Golda Meir was not born into power. She was born into pogroms. On May 3, 1898, in Kiev, within the crumbling Russian Empire, a little Jewish girl named Golda Mabovitch entered the world with history already pressing against her door. Her earliest memory, as she would later recount, was watching her father hammer boards across the entrance of their home to keep out the mob. Violence was not abstract. It was the soundtrack of her childhood.