By this age Ruth had grown into a diligent, intense, bespectacled bookworm who questioned everyone and everything. She had also developed an interest in photography and fashion, and dressed to make an impression. She would have rarely left the house without a camera or a book in hand. Or without a particular thought on her mind: after what she had seen and heard in Leipzig over the past five years, she knew she had to get out of Germany. And when she saw an opening to escape, she took it. When she left, she carried a suitcase with her worldly possessions, including clothing for every season and documents that proved her identity and accomplishments. She saved those papers for the rest of her life and guarded that suitcase and its contents with a fierceness known only to the stateless and the orphaned.
Ruth came into the world at a most unfortunate time and place for someone who happened to be Jewish. Her parents were part of a wave of émigrés from eastern Europe who had come to Leipzig, Germany, to take advantage of its international trade fairs and growing business opportunities for Jews. Although Ruth was born in Germany, she was not considered a German citizen. Born to immigrants, she was immediately marked as an outsider and classified as an immigrant. She remained classified that way—by one government or another—until she died.
Her father, Mendel, was born in 1877 in Roztoky, a small town in the Bukovina region in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.1 His family owned forested land and worked in the lumber business.2 Mendel moved to a larger town nearby, Vyzhnytsya, and married a woman named Rachel Kamil. She died in childbirth with their first baby, Clara, who was raised by Rachel’s parents. Mendel moved to Leipzig in 1911 with his second wife, Frima Feiger, and younger daughter, Mirjam (also spelled Miriam). He joined the booming furrier business there.3
Leipzig had long served as an important trade center not just for Germany, but internationally too. Since the Middle Ages, each year the city has hosted two fairs, which remain the oldest continuously operated industrial fairs in the world. Leipzig was also a cultural center with a world-renowned publishing industry and was the home of composers Johann Sebastian Bach, Felix Mendelssohn, and Richard Wagner. Bach was the cantor of Saint Thomas Church, a monastery that sponsors a boys’ choir that, founded in 1212, remains one of Europe’s oldest and most famous.
Since the 1300s Jews had been permitted to participate in the fairs with various restrictions, but they were largely banned from living in the city until the nineteenth century. The first large, permanent synagogue was built in 1855, and twenty years later the Jewish population was about seventeen hundred. By 1914 the fur industry in Leipzig consisted of nearly four hundred businesses, nearly half of them Jewish owned. Most of the businesses were located on or near the Brühl, a Jewish neighborhood and market street in the center of the city.
When Germany entered World War I in 1914, every family in the country was affected. Mendel Rappaport was drafted into military service in 1917 and served with the Austro-Hungarian military in forestry service.4 He was discharged and returned to Leipzig on November 12, 1918, the day after the armistice agreement was signed. Just six weeks later, his wife, Frima, died of tuberculosis in Leipzig, leaving yet another motherless daughter. Having been widowed twice in such a short time was undoubtedly traumatic for Mendel, although not unusual for the time. The horrific violence of World War I and rapidly spreading contagious diseases, including influenza, had ravaged families all over Europe. Mende
l was just one of many widowed in Leipzig. Mirjam was sent to live in Vienna with her mother’s sister for a time.5
Ruth’s mother, Chaja (also Chaya or Helena) Rubinstein, was born in Mielec, Poland, in 1885. Her parents were Markus and Reizel Perlsheim Rubinstein.6 One of Chaja’s cousins (or second cousins), also named Chaja (later Helena) Rubinstein, would immigrate to Australia and the United States and start a successful makeup business. Two of Ruth’s uncles on her mother’s side, Carl and Abraham, immigrated to the United States in 1900. Carl had been so desperate to leave Poland that he stole money from his father to fund his trip.7 Another one of Ruth’s maternal uncles, Leo, and his growing family moved first to Hanover and then Leipzig, where he started a metals and rag trading business. When Ruth’s mother moved to Leipzig is unclear, but she was living with Leo and his family when she married Mendel on October 4, 1922.8 Ruth was born the following May.
By 1925, two years after Ruth was born, the Jewish population in Leipzig had reached its height of 13,030, or 2 percent of the total population, largely through immigration from eastern European countries, especially Poland and Russia.9 This influx, nearly 70 percent foreign-born, created a division within the Jewish community between more-assimilated German Jews and the Orthodox Jews from eastern Europe, known as the Ostjuden.10
Rabbi Ephraim Carlebach arrived in Leipzig in 1900 to start a new Orthodox synagogue, Etz Chaim. A popular rabbi who was German-born but served the immigrant Orthodox community, he was an important mediator among the different factions of the Jewish community.11 Ruth’s family attended his services at his synagogue, an ornate building newly constructed in 1922—the year before Ruth was born.12 Ruth’s parents were Modern Orthodox. When her uncle Carl later asked her if her father was Orthodox, she was unsure how to answer. On further reflection, she questioned, “Did I tell the truth? I think so, but actually I don’t think Papa himself knows what he wants and what he is.”13
Many of Ruth’s memories of her parents’ Judaism focused on their traditions, including food:
My mother lit the candles and you know we always had challah, and gefilte fish or regular fish, or matzo ball soup, or noodle soup… My mother kept kosher for my father. So, we had a kosher kitchen. But, when we traveled, she and I ate treif and actually with my father’s blessing. He just said he was raised Orthodox, he couldn’t get himself to change. But he was really, he was sort of an accepting, liberal kind of guy. And, like if I was sick in bed and needed a treat, he’d come home and bring me a package of ham. For sandwiches. So, you know it was a tradition, not religion.14
If Ruth attended synagogue regularly with her family, the services would have been sex segregated and led by men. Ruth never learned Hebrew or had a Bat Mitzvah, which was the norm for girls at the time, but she attended the Hebrew school at the synagogue and her teachers gave her good marks on behavior in her report cards. Although she probably learned stories from the Torah and Jewish culture at the school, she was not participating fully in Jewish life in Leipzig. She revealed later that she had stopped believing in God when she was about eight years old, although she did not explain what in particular had led her to atheism.15 Perhaps she came across the concept in her extensive childhood reading, or maybe something traumatic led her to question the existence of God. In her seventies, when she joined the Hill Havurah, a Jewish group on Capitol Hill, Ruth warned the group to not let any one person become too powerful and to guard against Judaism’s traditional sexism.16 The roots of this sentiment were laid when, as a girl in Leipzig, she questioned long-held practices of silencing women from religious expression.
Ruth’s family lived in a mixed neighborhood in Leipzig at 18 Salomonstrasse, just a few blocks east of the center of the city in the Graphisches Viertel (Graphics Quarter), famed for its many publishing houses and bookbinderies. The apartment building at 18 Salomonstrasse was large, with three wings separated by courtyards. The Rappaports lived on the second floor of the middle wing, B. In addition to apartments, several businesses were housed in the building, including a restaurant and sausage company. Ruth’s apartment was just a few blocks from the train station, the University of Leipzig, the symphony hall, and the Brühl, the street where her father probably worked. She played with non-Jewish friends and attended a public elementary school (Volksschule), a mixed school with both Christian and Jewish children, although the records for this school do not survive.17 She described herself at this age as “a snot-nosed kid,” but, she added, “I was bright.”18 She may have been quiet, but the books she rapidly consumed started to introduce her to new ideas and instilled in her a sense of skepticism.
When asked what kinds of activities she participated in, she explained, “Mostly reading. I wasn’t too much into sports, because I was really nearsighted as a kid. And in those days, we didn’t have plastic glasses. So, you know, I couldn’t go in for sports. A tennis ball and pair of eyeglasses can be fatal. So, I was a little bit removed from sports and tended towards books.”19 A photograph of her around age five reveals that she didn’t wear glasses yet, but some time in elementary school, Ruth developed eyesight problems—including a lazy eye, likely inherited from her father, who also had the same ailment—and her nearsightedness was no doubt caused by intense reading. Even though she claimed she did not participate in sports, among her papers from her childhood is a certificate showing that she passed swimming lessons; it would remain her favorite form of exercise throughout her life. She also belonged to Bar Kochba, a Jewish sports club in Leipzig for children, and a photograph reveals that she played basketball with a group of other children when she was thirteen.20
To Ruth, the most important group she belonged to was the Brith Habonim, a Zionist youth organization. Her small group, or the Bund, as she called it, was known as the Arbeiterbund or labor union. She recalled that she was one of only two in the group that were considered middle class, while everyone else was classified as the Jewish working poor.21 Leipzig’s Zionist movement grew throughout the 1920s and ’30s as it became increasingly clear that Jews were not welcome in many areas of public life. There were several organizations for adults, including the Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland, a mainstream group, and Poale Zion, a group for the working class. Ruth’s father considered himself a Zionist, and her sister Mirjam probably joined an organization as well. Ruth remembered attending a Zionist meeting at age six, where she questioned the reverence of a Zionist hero:
It was sort of a commemoration of somebody who was a hero, Joseph Trumpeldor, who died, ta-da, ta-da, and here’s this little six-year-old and she says, “What’s so great about dying for your country? Isn’t it more important to live for it?” I thought that was a pretty astute comment from a six-year-old.22
Although Ruth would remain involved in Zionism for the next twenty years of her life, this story illustrates how from the beginning she was wary of the movement’s ideology. She would later mull over in her diary her feelings about it, her arguments with other Zionists, and whether establishing a Jewish homeland was truly a solution to the “Jewish question.” More than anything, this commemoration that she remembered more than eighty years later is reflective of Ruth’s inclination to question everything.
Reading was central to Ruth’s childhood. Her parents encouraged their children to read, as Ruth remembered that her sister Mirjam was also a bookworm. But like most parents of children who read voraciously, they also had their frustrations when their daughters would read so much they avoided other activities. Later in life Ruth wrote, “I remember when I was a young child, sometimes father or mother would scold Mirjam because she would read a book rather than do a chore . . . She did a lot of living through books.”23 Like Ruth, Mirjam remained a lifelong reader.
The Rappaports took advantage of living in a city that revered books. Since the seventeenth century, Leipzig had hosted an annual international book fair. By 1930, Leipzig had 436 publishing houses, 277 printers, and 69 bookstores, and one in ten residents worked in the book industry.24 Growing up in this publishing neighborhood influenced Ruth’s interest in books and intellectual pursuits. She remembered:
There used to be a very famous German encyclopedia called Brockhaus… and the Brockhaus family lived across the street from us. Leipzig, of course, was a publishing city, and very few people know that, but not pocketbooks, but paperbacks, quality paperbacks, were published in Leipzig long before the names were coined, because we had these publishing houses in Leipzig. And boy, I had a whole collection of English novels by the time I was ten years old.25
During the 1930s, there were thirty-nine publishers or other businesses in the book industry located within three blocks of Ruth’s childhood home. In her apartment building alone, there were seven: Johann Ambrosius Barth, a medical publishing company in existence from 1780 to 1999; Curt Kabitzch, another medical publishing company; Alfred Mesiter, a printer; Quandt & Händel, a science publishing company; Leopold Voß, a publishing company started as a bookstore in 1791 and noted for its specialty in science and philosophy, including the works of Kant; G. Fr. Wanner, a book binder; and Wilhelm Wobersin, a travel bookstore.26
Leipzig had another advantage for young people interested in foreign languages. A special school for translators trained and hired them to work at the industrial fairs, which attracted merchants from across Europe. This program was also open to local children. Ruth had already begun studying English in school when she was eleven years old, probably because her mother wanted to immigrate to the United States to be near her brothers. But this program (probably a summer class) seemed to have been very effective for her:
It was a three-month course… I didn’t have to live at the school, because I was from Leipzig, but most students lived there. And it was immersion study. You had breakfast with your teachers. You went for a walk. You couldn’t use anything but English. If you couldn’t say it in English, you couldn’t say it. It was agony while it lasted; however, when I came to t
he States as an immigrant, I didn’t have to take a single required English college course.27
Chapter 2
What had been a typical childhood for a Jewish girl in Leipzig suddenly changed when Ruth turned ten, soon after the Nazi Party came to power. Even at such a young age, she understood the seriousness of this new political regime. She heard about it for the first time on the radio around her tenth birthday in May 1933 and sensed the fear that was in the air. At some point later, Ruth was crossing a street in Leipzig when a motorcade passed by; she knew instantly it was Hitler. He was sitting up straight in his open vehicle with his arm raised in the air. “Sig heil!” he yelled. Others in the crowd around her repeated the salute. But Ruth refused to, and in hindsight she doubted that anyone would have noticed the defiance of a short Jewish girl, just one of many in the crowd.1
In April 1933 Ruth was accepted to the höhere dreistufige Mädchenschule der Stadt, Leipzig’s college preparatory public high school for girls, based on her test scores.2 In 1935, a law was passed banning Jewish children from public schools.3 She had to return to her public elementary school for a time before transferring to the local Jewish high school, the Höhere Israelitische Schule, also known as the Carlebach School, which was founded by Ephraim Carlebach in 1912.4 It is unclear why Ruth and her parents did not opt for Jewish schools to begin with. Perhaps attending public schools was a sign of belonging to the bourgeoisie. But Ruth remembered one advantage of attending this Jewish private school that had had its origins in anti-Semitism: almost all of her teachers were Jewish professors from Heidelberg University who had been fired in the sweeping bans of Jews from many professions.5
Hillel Shechter, who grew up in Leipzig and also attended the Carlebach School, remembered that some teachers belonged to the Nazi Party, including a biology teacher who wore his Hitler Youth uniform to class and others who made it clear that they had anti-Semitic leanings.6 The Carlebach School was overwhelmed with new students and asked the Leipzig School Board for funds for a new building. The request was denied because most of its students were designated as foreigners, like Ruth, even though a majority of them had been born in Leipzig.7 It is clear that she struggled for the first few years at the Carlebach School. Her teachers’ comments on her report cards at this time included, “Ruth is immature, she has no concept of order . . . She is very impertinent . . . Her work is barely acceptable . . . Ruth is not industrious or diligent and does not participate in classroom activities.” The subjects she struggled with were religion, English, and math.8
The year 1933 was significant in Ruth’s life, and not just because of the obvious political changes in Germany. Ruth’s mother, Chaja, became the manager of the österreichisches Vaterlandsheim (or ÖVLH), a local club and restaurant for Austrians in Leipzig, specifically Jewish immigrants. She may have worked there before becoming the manager, but regardless, it appears to have been a demanding job, and she was not at home most evenings. Ruth remembered this as a time when she had to step up at home and become more self-reliant.9 She may have also assisted her mother at the restaurant and claimed in her diary, “Through the Ö.V.L.H. I had a certain amount of life experience.”10 She described the members as “pompous con men—with debts—but, worldly and bon vivant, [who] look down on people, and bamboozle others.” It appears that it was also a sort of second home for the Rappaports; she remembered that on Yom Kippur in 1938, the last one she would spend in Leipzig, her family ate dinner together at the restaurant.