A Well-Read Woman

As you know, a short time ago we offered to provide a home and a family for an emigrant child. We thought to take in a poor person for whom we could replace what their homeland had taken, to be their father and mother, to give them something and to be someone for them.

You then sent us Miss Ruth Rappaport, daughter of rich Jews, spoiled and self-important, with a personality that just doesn’t fit in with our plain-thinking family. I don’t

want to criticize Miss Rappaport at all, as she is just a product of her upbringing and surroundings, but it is nevertheless difficult for us to bring about any type of assimilation, which very much goes against her specific personality.

In short, it is far from what we expected and hoped for, and we ask you to organize an exchange. If you do not have a sweet-natured, poor girl, either from Sudetenland or Germany, we would rather pass on a German addition to the family and open our home to a Swiss girl . . . You can quietly and calmly change the situation. Miss Ruth does not know anything about this letter and we will also not allow her to find out.2

Dr. Keller wrote back to him a few days later, apologetically explaining her own feelings about Ruth:

We are very sorry you were so disappointed with Ruth Rappaport and had so much frustration. We thank you for trying so hard. We can understand your frustrations as we also found her very arrogant and stuck-up. In the last interview we felt this, but she talks very nice about you. We hope to find a place for her soon. We only have Jewish children so cannot supply you with another girl. All of the Christian children have been placed.3

But Mr. Röschard felt guilty about Ruth and didn’t want to appear so eager to cast her aside. He decided to give it more time and notified Dr. Keller, “She is too grown-up for her age. We will try it once more and see if we can work things out.”4

Ruth had been under the impression that her relationship with the Röschards would be more like that of an employer and employee. She wanted to retain her independence and come and go as she pleased. Immigrants in Switzerland were forbidden from working for pay, so Ruth imagined she would help with household chores in exchange for room and board. It appears that Ruth was not able to attend a free public school in Zurich.5 She explained to her American uncle Carl Rubinstein in a letter written in her awkward English, “I am not allowed to earn money in Switzerland, and my parents are forbidden to send me any . . . Every day I spend in Switzerland is lost time for me . . . If there were not the new law that also parents, whose children are abroad and want to go to school, are forbidden to send money out from Germany, I would go to school here. So I have no opportunity.”6

She had to fill her days with something. Ruth went out frequently to socialize with other teenage and young adult members of the Hashomer Hatzair, a Zionist youth group that she had recently joined. Months later, she revealed that, in her opinion, she had worked hard for the Röschards and they had been generous to her. She had no complaints about the family or living with them.7 If she realized that Mr. Röschard found her behavior to be intolerable, she never indicated it in her diary. While living with the Röschards, Ruth inquired to several organizations in Germany and England about the possibility of joining one of the Kindertransport trains to England, but she was ineligible for various reasons. Near the end of January 1939, she was sent to a new family in Zurich, the Herzogs.

Kurt and Doris Herzog had two children, including a toddler daughter named Ursi.8 Ruth was responsible for caring for them to some extent, and she took photos of herself and Ursi out on walks around Zurich. After living with them for about three months, she compared them to the Röschards, angrily writing in her diary that although they were comfortably middle class, the Herzogs were stingy.9 She explained her difficulty playing the role expected of her:

On the other hand, supposedly the Herzogs wanted to have someone for whom they could do good, who would completely belong to the family, talk about everything with them, and who feels at home with them. And I didn’t want that. 1. Nobody owes me anything here, 2. If I really was the way they are accusing me that I am not, then surely they would have said that I am demanding, 3. They never were very warm towards me, and I have always tried to avoid being any bother to them, 4. I did not know that they wanted to have a relationship with me, like for instance, a child with her parents, or with an uncle and aunt, 5. We are so different in our views and with everything, that surely would not have worked, 6. I always thought they were not that interested in me. 10

Ruth also wrote about the feelings welling deep inside that she could never express to anyone:

It may be my mistake that I come across so cold. As much as I can talk about meaningless stuff with all people in a superficial way, when it comes to my own affairs, I am totally closed up. Even if I speak about those things with someone else, I always have such a cold and superficial tone, as though I am not even speaking about myself. It is not meant for me that I, with warmth, would repeat the things I feel, neither with my parents nor with anybody else. And it is not even theatrics what I feel say or do. Whereas people see me on the outside as hard-working, strong, etc., and they think that I know no sadness, at times I feel bitterly miserable.11

At the end of April, Ruth’s father came to Zurich, and shortly after, her mother visited for a few days. They stayed with Ruth at the Herzogs’, and she worried how this would play out. Had she given everyone in Zurich the wrong impression of her parents? She was particularly embarrassed by her mother’s brazenness in asking other families to financially support Ruth. She noted, “My parents really don’t have very much anymore. I actually feel sorry for them. They have worked very hard their whole lives and now they have nothing to show for it.”12 But she was thrilled to see her father again: “Papa is here now, and I am so happy, and if it wasn’t the fact that it is Germany, I would have for sure have gone back home, but . . .”13 She trailed off, not needing to explain the obvious.

Even though Ruth had expressed that it wasn’t allowed, Mendel had been sending her money periodically. She also received small sums from Dr. Keller and a hundred francs a month from her uncle Carl Rubinstein in Seattle. When Kurt Herzog discovered that Ruth was receiving money, he informed her that since she “didn’t have the need anymore,” she couldn’t stay with them any longer. She had already concluded, “The longer I am with the Herzogs, the more obvious it becomes how totally different we are . . . It already bothers me enough that I must be a burden to strangers, and needless to say when I am told about it constantly. I know that I owe the Herzogs many thanks, but the way they behave now is really not very nice. They are petty people.”14

Ruth was not an easy person to live with. Although she tried to be considerate, something in her personality turned off both the Röschards and the Herzogs. By this point in her life, she was strong-willed and spoke her mind. She explained what her ideal living situation would be in Zurich: “In any case, I just want to go where I can work and be with people who don’t just want to do something good, but where I have a real business relationship, working ½ day and the rest of the time I am free. The nicest thing would be if I could take a room somewhere and study something, but that is just not possible.”15 Ultimately, she just wanted to be treated as an adult.

Soon she would be living with a Jewish family, the Langers, who had a daughter near Ruth’s age, Rose, whom she met through the Hashomer Hatzair. By July, she would be shuffled to the Jakobowitch family, who had two daughters with whom Ruth would attend a Zionist camp. Ruth’s father wrote to her in July explaining that he was looking into moving her to Lugano, Italy. She wearily wrote in her diary that she had packed her bags eleven times since she came to Zurich and was loath to move to a new place again. She stayed with the Jakobowitch family until she left for the United States in October, complaining in her diary only occasionally about the antics of their daughter Gerda. Like other Jewish refugee children, Ruth had eventually learned to act as grateful toward her foster parents as she could, despite her growing bitterness.

Chapter 7

Out of school for a full year, Ruth had more free time than she knew what to do with while she waited for her visa to the United States. She helped out with housework daily for her foster families and occasionally studied English. She was annoyed with herself for wasting time that she should have spent preparing for her move, but she had trouble focusing. As she would for the rest of her life, Ruth wavered between her dual desires to, on the one hand, go out, socialize, and

be frivolous, and, on the other, to focus on her solitary intellectual pursuits. She could now read openly all the books that she had to be careful to hide in Leipzig. Regardless of where she read them, openly or in secret, Ruth knew that reading risqué or radical books was a marker of her own sophistication.1 She also seems to have started smoking, another habit she surely thought was sophisticated. In a letter to her cousin Rose, Carl’s daughter in Seattle, she alluded to this, explaining a photograph she had sent: “The last one, with the cigarette, was only a joke, because I was imitating a lady, and in truth I am an ‘ANTI SMOKER.’”2

Now she finally had the chance to openly pursue any topic that interested her, no matter how controversial. But she was disgusted with the fact that she was just not motivated and wasted time during the day taking photographs with her friend Teddie. She chastised herself in her diary but also partially blamed the political circumstances she was mired in:

Because of my surroundings in the last two years and because of the situation in Germany, I have become what I have never wanted to become, a person without an inner life, which means I don’t engage in anything intellectual, and I have no interest in the world, movies, etc. Like I already said, I am totally blah. That will definitely need to change completely now.3

An omnivorous reader, Ruth read whatever she could get her hands on: books owned by her foster families, books borrowed from her new friends, books she might have bought in Zurich’s plentiful bookstores, and books available at libraries, including the Zurich Central Library or possibly a synagogue library. Although she claimed at the time she didn’t do “anything intellectual,” decades later, when applying to library school, Ruth thought about this time in her life differently. She wrote, “I can truthfully say that the most memorable point of my stay in Switzerland was access to libraries and books which opened for me a whole world of new ideas that had been strictly taboo in Germany.”4

While the Zurich Central Library would have had a wide selection of books, newspapers, and magazines, it was not what we think of as a typical public library today, especially when it comes to children. First, there was no children’s or young adult department. Children younger than eighteen were not allowed to check out books. Only citizens had borrowing privileges, so Ruth would not have been able to check books out even if she were older than eighteen, although her foster parents or the parents of friends could have done so for her. Anyone was allowed to visit the library and read whatever he or she wished.5 It was located in the Rathaus Quarter, the oldest part of Zurich. Due to the narrow cobblestone streets dating to the Middle Ages, it is still largely cut off from car traffic. Built in 1914 after a merger of several small libraries, the sturdy stone building now serves as both the city’s public library and the main library of the University of Zurich.

Ruth wandered the streets of Zurich during the day, waiting to meet up with friends after they got out of school. She could have passed the time in bookstores, shops, and cafés, but only at the public library was she not obligated to buy anything. She could browse for hours, read German newspapers—including, probably, her hometown Leipzig newspaper—write in her diary, or write letters to her friends and parents. In hindsight, it didn’t matter what exactly she read at that library. What mattered was the feeling it gave her: a sense of peace and safety and the opportunity to read, or not read, whatever she wanted to without judgment or regulation. Ruth was just one of many exiles who found refuge at Zurich’s public library. Many Communists and radicals from around Europe came to Zurich during times of crisis in their own countries. Vladimir Lenin lived just a few blocks from the library in 1917 and spent most of every weekday reading and working there.6

When her father visited, she felt guilty for spending time with him in a carefree way:

I spent my time in the exact manner that is frowned upon in the Bund, had invitations for dinner with Papi, gossiped and played cards. As a newcomer to the group, I can even openly talk about this but deep inside I am ashamed of myself. I have become so completely without any care and energy, that it is a total shame. I was disgustingly bored, but in the Bund, if we don’t have Sichot [discussions] about books or problems, then I am just as bored. This shows quite definitely that I stand for nothing, not in society nor in the Bund.7

Like the Habonim in Leipzig, the Hashomer Hatzair would provide Ruth a social circle to discuss her intellectual, religious, and class questions. And like the Habonim, the Hashomer Hatzair would not live up to Ruth’s expectations of finding “true chaverim.” She was continually let down by this group of young Jews, who appeared to her more and more superficial and self-absorbed over the year she lived there. Most of all, she was disappointed with the group’s leader, Roger Garfunkel. It wasn’t just that he had rebuffed her after meeting him in Saint Moritz and that she was nursing an unrequited crush. She came to understand that he was a hypocrite, a comfortably middle-class person who encouraged others to practice hard physical labor in preparation for a new life in Palestine but didn’t seem to have any desire to do this work or move there himself.8

Ruth remembered the activities of the Hashomer Hatzair in her oral history and described the group’s trip to the castle at Elgg in April 1939:

I dug potatoes. I harvested potatoes. And one of the other strange things in all this mishmash was, there was some really large Swiss corporations. And they owned acreage in which they grew stuff. And when I went to Switzerland I volunteered to dig up potatoes for the Swiss chemical companies. These chemical companies owned farmland and they actually cultivated them, and we volunteered to dig up potatoes for them, in exchange for which we got to live in a Swiss castle.9