He would find it in the nascent state of Israel. Here’s how it started: In 1922, Zemurray was contacted by Chaim Weizmann, who would become the founding president of the Jewish nation. Weizmann had been traveling the United States when he heard his first Banana Man story. “I made an unusual ‘find’ in New Orleans, where lived a very remarkable personality in American Jewry—Samuel Zemurray, the banana king,” Weizmann wrote in his autobiography. “I paid my first visit to New Orleans specially to meet him. He had been told of my arrival and postponed his own planned departure from the city for several days—days which I found not only extremely interesting, but also profitable for the Funds.” The men met several times that year. Their conversations lasted for hours, drifting from English to Russian to Yiddish, whatever language best expressed the thought of the moment: English for money, Russian for struggle, Yiddish for the heartaches faced by a Jew in the world. Weizmann talked about his hometown in Poland, his disappointments and anger, his realization that the Jew will be free only when settled in his own land.
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