That summer Ruth took a class in sociology, which she would later choose as her major. She also took a speech class and honed her persuasive speaking skills on her favorite issue, as she explained in a letter to Naomi Chertoff:
In one of my English classes (where I am the only Jewish student) I have given a number of speeches along Zionist lines, and honest I felt very happy about the reaction I received. Some of the kids actually asked for references, and then gave speeches illuminating one point or another that I had stressed, as f.e. American Oil in the Near East. It really boosted my morale!42
Her new persuasive writing skills had developed so well that she received a prize in August from the American Zionist Youth Commission and the American Zionist Emergency Council for an essay she wrote on Zionism. Her winnings were fifteen dollars in war bonds.43
In her letter to Chertoff, Ruth couldn’t help including a dig at Zeanna Berliner, who had recently quit as president of Junior Hadassah to go on a trip to New York. The vice president of the group refused to take over. “You can see what a mess it all is,” Ruth wrote. A month later, she wrote to Alice Bernstein Jacobson, Junior Hadassah’s executive secretary, to explain that Marian Elyn, “a girl with a level head and her two feet firmly on the ground,” was now president. Ruth believed that with some help (from herself, likely), Marian would do fine and the group would get back on track.44
That fall Ruth enrolled as a full-time student and took six courses, including English Composition, a survey of American literature, Introduction to Philosophy (which she almost failed), Introduction to Psychology, a sociology class titled Problems of Social Insecurity, and a gym class. Still working at Grunbaum’s furniture store through most of the fall, she was overextended and exhausted, even if she had pulled back on her Zionist work. In November, Ruth quit both of her jobs, at Grunbaum’s and the Medina Baby Home. She was now working as the assistant to the director of volunteers at Seattle’s USO and the United Seamen’s Service (USS), both busy organizations that ran service clubs and programs for troops passing through Seattle.
In January 1945 Alice Bernstein Jacobson wrote to both Ruth and Marian Elyn. Despite Ruth’s efforts, she seemed not to have really disengaged herself from Junior Hadassah. Jacobson was at the end of her rope in dealing with Marian and Ruth, both of whom, it seems, had written letters complaining about the lack of interest among the Jewish women of Seattle in joining Junior Hadassah and the lackadaisical attitude of current members. Jacobson chastised them for holding three-hour business meetings, not guiding new members appropriately, and running to the national office about every little incident. She drove her point home: “I want you to study ways and means of helping yourselves. You get the working material through what we send you—but you have to figure out how to put it across so that it will be accepted! You are on the scene; no one can tell you how to do it.”45 She pleaded with them not to be mad at her for her sharp words. In a separate enclosed letter to Ruth alone, Jacobson—acknowledging Ruth’s reality as a restless, outraged refugee—asked for patience regarding Marian: “This young American girl is something special we have to deal with—and she requires much, much patience—And Humor.”
Jacobson’s letter was representative of how other people saw Ruth: she was so driven, so detail oriented, so outspoken, and so judgmental of others she thought of as lazy or indifferent that she exasperated many people around her. However, if Ruth had been a man, she likely would have been admired for her strong leadership. Even though others implied that she should stop caring so much about her Zionist work, she knew that her efforts were making a difference, even if it was a small one, even if it was in “a backwater town” like Seattle. Through her work with the Junior Hadassah, the Seattle Zionist Youth Commission, and the Seattle Emergency Zionist Commission, she had increased membership, educated Seattleites on the plight of European Jews, and raised substantial funds to help start a new homeland for Jews. It may not have brought her much satisfaction, but it was all she could do while waiting out the war in Seattle.
In March 1945 Ruth wrote another letter to Esther Elbaum, telling her how much she was enjoying school. “Burying my head in Pla
to’s Republic, Poli. Science, Abnormal Psychology,” she wrote. “Ha, joke’s on me.” She described how the previous semester she had written a paper for her sociology class that was her “autobiography under the title of ‘social insecurity.’” “The whole department is crazy about it,” she went on. “Got me an A and a lot of gasping how do you do’s from prof.”46 Ruth had no doubt written about her own insecure life, from her status as a noncitizen in the country where she was born, to the persecution of her family, her flight to Switzerland, and her bounces from family to family there. And even though she was safely ensconced in Seattle and living with her privileged relatives, that didn’t necessarily bring her or her family in Europe any security for the future.
The process of writing that essay might have prompted Ruth to think harder about her status in the United States. Once it looked like the war could end soon, she had to plan for her next step. She still had a visa, and her status was “alien.” In February 1945 Ruth had decided to apply for citizenship. On February 21 she was notified to go to the United States Immigration Station and Assay Office and bring two citizen witnesses who had known her for the past five years, her alien registration card, and eight dollars for the filing fee.47 She insisted in hindsight that the ceremony was no big deal: “It was really simple. My uncle was a friend of the judge’s, and we just went to the judge’s chambers, and I swear for five minutes and I was a citizen.” 48 She received her naturalization certificate, declaring her an American citizen, in April.
When asked later if she felt like she was “very German,” Ruth responded, “Hell no. I never felt German. I was a Romanian.” But she explained that she didn’t “feel Romanian” either: “I mean . . . sort of between and betwixt. I had a passport from a country I barely knew. I lived in a country where I didn’t have a passport . . . I was just kind of floating.”49 At some point in her life she began to not just speak and read in English but think in English as well. She admitted, “Now if I want to, if I switch to German, I have to really push a button. I really have to make a switch and force myself. I mean, I can think in German but it’s a conscious effort.”
Ruth claimed that she didn’t feel any different after becoming a citizen: “I felt at home from the day I got there . . . I was fluent in English. I had good friends. I was sort of generally accepted.”50 In that one phrase, “sort of generally accepted,” Ruth glossed over the deep pain and alienation she had felt in Seattle over five long years. At age eighty-seven, she blustered that gaining American citizenship hadn’t meant anything to her, that she had felt at home in Seattle since she had arrived there. For someone who had never been a citizen of any of the three countries where she had lived, achieving citizenship actually must have brought her both relief and a sense of security. She knew she didn’t feel at home living with the Rubinsteins, or even in Seattle really, but she recognized that the United States was her home now and in the near future. There was no way she was going back to Germany, or even Europe, now that it was completely destroyed by war. Although she didn’t agree with US politics and it hadn’t done enough to save other Jews like her, including her parents, she at least had the security of American citizenship. For now, anyway, Ruth had proof on paper that she belonged somewhere.
Greg and I flew to Portland to visit my family and drove up to Seattle for a short research trip. We stayed at a cheap hotel near the university and spent our first night walking around the student neighborhood. Nearly every block was under construction, with cranes looming in the dark above new high-rise condos. Ruth’s “backwater town” had grown to be a huge and very prosperous city.
In the University of Washington library’s special collections, I pored over more of Ruth’s papers, most of which were related to her time as a high school and college student. I flipped through an endless number of add/drop slips, which included a laundry list of excuses Ruth had for why she couldn’t attend class or finish her assignments. I perused her high school yearbook and read some essays and letters she had written. In other collections, I found and read issues of the Herzl-Gram, the newsletter of Ruth’s synagogue, and skimmed oral history transcripts of people Ruth had mentioned in her letters and diaries.
While I was in the archives, Greg explored the city. I gave him an assignment to visit the cemetery where the Rubinsteins were buried, and he took diligent notes and photos for me. We drove to the Montlake neighborhood and found the Rubinsteins’ old house. We walked down the street to see the Montlake Cut, and I imagined Ruth walking down the sidewalk, where I knew she went at night to sit by the water and think. We visited the old Herzl’s Congregation Synagogue, which was now a community health center, and walked inside to see the lobby.
On our last night there, I exited the Suzzallo Library into the dark fog and circled the library complex trying to find Greg and became a bit disoriented among the fir trees. Although she made attempts to conceal it, Ruth struggled to adjust to life in Seattle. It was a completely different environment from the one in which she had been raised, and she found it difficult to shed her past and her personality just to fit in. But, like she always had, she pushed through. After she moved away and reflected, she said Seattle felt like a dream, a fairyland. As I stood there among this mist and these trees, it certainly was.
Part IV:
Don’t Bet on It
SEATTLE AND SAN FRANCISCO, 1945–1947
Chapter 12
The people of Seattle were not certain how to mark the Allies’ official victory over Germany. The announcement had come through the Associated Press on May 7, 1945, but not yet from the government. Leaders of the city had imagined a large celebration in anticipation of the end of the war, but revelry did not fill the streets, neither on that evening nor on the following day.1 Ruth might have listened to President Truman’s address, then gone to her classes at the University of Washington in the morning. She probably went to her job at the USO, where perhaps she celebrated with other volunteers and men stationed in Seattle or on leave. Herzl’s Congregation Synagogue held special services that evening. With Truman’s nod to Mother’s Day in his speech, did she wonder about her own odds of reuniting with her parents? She had read the reports earlier that year of the destruction of Leipzig. Her old neighborhood, the Graphics Quarter, had been bombed, which destroyed not only the buildings but also one million books.2 She had seen in the newspapers the photographs of liberated concentration camps. The news was too stunning for most Americans to fully comprehend, but for someone like Ruth, who had witnessed Kristallnacht and followed closely the reports in Jewish publications of what is now called the Holocaust, it may have been no surprise.
In May, shortly before her twenty-second birthday, she had come down with the measles and had decided to finally quit Junior Hadassah. The angst of watching the organization she had built up now fizzling away under Jewish girls who were indifferent to Zionism was finally too much to bear. She wrote her letter of resignation to Alice Bernstein Jacobson, the executive secretary of Junior Hadassah in New York. Jacobson wrote in reply, “Ruth, I do not think you expect me to reply about your decision to withdraw from unit activities for awhile. You know what is best. On the other hand, I want you to know that we appreciate what you have done for the past few years and we feel sure that your deep concern for the Zionist movement will never waver.”3
In the spring of 1945, Ruth was invited to speak at three forums sponsored by the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee (JAFRC) in order to raise money for refugees from Spain. The title of this program was “A First-Hand Account of Fascism,” and Ruth spoke about her experience in Germany and what her family across Europe was going through.4 At this point she knew that her father and brother-in-law, Salomon Rosner, had been deported to concentration camps, but it is unclear if she knew the specifics of where they were and what exactly happened to them. JAFRC had been founded in the early 1940s by Dr. Edward Barsky to unite various fundraising groups for victims of the Spanish Civil War. Barsky went to Spain in 1937 with the Abraham Linco
ln Brigade and served as a pioneering surgeon, developing methods there that would be used by American army medics in World War II. JAFRC’s funds aided Spanish refugees in France and Mexico with medical care, housing, food, and clothing.5
At the beginning of June, Ruth wrote with a darker tone to her friend Esther Elbaum, apologizing for a hasty telegram that she had sent the day before. Ruth had seen a blind job ad that she suspected was for a position at Hadassah headquarters, where Esther now worked in New York, and she desperately wanted it. Ruth wrote:
You know that I have never really been happy in Seattle, mainly because I want to do some real work, something that is close to me, and it is impossible to find that work in Seattle. Since I have my citizenship papers and am free to travel around without having to be afraid, I feel that if I could just land a job in New York my life would be much better adjusted and run more smoothly. You know that I have a lot of excess energy which I tried to use up by doing Zionist work out here and studying, however neither one of the two alternatives are really satisfactory. The Zionist work is [too] petty and the school is too poor. I don’t get out of my courses and teachers what I want, and would rather live in New York and take a few night courses. Also, by being right in New York I might do more in locating my family than by hibernating on the West Coast.6
Ruth still lived with her uncle Carl and aunt Dora. They went out of town often, but she still longed for a place of her own, which she probably couldn’t afford. She was desperate to get out of Seattle to make her own way in life and end her dependency on the Rubinsteins, even though they had been largely benevolent toward her. Esther responded that Ruth shouldn’t get too “het up” about the job because she’d be working with a woman who was “a driver and a sourpuss.” Esther explained the headaches of working at Hadassah headquarters; a position there likely wouldn’t give her more satisfaction than the work she had done in Seattle. Esther offered to go across the street from her New York office to the American Jewish Congress headquarters to help Ruth search for her parents.7
In the immediate aftermath of the war, American Jews seemed uncertain of how to go about finding relatives who had been left behind in Europe. Who was responsible for coordinating these efforts? For the American and Russian armies, the Red Cross, and Jewish organizations, the first task was to rehabilitate concentration camp survivors, who were eager to leave for Palestine or the United States. Jewish organizations compiled lists of survivors and dispersed the lists throughout the Jewish diaspora. On May 28 an announcement appeared in The Transcript that some survivor lists were already available at the Washington Émigré Bureau. Max Schneider, Ruth’s brother-in-law in Palestine, made the first inquiry for Mendel and Chaja Rappaport.8 Ruth probably contacted Clara and Mirjam to hear how or whether they made it through the war and to inquire if they had heard from their parents. She anxiously followed the news from Palestine, where Jews were fighting the British to allow more displaced people, known as DPs, into the country.
Ruth decided to take a break from school. The end of the war might have brought too much turmoil for her to keep concentrating on her studies, but she continued her job with the USO and the USS. The Seattle branches of these organizations would soon see a flood of soldiers returning home and would be busier than ever. In August the Seattle Times noted that women’s volunteer work for the war was not over yet. Concerning the USO, Aileen Hicks Finley wrote:
More than 1,000 feminine volunteers work at the Seattle U.S.O., according to Mr. William D. Martin, manager. These women man the Snack Bar, Information desk, Hospitality desk, cashier’s desk and program office, where they distribute razor blades, tooth paste and other creature comforts to the men. They run the switchboard every day after 6 o’clock and on Saturday evenings and Sundays. A special group sews buttons on uniforms and mends holes . . . Mr. Martin believes the club will see a sharp increase in patronage with so many service men leaving the Pacific as well as inductees leaving from here for that area as occupation forces.9