in Jerusalem; Lester Crown and The Crown Family; and the Martin J. Gross Family Foundation for their generous financial support. With his friendship, Moshe Reut provided a serene place for writing. We thank Brandeis University and Yad Chaim Weizmann for their long-term material and spiritual support for this biography. Ariella Friedman, always in good spirits, helped us overcome the distance between Boston and Jerusalem. Very special and major thanks are due to Hagit Krik, who for more than a decade served as a research assistant in the writing of this biography. Her devoted labors, ideas, and advice made her in a very real sense a full partner in this project. Thanks also to Joanna Gould.

Avi Katzman took on what seemed like the impossible task of condensing the three original volumes of the Hebrew version of this biography into a single, convenient, and readable volume. Haim Watzman produced an impressively professional translation of this complex text. His grasp of the ins and outs of Hebrew and English, and his knowledge of the history of the period, made him a valuable partner.

Sylvia Fuks Fried is a superb and knowledgeable editor as well as a friend. We are fortunate she accompanied the manuscript with great care and a sure hand during its various iterations. We are grateful for her wise advice and counsel. Sue Ramin, the director of Brandeis University Press, expressed enthusiasm for the biography from the first time we discussed it. We have benefitted from her wise counsel, her distinguished career in publishing, and her understanding why such a biography was long overdue.

And we thank our families, and not simply because that is expected. A biographer lives the life of, and with, the person he is writing about. Weizmann long since took up residence in our homes. Our families did not invite him, but they offered patient hospitality, support in difficult moments. They displayed fortitude and offered understanding smiles when needed.

It is important to take care with words. There are no correct and incorrect words when it comes to any subject. In this case the subject is Chaim Weizmann. As we seek to offer a faithful portrayal of Weizmann, we must use the vocabulary he used in his Zionist labors. He, like all his contemporaries, referred to the territory where his movement sought to establish a Jewish state as Palestine or sometimes, adding the traditional term, as Palestine-Land of Israel. The use of the term today, when the term Palestine denotes the Arabs who live in or claim that same territory, may seem out of date to some and raise the hackles of others. But we adhered to his terminology. Other terms also need to be understood not as they are today but in the contemporary context, for example, Palestine Jewry, Holocaust, catastrophe, and transfer. Our goal was to learn about Weizmann and his position.

Our critique is aimed largely at the relevance of his actions, decisions, and approaches to his own goals, those he explicitly stated and those he implied. In such cases we have compared or confronted his positions with those of others and with the historical circumstances portrayed in the historical literature. Weizmann apparently dreamed in Russian but told jokes in Yiddish and, following World War I, wrote and spoke primarily in English, using German and French when necessary. Hebrew, which he found difficult, was reserved for formal occasions.

The footnotes appear at the end of the book. For the convenience of our English readers, we have eliminated most sources in Hebrew and Yiddish from our bibliography. Scholars who read these languages can consult the three volumes of the full biography to find what they seek.⁷

Researching and writing the life story of a single person are first and foremost an ongoing dialogue. Another biographer’s dialogue with the same figure will most likely result in a different picture. In our case it was a trialogue. There were three conversations going on—that of each of us with Weizmann and the one between us. The experience certainly did not disturb Weizmann. For us it was especially rewarding. Such an ongoing conversation is a gift that many in our profession, lone knights on a quest, never have an opportunity to enjoy. Putting one’s ego on an even keel is vital for every research project, but for biographical work in particular, it is all the more important when grappling with an ego like Weizmann’s. And, as he himself taught us, friendship is a great asset in life. In this matter we sought to learn from his successes, but also from his mistakes. The responsibility for what is written here lies not with those who helped us, or with Weizmann. It is entirely ours.

We did not invent the connection between Chaim Weizmann and the biblical Moses, who led the Children of Israel for forty years toward the Promised Land, which he himself did not enter. The comparison was already made by his contemporaries at the time the State of Israel was founded and afterward. This biography proves that the likeness is a true one in more than one way. But that is not how Weizmann was enshrined in Israeli memory. Chaim Weizmann’s fame in the collective memory of Israel and of the West (if he is remembered at all there) rests largely on the Balfour Declaration, which flickers in some recesses and gets touted as something to be proud of, or as an original sin and supposed root of the Jewish-Arab conflict in Palestine-Israel. Indeed, if you ask today’s Israelis who Weizmann was, they are unlikely even to mention the Balfour Declaration, simply recalling that he was Israel’s first president and not much else. The fact that fellow historians who have written about Weizmann all too often relegate him to the status of a corridor connecting Herzl and Ben-Gurion, to whom the task fell to lead the new state in its early years, further bolstered our determination to write a work that would give him his due as Israel’s founding father. We take comfort in what Sigmund Freud wrote in his famous book Moses and Monotheism, to the effect that collective memory can forget and then again remember after many generations have passed.⁸ Part of the motivation for this work has been to effect such a re-remembering. But we have taken care, to every extent possible, that that hope not serve as the compass or map guiding our work.

JEHUDA REINHARZ

Brookline, Massachusetts

MOTTI GOLANI

Tel Aviv, Israel

1

EASTERN EUROPEAN BEGINNINGS

The origin myths of Chaim Weizmann’s childhood town emphasize the organic ties between the Jews and the geography, history, and local population of Motol. According to one legend, narrated by Jews and non-Jews alike, during the Swedish invasion of Poland in the mid-seventeenth century, a Polish woman murdered a Swedish general and stole his important military documents. To avenge his death, the Swedish army surrounded the woman’s village and burned it to the ground, killing all its inhabitants, save for the sole survivor, a Jew named Mordechai the Undertaker, known as Motol, who hid in the cemetery. After the Swedish army retreated from the town, he built himself a house, which in time became an inn and a waystation for merchants who traveled between Pinsk and Minsk. The tavern was particularly popular with the peasants of nearby villages, who would call out to each other Poidom do Motoleh (Let’s go to Motol) on their way to drink. In time, other Jews and non-Jews began to build their houses near Motol’s, and the village, with its Jewish-sounding name, gradually assumed an important role in the region.¹ Another story from the same period claims that during the Bohdan Khmelnytsky Uprisings,² the Cossacks killed all the Jews except one named Motol, who survived and built a tavern popular among the Polish villagers.³

Although these myths are hardly definitive in a historical sense, they perform the role of establishing a Jewish relationship to the place and a collective memory of origins. By 1847, there were 222 Jews registered in the census; fifty years later, there were 1,354, out of a total population of 4,297.⁴ Motol was a small town in the Pale of Settlement, in the Kobryn district (uezd) of Grodno Province, on the border of the Russian-ruled Kingdom of Poland. It was situated on the banks of the Yasolda River, which flowed into the Pina, one of the tributaries of the Pripyat, which itself joined the great Dnieper River. This wedge-shaped geographical region of Polesia, along the Pripet River that flowed by the cities of Brest-Litovsk (which the Jews called Brisk), Homel, and Kiev, had an excellent transportation network. Although Weizmann describes this space as one of the darkest and most forlorn corners of the Pale of Settlement, his own narrative describes the vibrant, albeit precarious timber trade that took advantage of the thriving forests and accessible riverways.⁵ Belarusian was the language of the north; Ukrainian dialects were spoken in the south. Polesia also had a small Polish population; those who lived in the villages owned small estates, while Polish city dwellers were largely professionals and businessmen.

Image: Chaim’s mother, Rachel Leah Weizmann.

Chaim’s mother, Rachel Leah Weizmann.

Image: Chaim’s father, Ozer Weizmann.

Chaim’s father, Ozer Weizmann.

Nearly twenty miles from Pinsk, Motol was a typical nineteenth-century Polesian town, divided into three parts along its main street. The higher-status and wealthier residents—Belarussians, Poles, and a few Jews—lived in the area known as the market, where the local government institutions, schools, and pharmacies were located, as well as the Old Synagogue, the Jewish ritual bath (mikveh), and the church. The Jews referred to the middle section of the main road as Gentiles’ Street. Its inhabitants were prosperous Belarussian artisans. Over a bridge, in the new part of town, lay the New Synagogue and Jews’ Street, the focal point of Jewish life. All the Jewish stores and workshops were located in this neighborhood, the town’s poorest.⁶

Chaim Weizmann’s own family was relatively prosperous and could afford to hire domestic servants in the midst of fantastic poverty in Motol.⁷ His father, Ozer, hailed from a pedigreed family. His grandfather Chaim Azriel Fialkov of Serniki was a merchant noted for his scholarship. A more distant ancestor had been a disciple of the great maggid, Rabbi Dov-Ber of Mezeritch, and had fathered a line of well-known rabbis and leaders of Hasidic sects. Fialkov’s wife was Gittl-Rivka Chemerinski of Motol. Five of their children changed their names (Ozer among them) to be adopted into families without sons to evade conscription in the Russian army. Since Serniki had little to offer in terms of education, Ozer moved at the age of thirteen to live with his aunt and uncle, Hannah and Shmuel-Itche Chemerinski, in Motol. It was there that he met Rachel Leah Chemerinski (no relation), the youngest of twelve children. She had been born in the village of Poretchye; her family moved to Motol when she was eight years old. Her father, Yehiel-Michel, a Stolin Hasid, worked as an overseer on the estate of Count Skirmunt and was well-to-do. He sought a worthy match for his daughter; Ozer, the poor yeshiva student boarding with his neighbor, was thus not an appropriate candidate in his view. According to Weizmann, however, Rachel Leah refused to consider anyone else, and they were married in 1867, when she was not yet fourteen and Ozer almost sixteen. Their first child, Miriam, was born in 1871, and was followed by fourteen others born over the following twenty-five years. Three of these died in childhood.

Chaim was born in Motol on November 27, 1874. At first, the family lived in the home of Yehiel-Michel, who provided for all their needs while Ozer continued his religious studies. It was only after the birth of Chaim, the fourth of their children, that the couple moved into a home of their own (probably purchased for them by Rachel Leah’s father) in the village center, opposite the home of the town’s priest. In contrast to the town’s impoverished dwellings, their house was spacious, with six or seven bedrooms. Its large windows looked out on a yard full of trees and flowers.⁸

Ozer eventually had to abandon his studies and become a forester, transporting logs on rafts to Danzig with a group of fifty or sixty peasant men whom he hired seasonally and with whom he enjoyed an excellent relationship.⁹ Yet his earnings, about six thousand rubles a year, were not enough to provide for his rapidly growing family. While his education had been traditional in all respects, he was drawn to the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment) and was an avid advocate of the revival of the Hebrew language. He read newspapers and provided his children with a general as well as a religious education. As a result, ten of his children took up academic careers. A dignified man of few words, he enjoyed a reputation for his scholarship and virtue in Motol. Despite the frequent and long absences from town due to his trade, Ozer was elected to lead the municipal council, the only Jew ever to serve in that post. His election was a demonstration of the respect and affection both Jews and gentiles felt for him.

In his memoirs, Weizmann depicted an insular childhood that was separate from the non-Jewish world despite his family’s close physical proximity to the parish priest’s home: We were strangers to each other’s ways of thought, to each other’s dreams, religions, festivals, and even languages.¹⁰ In contrast to the myths of Motol’s origins, which stressed belonging and camaraderie with the peasants in the taverns, Weizmann’s narrative conveyed aloofness and detachment even as he acknowledged the cordial relationships between Jews and non-Jews. In their house, Palestine was at the center of ritual, a longing for it implicit in our life.¹¹ Although he candidly admitted that his father was not yet a Zionist and that practical nationalism did not assume form till some years later, Weizmann asserted that the longing for return was in the air, a vague, deep-rooted Messianism, a hope which could not die. In this retelling of his formative years, he described how one rebbe harshly admonished him for his precocious ambitions to rebuild Palestine—an undisguised foreshadowing of his life’s greatest purpose.¹²

Image: The Weizmann house in Motol.

The Weizmann house in Motol.

At the age of two, Chaim went to live with his grandparents Frouma and Yehiel-Michel Chemerinski, who doted on and spoiled him. His grandfather would make special trips to Pinsk just to buy him a particular toy and in the winter piled up heaps of snow so that his grandson could slide down them. He also regaled Chaim with stories of great rabbis and Jewish heroes—not just ancient ones but modern champions of the Jewish people as well, such as Moses Montefiore and the Rothschilds.

As a child, Chaim was thin, pale, and sharp-eyed. He was very demanding and behaved like an only child. For example, he preferred silk shirts, which his grandmother sewed specially for him. When Frouma died —Chaim was just four years old—he moved back to his parents’ home, together with his grandfather. Yehiel-Michel had a room of his own. For the last three years of his life, he was partially paralyzed, so on Sabbaths and holidays a minyan—the quorum of ten men required for public devotions—would assemble at the house so that he could pray there. When he died in 1887, the Weizmanns had nine children. It was not easy to run such a household, even with the help of a maid, who enforced discipline, and a manservant, Yakim. In addition to the nuclear family, Ozer’s two younger sisters and brother, still young and now orphaned, moved in as well. When, in 1888, Chaim’s older sister Miriam married Chaim Lubzhinsky, who had worked with Ozer in his timber-transport business for the previous two years, he also became part of the household. The atmosphere in the home was warm and centered on Chaim’s mother, who was already a grandmother when she gave birth to the youngest of her children, Chilik. Miriam had two children at this point, who were delighted at the birth of an uncle. Rachel Leah spent most of her time caring for the children and in the kitchen. She also mended, sewed, tended the garden, and handled the business when needed. Amid all this she managed to find time to read Yiddish literature. She was appalled by any form of cultural or physical stagnation. A childless uncle adopted Chaim so as to exempt him from military service, but he continued to maintain close relations with his parents.¹³

Like most Jewish boys, Chaim attended the heder, which merited his most scathing critique: "Like nearly all heders, mine was a squalid one-room school, which also constituted the sole quarters of the teacher’s family. If my heder differed from others, it was perhaps in the possession of a family goat which took shelter with us in cold weather." Given that Chaim’s father was often away, the melamed filled a vacuum. His first melamed—the Yiddish word for a teacher in a heder—was one Rabbi Tunehleh. But the young Chaim declared that he would study only with the rabbi who taught his sister Miriam, Rabbi Zvi Bloch-Blumenfeld. At the age of six, he switched to Rabbi Abraham Isaac Motolianski, a humane and kindly teacher who instilled in his students a love of the Hebrew Bible. Motolianski, who was called Avrom-Yizhok der Schwarzer, the black Abraham Isaac, because of his dark hair and complexion, opposed fanaticism of any sort and imparted secular as well as traditional learning, including the rudiments of modern science. He also encouraged his charges to take an interest in social issues and current events, taught them to read the newspaper, and introduced them to modern Hebrew literature, which was still in its infancy. Perhaps it was under this teacher that the young Chaim came to his trademark combination of Hebrew culture, national sentiment, and the longing for the Jewish homeland.¹⁴

Chaim began to study Russian at the age of nine, in preparation for secondary school in Pinsk. By the time he moved to that city, he already knew much of the Bible by heart and had studied several tractates of Talmud. He had also acquired a basic knowledge of the Hebrew language, grammar, and literature. His parents and the larger milieu fostered his interest in the Hibbat Zion movement, also called Hovevei Zion, which promoted Jewish settlement in Palestine. At the age of eleven, just as he was about to move to Pinsk to continue his schooling, he wrote a letter to his Russian teacher, Shlomo Tsvi Sokolovsky. Much has been made of this letter, purporting to show that Chaim already at this point foresaw the role England would play in Jewish history. More important is what it reveals about the prevailing ideas in the Pale of Settlement and, perhaps, in the Weizmann home.¹⁵ The stories he had heard about Moses Montefiore, who had just recently passed away, most likely had an impact as well:

Image: Weizmann at age eight, 1882.

Weizmann at age eight, 1882.

I shall observe your command not to throw away behind me our sacred tongue. . . . And please, my dear teacher, do not imagine that when I attend the Gymnasium I shall throw off the garb of Judaism. . . .

I am sending you one of my ideas for you to see, and that concerns Hevrat Hovevei Zion and Jerusalem which is in our land. How lofty and elevated the idea which inspired our brethren the sons of Israel to establish the Hovevei Zion Society. Because by this we can rescue our exiled, oppressed brethren who are scattered in all corners of the world. . . . In conclusion, we must support this society, which understands what lies before it and sees the evil threatening us, therefore the obligation rests upon us to establish a place to which we can flee for help. . . . Let us carry our banner to Zion and return to our first mother upon whose knee we were born.——For why should we look to the Kings of Europe for compassion that they should take pity upon us and give us a resting place? In vain! All have decided: The Jew must die, but England will nevertheless have mercy upon us. In conclusion, to Zion!—Jews—to Zion! let us go.¹⁶

In contrast with this assertion that the kings of Europe wanted the Jews to die, Weizmann noted in his memoirs that they [the peasants of Motol] were quite friendly toward us. At worst they never got wholly out of hand, and there were never any pogroms in Motol or the neighboring villages. Indeed, he mentions pogroms only briefly, perhaps because the Weizmanns suffered none of the physical horrors of the murderous waves of anti-Jewish violence that swept through the Ukrainian provinces in 1881–1884. Furthermore, the family was relatively comfortable economically. None of them joined the great migration to America. When he wrote to Sokolovsky, he had already heard of the leaders of Hibbat Zion and their ambitions. The organization was, however, poorly organized and had next to no money. Its most notable activity was collecting contributions door to door on the Purim holiday. The movement nevertheless provided Chaim with his first lessons in Zionist doctrine. It was a natural choice for a boy whose father insisted on corresponding only in Hebrew, the symbol of the Jewish national renaissance.¹⁷

Pinsk was a bustling city compared to Motol. In 1886, Jews made up a full 83 percent of its inhabitants. That made it the second-most Jewish city in Russia, after Berdichev. Feivel, Chaim’s older brother by two years, was an intelligent and diligent boy, but he enjoyed work more than his studies. His father was happy to see him become a craftsman. He decided to send both boys to Pinsk, where Feivel would apprentice to a master lithographer and Chaim would continue his studies at the state-run high school for the sciences. Chaim passed his Russian exam and was accepted. It was not a school to brag about—the teachers held their posts because they had connections in the government bureaucracy. Their main concern was to win promotion, which was achieved by strictly observing the rules, which were aimed at preventing any sort of independent thought. The only exception was Kronienko, the chemistry teacher, an intelligent and humane person, expert in his field and willing to share his knowledge with his students. Weizmann later credited this teacher for giving him his initial impetus to pursue chemistry.¹⁸

The boys first boarded with a family named Pollack; a while later, Ozer’s widowed sister Bracha moved to Pinsk to care for them. Chaim continued his religious studies as well. The family celebrated his bar mitzvah in Pinsk. The gymnasium held classes on Saturdays, but for many years Chaim kept his promise to his grandfather that he would not desecrate the Sabbath by writing in school on that day. In 1888 Feivel was forced to leave his apprenticeship and return to Motol. It was a difficult time for the timber trade and his help was required. Chaim knew that his father could not afford the hundred rubles a year it took to support him in Pinsk. Even before this he had tried, without success, to earn his own keep. But now he took a post offered by Idel (Shmuel) Lurie to oversee the studies of his son, Shaul, in exchange for board, a small room, and fifty rubles a year, enough for his tuition, books, and other small expenses. The Lurie family was prominent in the timber trade, and Idel among its wealthiest members. Chaim lived in the Lurie home until he left Pinsk in 1892. His outlook was already clear by then. Study was not a goal in and of itself, but a means of escaping poverty. This view would in the future be the cause of much anxiety for him and anger at those he saw as idlers, permanent students lacking responsibility and purpose. Nevertheless, he knew how to enjoy his leisure time and summer vacation, when he journeyed on his uncle’s rafts up the canal to Brest-Litovsk and down the Bug to Warsaw. He also made visits home.¹⁹

He graduated from the gymnasium with the highest marks in all subjects except drawing. By this time he had had enough of Russia and turned westward. Two sons of a family friend attended a Jewish boarding school in Pfungstadt, near Darmstadt, in Germany. The friend recommended Chaim for a position as a junior Hebrew and Russian tutor for his sons and other students there. The attraction was that Weizmann could attend the technical university in Darmstadt, a thirty-minute train ride away. Getting a passport was expensive, so to avoid the cost, Weizmann posed, in the autumn of 1892, as a laborer on a raft heading to Danzig. At the first stop in German territory, he took his possessions and left the raft. He traveled the rest of the way by fourth-class train carriage via Frankfurt am Main.²⁰

Germany did not initially make a good impression on the new arrival. In small towns such as this one, the Jewish community exercised much greater social oversight of its members than was the case in the cities. Religion was not a matter of choice. The boarding school was very pious, but it was not the warm and intimate popular piety he knew from his own home. Its headmaster, Dr. Barnass, was a German patriot who held forth on the sterling qualities of German Jewry. These pronouncements outraged Weizmann, especially as Dr. Barnass’s harangues came in lieu of providing food, light, and heat. Years later, when Weizmann was diagnosed with blood in his lungs, his doctors attributed it to the austerity of his eight initial months in Germany. He enrolled in the Technical University of Darmstadt, at first as an auditor and then as an auxiliary student, meaning one taking a full course but lacking the acceptable high school certificate required for full enrollment. He had to get up every day at five in the morning to catch the six-thirty train and then wait for the university gates to open at seven thirty. He returned to Pfungstadt in the late afternoon, gave his lessons in Hebrew and Russian, ate his evening meal, and studied into the night. The education he had received in Pinsk was not as good as that of the other students, so he had to work hard to catch up. Darmstadt was a pleasant city, but he barely had time to enjoy it. He was always in a hurry, hungry, and lonely. Miserable and desperately homesick, he eventually cut short his studies and returned to Pinsk.²¹

This unpleasant experience did not detract from his ambition to carry on his studies in Germany. In the fall of 1893, he set out again, this time to study at the Charlottenburg Polytechnik in Berlin. Western culture had taken a hold on him, so it was no coincidence that he chose an institution of higher learning in the heart of Prussia. For young Russian Jews, Germany held out the prospect of freedom and an opportunity for advancement. The country was then politically stable, a place of scientific achievement and cultural supremacy. Many emancipated Jews and Zionists settled there in the pre–World War I era, with Berlin becoming a center for East European–born Hebrew writers, such as David Frischmann, Shaul Tchernichovsky, and Michah Berdichevski. They patronized the city’s cafés, where they furiously debated the questions of the day. More than half the foreign students at most German universities came from Russia, and most of these were Jews. When Weizmann arrived in Berlin, it already had a sizeable colony of Jewish students. He craved social interaction and sought a social group that would agree with and support his ideas. He found both in a small organization called the Russian-Jewish Scientific Society (Russischer juedischer wissenschaftlicher Verein). Known simply as the Verein, it had been founded by a dozen Jewish students from Russia in December 1888. Its leader was Leo Motzkin, who had been born in Ukraine and had settled in Berlin when he was fifteen years old. Motzkin’s father, like Weizmann’s, was an observant Jew in the timber business who was open to new ideas. When Weizmann arrived, Motzkin was twenty-six and studying mathematics at the University of Berlin. The energetic young members of the Verein, among them Shmaryahu Levin and Nachman Syrkin, would soon play an important role in the Zionist movement. Most were penniless and hungry nonconformists who frequently pawned their possessions to get through the month. Weizmann remained an active member until he left Berlin in 1897. Motzkin was, for a time, his Zionist mentor.²²

Weizmann worked hard at his studies. Professor Carl Theodor Liebermann, the director of the Charlottenburg Polytechnik, assigned Weizmann to Dr. Karl Anton Augustin Bistrzycki and Professor Georg Karl von Knorre. In their laboratories he met a fellow student, Christian Deichler, with whom he would collaborate in his research on synthetic dyes for textiles. After three years, they succeeded in preparing naphtha derivatives that could be used in dyes. It was an exciting discovery, yet he sometimes felt inferior to those of his friends who were studying loftier subjects, such as philosophy, economics, and law.²³

The Verein’s evenings and weekends were no less exciting than the days in the lab. Weizmann plunged into its activity and in 1895 served as the group’s secretary. The Verein assembled on Saturdays, generally in the café next to the Hotel Zentrum on the Alexanderplatz, where the members could get beer and sausages on credit. They spent a great deal of their time debating current events. They hoped that this activity would attract Russian-Jewish youth and differentiate them from philanthropic associations such as the Verein Esra. On Saturday nights they sponsored lectures on Jewish history and literature and debates with rivals. The goal was to deepen national consciousness and national commitment. Much effort was put into competing with the socialists for the hearts and minds of the new Jewish students who arrived each morning on the trains from the East and had yet to form their positions on nationalism and socialism. The competition was intense. Jewish socialists and nationalists would wait on the train platform and ambush the new arrivals. Once they aroused a young person’s interest or curiosity, they would invite the newcomer to a Saturday-night debate before a large audience. The socialists and those who rejected Jewish nationalism would come to hone their arguments. They were usually at an advantage because they would bring in well-known figures from the socialist world who would try to overwhelm the members of the Verein with their prestige, if not their reasoning. It was an exhilarating time for Weizmann, an atmosphere of intellectual freedom in which he formed important friendships, most significantly with Motzkin, whom he viewed as his intellectual superior. He took full advantage of the music and theater Berlin offered. Weizmann and his friends’ favorite day was Sunday, when students could buy discounted tickets. Sometimes they would see three shows in a day, gulping down during intermissions sandwiches they had brought and returning to their rooms after seeing plays by Shakespeare, Goethe, and Ibsen. Berlin’s most acclaimed musician at the time was the conductor Felix Weingartner, whose concerts the members of the Verein frequently attended, sitting in the cheapest seats and applauding madly. Once, at the end of a performance held, as it happened, on the Purim holiday, Weingartner walked over to see who was making all the noise. Taking in their adoring countenances, he treated them to sausage and drinks.²⁴

At the beginning of 1895, Weizmann’s family moved to Pinsk. Ozer’s business was again going through hard times, and he decided to merge it with Lubzhinsky’s. He could manage his affairs in Pinsk as well as in Motol and, as his rafts passed through Pinsk in any case, living there would enable him to spend more time at home. But it was not easy for the Weizmanns to leave Motol and start over. Chaim also had a hard time leaving the sparkle and gaiety of Berlin for provincial Pinsk at the end of the spring semester in 1895. He spent his year there as a science tutor for high school students who wanted to continue their studies outside Russia, and teaching Russian and Hebrew. In the mornings he worked in a small chemical factory owned by Grygory Lurie, the brother of Shmuel, his former employer in Pinsk.²⁵ Soon after arriving in Pinsk, Weizmann began grumbling about his lot in letters to Motzkin:

After Berlin, Pinsk has made such a vile, repulsive impression on me that I find it unpleasant, even distasteful, to share it, dear friend, with you. There is nothing here and no one: instead of a town—just an enormous rubbish-heap; instead of people, one comes across creatures devoid of all personality, with no interests, no desires, no demands. . . . Hundreds of Jews push on and hurry about the streets of our town, with anxious faces marked by great suffering, but they seem to do it unconsciously; as if they were in a daze. As in any other well-organized society, there is a so-called intelligentsia here, too. . . . In point of fact, the male intellectuals are busy paying court to intellectual damsels, while the married men and women spend their time playing cards. . . . From all this you will understand that I am incredibly bored here.²⁶

The student who had not long ago decried assimilationist Jews had broken free of some of the values and lifestyle of the Pale of Settlement. He saw himself as a Russian-Jewish intellectual and had internalized some Western attitudes toward his Russian coreligionists. His contempt and disdain for them were no doubt fed by his anger at having to interrupt his studies, but he had also been influenced by Russian radical currents. In fact, he was not all that bored. Along with Yehuda Berger, Mordechai Strick, and Hirsch (Tzvi) Hiller, he founded a Jewish nationalist literary circle. At one of its events, he gave a talk about the Yiddish and Hebrew writer Y. L. Peretz, but it was not well received. He and the other founders also campaigned for the establishment of a heder metukan, that is, a progressive heder, with an innovative curriculum and teaching methods. The city’s traditionalist Jews were incensed and some even violently attacked Weizmann and his friends, on one occasion shattering the windows in Berger’s home and on another stoning the Weizmann home. Ozer walked out onto the small porch and informed the demonstrators that he supported Chaim and his friends and would not be deterred by violence. His dignity and authoritative demeanor impelled the assailants to disperse.²⁷ His mother was their most reliable ally, even burying their revolutionary pamphlets in her garden during police raids and employing her female air of innocence to avert danger.²⁸

Chaim’s leisure time was taken up with Zionist and educational activity, but that did not distract him from his looming conscription into the tsarist army. Students were largely exempt from conscription if they studied in Russia. Even though he had been formally adopted by a childless uncle, making him technically an only child and thus eligible for an exemption, he had received a call-up order during the autumn break of 1894. It was a delicate situation—so many young Jews had left Russia that the community was not providing its quota of enlistees. Reb Israel Chemerinsky of Motol proposed adding a few years to Chaim’s age. Ultimately, Chaim did not register with the other draftees but rather submitted an affidavit that he was ill. He took to bed healthy but then really fell sick. The charade affected him psychologically, and he was bothered by the fact that it involved the payment of large sums as bribes. Two weeks later a military delegation visited his home. A doctor examined the prospective soldier, diagnosed a severe illness, and sent a certificate to the district capital. Weizmann received a year’s deferment, which ran out soon after he returned to Pinsk in the spring of 1895. He decided not to play the game again. A few days before he was due to report to the draft board, he left home on the pretext of traveling on urgent Zionist business. He set out for Kobrin, where the provincial supervisor of army affairs resided. He explained to this official that he had never engaged in any physical exercise, that his health was poor, and that he was deeply committed to his scientific studies. Rather than waste time in the army, he would prefer to flee to America, where he could continue his academic work. The supervisor looked the bold young Jew over and said, Yes, you are correct, Mr. Weizmann. Indeed, you don’t give the impression of a soldier and we have more than enough cannon fodder. Go in peace and report before the committee. I am certain they will also understand that you were not created to hold a rifle. A few days later he received the so-called white certificate that exempted him from active service and reserve duty.²⁹

Back in Berlin in the summer of 1896, he immediately plunged into the affairs of the Verein and the Jewish national movement. Motzkin, who was not responding to his letters, increasingly annoyed him. He wrote to his friend to tell him that I feel deeply offended at being ignored like this, all the more because it is you who are doing it. . . . In spite of my frequent appeals and requests, you do not give a single sign of life . . . it follows that you simply did not want to write. This would drive anyone wild. He felt humiliated. He had always been a sensitive person, easily offended. Up to this point he had addressed Motzkin using the respectful plural second person, but his respect now cracked. His letters display character traits that would find full expression later in his life—the tendency to complain about others, self-doubt, and the need to exaggerate his own accomplishments to the point of sometimes slipping into falsehoods.³⁰

Motzkin had brought Weizmann into the Berlin circle of Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginsberg), the most profound of Hibbat Zion’s thinkers, and one who at times attacked the movement, in particular regarding the issue of settlement in Palestine. Ahad Ha’am demanded that no more settlers be sent there until a legal international basis for their presence was established. He also decried the fact that the existing settlements depended on donations from abroad. The redemption of the land was essential, he argued, if European Jewry were to resist the influence of foreign cultures. The solution was the establishment of a Jewish spiritual center in Palestine that would infuse Judaism with new life. Zionism was not a solution for the Jewish problem, that is, the nation’s economic, social, and political ills —but it could solve the Judaism problem by creating a new type of Jew through the revival of Jewish education and tradition and a renaissance of the Jewish spirit. Jews would not go to Palestine because of poverty and antisemitism but because it would offer them spiritual revival.

Weizmann’s close friends in Pinsk, like those of the Verein, were active in Bnei Moshe, a semisecret and highly selective fraternal order that Ahad Ha’am founded in 1889. In October 1895, Weizmann met Motzkin in Brest-Litovsk and, at his recommendation, was inducted as a member. A short time after he was admitted, he came under suspicion of disloyalty. In a letter to the order’s central office, its leaders in Pinsk cautioned that he should not be entrusted with too much information, because there was reason to believe that he was a social democrat. They revealed that Weizmann had been considered for membership in the society for some time and that he had been accepted only on Motzkin’s recommendation. He had not joined because he shared the movement’s values but simply because his Berlin friends urged him to do so. In any case, they concluded, one has to be wary of him at the start . . . please gather some information about him from our brethren in Berlin.³¹

In the spring of 1896, Ozer Weizmann’s business began to recover thanks to his enterprising and ambitious son-in-law, and the two men decided to finance the rest of Chaim’s studies. They sent him back to Berlin and promised a monthly stipend of one hundred marks. The steady income meant that the young Weizmann could devote all his time to his studies and eventually lend money, or his coat (to be pawned), to his more needy friends. He was not careful about his money, but stuck to his resolve to obtain a profession that would provide him with a regular income. As much as he admired the bohemian lifestyle of his friends and Motzkin’s devotion to public causes, they were, as he saw it, unproductive people who were wasting their talents and the opportunities that came their way. His harsh criticism seems to indicate that he was afraid that if he relaxed his own self-restraint, he might become one of them.³²

When he returned to Berlin, Weizmann, along with two other members of the Verein, went to pay his respects to Ahad Ha’am. The latter was in the city in connection with the publication of Hashiloah, the new monthly journal he had been unable to obtain a permit to publish in Russia. Weizmann came away with a less-than-enthusiastic impression. The three of us visited Ahad Ha’am today, he wrote soon thereafter. The conversation turned on various rather unimportant questions. Like other young Jewish nationalists in Berlin and elsewhere, he wanted action—aid for refugees, amelioration of the plight of Russia’s Jews, and improvement of their living conditions. He defended Ahad Ha’am against attacks from religious leaders but did not agree with him about everything. Unlike the restrained and skeptical philosopher, Weizmann advocated militant action.³³

In the summer of 1897, the eyes of the Zionist movement were turned to Basel, where the First Zionist Congress was to take place that August. Weizmann was preparing to head east. That winter, after a series of experiments so arduous that he even forgot to write home, he discovered a formula for improving the methods of producing dyes. His teacher, Professor von Knorre, recommended him to the manager of a dyeing plant in Moscow. Weizmann was in the meantime busy making plans for the congress. He was elected a delegate from Pinsk, so for the time being he put off the invitation to Moscow. All spring, Weizmann traveled by cart, wagon, and boat to remote communities in the Pale, along the murky waterways of the Pripet Marshes. In June he returned to Berlin to set his affairs in order and pack his belongings for the move to Fribourg, Switzerland, in the wake of his favorite instructor, Bistrzycki. There was a matter he had to take care of —Motzkin owed him more than thirty marks. In one letter after another he pleaded that the loan be repaid. The lack of response and the failure to pay up bothered him. There are no clear clues as to why a man who had been a mentor and guide for the past four years had suddenly turned against him. Their friendship never