A Well-Read Woman

Her mother may have started working because Mendel’s business may have been failing, likely because of Jewish boycotts and the worsening economic conditions of the Depression. When asked about this, Ruth answered, “I don’t think he was closed, shut down, or anything like that. It was just the Depression. Actually, I think it’s kind of funny looking back.” She joked, “I don’t know if there was a middle-class Jewish trade or not, but you know Jews were never poor—they just had cash flow problems.”11 One of Ruth’s uncles (probably Leo Rubinstein) had done very well financially in Leipzig; Ruth remembered that he owned a Rolls-Royce that her family borrowed occasionally. Ruth’s parents also continued to employ a maid named Else, who Ruth took a photograph of washing dishes at the sink at home in the summer of 1936. Else wore an apron and a scarf on her head and faced away from the camera as she diligently worked, but she seemed to be suppressing a smile, as if knowing that Ruth was trying to artistically capture her.

Since 1927 Ruth’s sister Mirjam had worked as a clerk for the film company Globus AG in Berlin. The company closed in 1930, and she had trouble finding work.12 In 1933 Mirjam decided to go to Palestine and left the day after Ruth’s tenth birthday.13 She probably went with her friend Hadassah Schneider, who moved with her family to Palestine in the 1930s. Mirjam later married Hadassah’s brother, Max, in 1940 in Jerusalem.14 Between 1933 and 1935, eight hundred Jews from Leipzig immigrated to Palestine.15 Mirjam came back to Leipzig in 1937 for a visit, looking tanned in a photograph with Chaja in front of their apartment building.

One of Ruth’s most vivid memories was a book burning in Leipzig in 1933. Across Germany in April and May, university students burned or destroyed “un-German” books and literature, in what became known as the Action Against the Un-German Spirit. Initially the plan was to burn writings by Jewish authors, but it quickly expanded into a sweep of all literature considered pornographic, Communist, modernist, or any other “ist” deemed a threat by the Nazi Party. A librarian, Wolfgang Herrmann, created a list of books to purge from Berlin libraries. He had Nazi leanings, although the book burnings themselves were not ordered by the Nazi Party or the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. In Berlin the bonfire of books at the opera house on May 10 was accompanied by a speech by Joseph Goebbels and broadcast nationally.16 During the month of April, Leipzig’s public libraries and the private libraries of Communists were searched and forbidden books were taken away.17

On May 2 the library at the Volkshaus, a community center for trade unions and Communists in Leipzig, was ransacked. Books by Karl Marx, Heinrich Heine, Kurt Tucholsky, Erich Kästner, Sigmund Freud, and eighty-nine other authors were torched by University of Leipzig students.18 The building was south of downtown Leipzig, and Ruth, just ten years old at the time, heard that it was happening. She set out to see it for herself and described the heaps of books set on fire in the road. She was stunned to see this happening in her hometown, the world-famous city of books, and did everything in her might to not cry as she passed by and watched.19

This book burning, however, was one of just two that occurred in Leipzig. On May 14, 1933, the Association of German Booksellers met in Leipzig. Joseph Goebbels spoke about Leipzig’s importance in the international book trade and tried to calm the outraged booksellers, who were concerned about Leipzig’s reputation. He promised that their businesses would not be damaged and encouraged publishers to stop printing un-German literature and focus on printing new Fascist books. Although there were no more book burnings in the city, many publishers in Leipzig left Germany altogether.20 Members of the Brockhaus family, who owned the publishing company across the street from Ruth’s home, were deemed half-Jewish or one-quarter Jewish, but they petitioned Hitler directly for permission to be included in the new Chamber of Literature (approved publishers), probably because of the prestige of the company and the fact that they published two well-known pro-Nazi writers, Sven Hedin and Colin Ross.21

Since 1930 certain magazines and journals had been banned in Germany, but in February 1933 President von Hindenburg issued the “Decree for the Protection of the German People,” which allowed local police to confiscate books that were “apt to endanger public security or order.”22 Other regulations expanded the types of materials used and the power of the federal authorities to intervene if the locals in charge were not obeying the new censorship regulations. In 1941 Jews were banned from public libraries (they had earlier been banned from many other public places, such as movie theaters and concerts). The banned book

s list created by Herrmann, as well as other lists, such as one crafted by librarian Ernst Drahn, were managed by Goebbels and the staff of the Chamber of Literature.23 But these lists did not prevent Germans from seeking the forbidden books, if they didn’t already own them. Ruth and other members of the Habonim had access to at least some of them. They gave each other books by Jewish authors and those considered radicals and destroyed them when they were finished. Ruth reported, “By 13, I had already read Trotsky, Maxim Gorky, Traven, Remarque, Sholem Asch. At 12 and 13, I was very knowledgeable and involved with socialism and communism. I questioned if there is a God and thought about the effects of industrialization.”24 These authors deeply influenced Ruth. Besides shaping her views on Socialism, Zionism, and Jewish identity, authors like Erich Maria Remarque, whose antiwar book All Quiet on the Western Front was banned in Germany, would affect Ruth’s views on war and violence.

In a city with such a thriving publishing industry, it was not too difficult for Leipzig’s teenagers to acquire these banned books that had yet to be destroyed or confiscated. But what level of risk were they taking if caught? Would they be imprisoned, fined, beaten? In this frightening new era, friends, family, and passing acquaintances fled the country or disappeared. To Ruth, breaking the laws regarding what she was allowed to read was worth the risk, whatever the consequences might be.

Chapter 3

The Brith Habonim had a large influence on its young members, and it was in some ways a more significant influence in Ruth’s life than her parents. She noted that Zionist youth groups were “a double-edged sword” for the parents.1 The older generations, particularly those who were native Germans, were not so supportive of Zionism, because it implied that Jews could not fully assimilate into German society. They worried that it gave Germans a pass on their responsibility to be a fully democratic, inclusive nation. Many German Jews, and even a Zionist immigrant like Ruth’s father, viewed Nazism as a temporary aberration in Germany’s history that would soon blow over. Ruth remembered her father feeling this way even though he was an immigrant and probably experienced anti-Semitism on a regular basis: “My father was totally unrealistic. ‘Hitler’s going to last six months, and the Germans will know when to bargain.’ God almighty! I mean, never mind. When I remember, I still get angry. Because there was no excuse for being that much of an ostrich!”2

Was Ruth’s father oblivious to the dangers lurking ahead? This is how she remembered it, but the records indicate that he indeed tried to get his whole family out of Germany. In the spring of 1938, he corresponded with Jakob Gross, who was living in Nairobi, Kenya. Gross described what steps the Rappaports needed to take to immigrate to Kenya and the business opportunities for Jews available there.3 Ruth’s family also wanted to immigrate to the United States, either to Seattle to be near Chaja’s brothers or to New York, where Mendel’s brother, Irving, lived. Mendel was especially focused on getting Ruth out of Germany. Her name was placed on a waiting list in August 1938 at the American consulate in Berlin.4 In 1937 or 1938 Ruth’s sister Clara moved to Paris to marry her boyfriend, Salomon Rosner, also an immigrant from Vyzhnytsya, who had first tried his luck in Berlin.5 The letters and other documents that described her father’s efforts were all in Ruth’s papers that Peter, my Library of Congress colleague, found in her house, so none of these efforts to immigrate were concealed from her. But she still angrily remembered her father as oblivious to what was to come.

If most Jewish parents in Leipzig tried to protect their children from unnecessary worry, teenagers in the Habonim and other youth Zionist groups received a very different message from their group leaders: get out now. Ruth explained that the leaders of the group were urgently encouraging their members to go to Palestine as soon as possible if they could. In hindsight, the group’s efforts to teach its members agricultural skills seemed like a waste of time to her considering what was looming, but as she later said, “At the time it was a solution to a problem.”6

Ruth was conflicted about “making a decision”: choosing whether to move to Palestine and live on a kibbutz or leave Zionism behind and assimilate into Leipzig’s (or possibly America’s) bourgeois culture. She agonized about it, weighed each option, and examined her own personality and flaws. Was she physically and mentally tough enough to work on a kibbutz and forsake most physical and intellectual comforts? Would a bourgeois middle-class life as a housewife be too empty?7 If there was one thing she knew she wanted, it was to work hard and to become a professional. What exactly that profession might be, especially since there were so few open to women, remained unclear to her.

On Ruth’s thirteenth birthday in 1936, her parents sent her alone on a trip to Romania to visit Mendel’s family. She remembered:

For my birthday, I received a suitcase and money for traveling at the Pentecost vacation. I was very into the Chaluzisch movement.8 When I then traveled to Romania, I totally felt like a traveling lady, totally independent, which I actually was… Most of all, I was also in a good humor and I made my vacation with the yucky relatives very nice.9

Ruth might not have ever been to Romania or met her father’s family before. She obtained her Romanian passport for the trip and took photos in her father’s hometown. Traveling on her own might have been a marker that she was mature enough to go to Palestine alone if she wished. She also described the trip with sadness and revealed her propensity to act tougher than she really was:

In Romania, the relatives were so different from me, and at times we even butted heads, and everyone admired me because I refused to let it get to me; they thought that I didn’t care and I’m going my own way, a different child would not be happy anymore, would have cried, and the vacation would have been ruined, but nobody knew that I was desperately unhappy in the evening in bed by myself.10

It may have been the first time she did not connect well with her extended family, especially without the benefit of her parents to bridge the distance, but it wouldn’t be the last.

On New Year’s Eve in 1936, Ruth started a diary. She reported that her uncle Leo (her mother’s brother), aunt Dora, and cousin David had just left for the United States, yet another Leipzig Jewish family making a break for it while they could. David was the youngest of four children; the oldest daughter, Deborah, lived in Hanover in a mental hospital, and Meier and Rosel, his middle children, had already left for Palestine.11 Ruth acknowledged that she had not made an effort to see her relatives recently and did not get along with them, but now that they had left, she missed them. It felt like everyone was leaving, and Ruth feared that she would be one of the last people stuck on an obviously sinking ship.

Despite the fact that their world was beginning to crumble, Jewish girls in Leipzig sustained intense friendships with one another. Most of Ruth’s friendships grew out of the Habonim. She revealed, as only a thirteen-year-old girl could, the reason why she had started her diary in the first place:

With Esther things are very different on the outside, but basically we play act. We talk about many different things, but we don’t talk about anything really personal. I get along better with her than Miriam, for sure, but it is not a friendship, because she will not let me read her diary and I won’t let her read mine, which I just started to write today.12

A few days after she’d begun the diary, Ruth wrote about her conflicted feelings concerning the Habonim, and, in particular, her disagreements with Ury Rotschild, the leader of the group. She explained that he had recently left Leipzig on a trip and that since his departure everyone had formed their own cliques, despite their frequent criticism of them. Ruth wanted to leave the Bund. She couldn’t stand their judgments about wearing flashy bourgeois clothes, when clearly these working-class kids coveted them.

Ruth abandoned her diary for the next two and half years. But when she started writing again later at age sixteen in Switzerland, she picked right back up with reflections on why she decided to quit the Habonim in Leipzig in 1937 or thereabouts. Her parents had been pushing her to act more like a middle-class girl, which she had resisted while in the Bund. But the group had distracted her from school, and to her embarrassment, she failed and had to repeat a year.13 Although she got along with the other girls in the Habonim, she developed tensions with the boys, Ury in particular. After going to a Zionist summer camp with the group, likely in the summer of 1937, she had had a big fight with him and finally quit.14 He had accused her of being a conceited bourgeois girl concerned only with clothes and makeup. Ruth knew this flatly wasn’t true; she was an intellectual who cared deeply about class issues, Palestine, and the fate of Jews in Europe. But she couldn’t blindly adhere to any one ideology; her deep independent streak forced her to acknowledge that she would likely be unhappy on a kibbutz. Ruth revealed, “We were brainwashed in the sense that the way of the Bund is the only one, this is the way you have to go or you are losers.”15

She explained the sense of liberation she felt when she quit the Bund and how she could finally go out and do the things she wanted to do without risking criticism from Ury and the others in the group. Her grades and her teachers’ comments on her report cards dramatically improved in 1937. Even though she feared she was drifting into shallowness, she longed for a normal teenage life:

I didn’t have any real girlfriends, because I was already so influenced by the Brith that the typical young girls who only knew about fancy dress, silly movies and books were way too childish for me. But given a little time, I almost turned into the same kind of person. I wore clothing that was more stylish, a bit sporty, not like before in the common dress, but with a degree of elegance and for Leipzig, I stood out. I was an equal with all of the rich girls in my class. What I didn’t yet do was dancing, use makeup or powder. I often went out to a coffee house with my parents, and I was able to have amusing conversations with the young men. In any case, everybody thought I was 17 or 18 years old.16

She looked back at this period with some sense of regret, however: “I was, by the way, until January of 1939, very much on my way to being a superficial, vain, dumb, which means good middle-class society girl, just like Ury Rotschild had predicted.”17

In 1936 Ruth started using a camera and kept a photograph log with captions and dates for every shot she took. The initial captions from 1936 reveal outings with the Bund and names of members in each photo. The captions from later in

1937 and 1938 are only of Ruth, her family, and friends Edith and Esther, often in parks or in the squares of Leipzig. There are a few of Ruth alone, posing like a fashion model in a park, trying on her new liberated identity. Meanwhile, letters of complaint flooded into the Leipzig parks office demanding that Jews should be banned from parks or, at the very least, from sitting on park benches. Leipzigers were especially concerned about Jews in the large Rosental Park, where Ruth had taken many photos.18

As Ruth became a teenager, she grew into a very independent, outspoken person who clashed with her parents at times. She remembered, “I was much closer to my mother. We had a good relationship. I think my dad was a little bit of a control freak, but I think most parents were in those days.”19 After she left Leipzig, she reflected on some prescient advice that her mother had given her but she did not want to hear: “Your two best friends, your two least jealous friends, are your parents, but you will learn that too late.” Ruth lamented, “How rightly she had it! I know today that, when I didn’t speak to her, she also understood me better than anyone.” 20

By the time Ruth was fifteen, she saw herself largely as an adult, free to come and go as she pleased on her own, even at night. Later, when she moved to Seattle to live with her aunt and uncle, she would long for these times in Leipzig when, she claimed, she “did what [she] wanted and went where [she] wanted.”21 The streets of Leipzig were becoming increasingly dangerous for Jews, but Ruth desired to go out and watch what was unfolding, which she described as akin to being a reporter. She said, “In a peculiar way . . . I’m not sure I can explain it, but I guess I always kind of went along feeling it’s better to see than not to. I felt more in control being able to watch. I wasn’t so puzzled. I could see what was going on. But I just sort of hoofed it around.”22 Her Romanian passport didn’t say she was Jewish, which meant she didn’t have to follow the curfews for Jews. She revealed that the police in fact suspected she was Jewish, but when they confronted her, they couldn’t prove it.23 Ruth defiantly roamed the streets on her own, half flaneur and half spy.