Biography
Levi Eshkol (Shkolnik) was born in the shtetl of Oratov, Kiev Governorate, Russian Empire (now Orativ, Vinnytsia Oblast, Ukraine). His mother (born as Dvora Krasnyansky) came from a Hasidic background and his father (Joseph Shkolnik) came from a family of Mitnagdim. Eshkol received a traditional education.
In 1914, he left for Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire. He was a leading member of the Judea Workers' Union in 1915–17. During World War I, he volunteered with the Jewish Legion.
Eshkol joined Kibbutz Deganya Bet and married Rivka Maharshek. They divorced shortly after the birth of their daughter, Noa, in 1924. Eshkol's second wife was Elisheva Kaplan, with whom he had three daughters, Dvora, Ofra, and Tama.
Prior to and immediately after the establishment of the State of Israel, Eshkol was a member of the Haganah high command. He engaged in arms acquisition for the Haganah prior to and during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. After Israel's victory, Eshkol was appointed Director-General of the Ministry of Defense, serving from 1950 to 1951.
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“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
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“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
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