A Well-Read Woman

I traveled to Israel with my friend Maya, another archivist at the Library of Congress. This was a trip that for years we had talked about taking. Her mother had grown up in Jerusalem, and her sister now lived there. After meeting up at our hotel in the German Colony, Maya and I walked down King George Street and found the apartment where Ruth had lived with Fred Schneider. We walked on just a few blocks more to a construction site for the new museum dedicated to the history of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. Plastered to the fence were photos of Israel’s founders, including one of Maya’s grandfathers, who served as deputy secretary of the Knesset for many years. Her brother-in-law, a professional tour guide, showed us around the Old City. We walked through the labyrinth of ancient streets, stopping at a hidden garden at Christ Church, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Western Wall. While Maya went up to pray at the wall, I sat down in a chair and wondered if Ruth, the adamant atheist, had ever come here to pray when she later visited Mirjam. We took a day trip to Tel Aviv to meet up with one of Maya’s friends and found another one of Ruth’s apartments on Ben Yehuda Street. We huddled in the rain on the beach, and I realized that the Carlton Tel Aviv Hotel that we walked by must have been the Ritz Hotel, where the PIO office was.

Back in Jerusalem, I searched on my phone for information on a figure in Israel’s history, Avraham Stern, but the link to his Wikipedia site came up as “Website not available.” I got the same message when trying to read a few Washington Post opinion articles. Why couldn’t I read these websites? It dawned on me that this might be my first encounter with state-sponsored censorship, and it left a sour taste in my mouth and a knot in my stomach.

On my last day in Jerusalem, I walked through the quiet streets on Shabbat to the Israel Museum. I made my way slowly through the Valley of the Cross Park, past the olive trees and the Monastery of the Cross. Ruth often came here to escape Fred, sit on a bench, and write in her diary. At the museum, I saw the Dead Sea Scrolls and endless exhibits of art and artifacts of Jewish life. I walked into an exhibit by Ai Weiwei that featured his sculptures and wallp

aper imbued with symbols related to his experiences living under censorship and violent repression in China. Children danced in their socks across a wide, handwoven carpet that Ai had created for another exhibit in Germany, called Soft Ground: an exact replica of the tile floor of the Haus der Kunst, the art museum Hitler created in Munich. As I stared at Weiwei’s wallpaper, which—patterned in a style that mimicked black-and-white Greek pottery—depicted Syrian refugees, I was overcome with grief for those across the world who still lived under terror and those who took flight and tried to survive as stateless refugees. In the dark lobby of the museum’s library, closed for the day, I sat and tried to collect myself, thinking of Ruth’s apt phrase: “It is all such a vicious circle.”

One ordinary workday, in Washington, DC, I had to take back some archival boxes to our storage area deep in the stacks of the library’s Jefferson Building. Contained in the eastern half of the building and under the Main Reading Room are fifteen floors of closed book stacks—mostly in the areas of history and social sciences—and a few storage cages for archival collections, including those for the American Folklife Center. I waved my badge to get through the first locked door, then struggled to push my bulky cart through two more awkwardly placed doors. For whatever reason that day, I looked up at the first aisle of books right in front of me, which I had never noticed before. They were all about Zionism and Israel.

I was in the DS 101–151 range, “Israel (Palestine). The Jews,” a simple subject heading for one of the most fraught problems of the twentieth century. I had browsed this subject heading and its many subdivisions in LC’s online catalog before, when I searched down the electronic rabbit hole for books that might help me better understand Ruth’s experience as a Zionist and temporary resident of Israel. Countless times I had ordered the books through my staff account and waited for them to be delivered to a small office in the Adams Building, five floors above my own office, where I could then check them out.

It was quite another thing altogether to be confronted with these thousands of books in front of me, the result of over a century of people from all over the world arguing about what it means for Jews to have a homeland. Would they be disgusted to know these books were living in perpetuity down here together? I wondered if Ruth ever came down this aisle to browse, to remember what she had seen and felt in Israel, to verify that it had all been real. Did she want to see what new theories, treatises, and screeds had been added lately to these shelves, to marvel at what had become of her “old friends” there? Maybe she never did. Maybe she chose to ignore all the squabbling and shouting in this aisle and sought out new ideas, new books, and new answers to understand her place in the world.

Part VI:

What Else Can One Do in This Mad World?

PARIS, NEW YORK, AND BERKELEY, 1950–1959

Chapter 20

Ruth stopped in Genoa on the way to Paris and had a portrait photograph taken. In it her hair is wrapped in a bun on the top of her head to the left, and she wears a large beaded necklace and matching earrings. Although her eyes are half-closed, she appears genuinely happy. Also in Genoa, an artist named G. Giuliani drew a portrait of Ruth at the Hotel Columbia.1 She is wearing a gray suit and yellow necklace and carries what appears to be a trench coat. The artist drew her in profile and accented her severely pointed shoes. With her glasses and updo, Ruth looks like the serious librarian she would one day become.

Guy Rosner, Ruth’s nephew, was just ten years old in 1950, but his aunt made a big impression on him during her visit. She seemed to be zooming everywhere, not just in Paris but all over the world. She was ambitious, he recalled, just like a shooting star. Ruth stayed with Clara for a few weeks, then got her own place on rue de Marignan for about three months. Many journalists and men supposedly showed up at her apartment, but it is unclear if any of them were Viktor.2 In May 1950 she left for New York and stopped in England on the way.3

When she arrived in New York, she met up with friends she had known in Israel. She moved into an apartment on West 108th Street with Alisa Cerf, her nemesis from the PIO job in Tel Aviv.4 She wrote to a friend in Israel, “About life in the United States in general, I cannot possibly write you, as I would have to produce a book with many more than one volume.”5 But she provided a vivid description of her new life and living situation, which seemed to be similar to her life in Tel Aviv: “We have quite a bit of company . . . Around the corner from us is an apartment full of schlichim, and any time of the day or night they feel like it they drop in here . . . In all[,] I’ve kept away from organizations as much as I could, just going to an occasional party with other Israelis. There’s now an Israeli cabaret in New York . . . Every time I’m there I run into some people from Israel.”6 She explained that she was working for several clients part-time, including an art dealer and men from Israel who were in New York temporarily and needed help with correspondence and other tasks. Of one of these clients she wrote, “I am thus working for an author for whom I did research for a book he published 3 weeks ago, and very much enjoyed that job, as it was more like studying than work.”7

On the same day, in another letter to a different friend, Ruth further explained exactly who the aforementioned author was: “If you read the papers lately you will know the name Max Lowenthal[,] [author of] ‘[T]he Federal Bureau of Investigation.’ I worked on the book all summer and am still with Max part-time.”8 Lowenthal was a Jewish lawyer with a long career in government service: he had clerked for Judge Julian Mack (and married his niece), joined on the Morgenthau mission to Spain in 1917, and worked with Felix Frankfurter on President Wilson’s labor mediation committee. In the 1930s he became one of the major architects of the New Deal, serving as research director of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. He was also the chief counsel for the Interstate Commerce Commission, where he became a close friend of freshman senator Harry Truman when they worked together on the Committee to Investigate Railroad Finances. Lowenthal was an informal adviser to Truman when he later became president, and was also credited as playing a major role in Truman’s support for Israel in 1948.9

For decades Lowenthal had been amassing research on the FBI, which he considered to be a dangerous threat to the civil liberties of anyone tangentially suspected of Communist proclivities. He and his colleagues and friends had been investigated by J. Edgar Hoover’s army of bureaucrats for their real or imagined Communist associations. In September 1950, when Ruth was working for him, Lowenthal was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and questioned about various acquaintances. His son David recalls:

Max’s responses were, in the first place, totally, even maddeningly, disarming. Time and again when asked if he had met so-and-so or knew of links to someone, he said he had no memory of that, but was happy to accept any evidence the committee might have to the contrary. “Anything the committee has that would correct what I say on this or anything else, I will accept. If it is a fact, I will accept it.” This meaningless but conciliatory throwaway line, uttered very slowly ten, twenty, fifty times in a deep, sincere tone, drove his inquisitors round the bend.10

Hoover and his ally, Representative George Dondero, had ordered this questioning of Lowenthal to threaten the publication of his forthcoming book, simply titled The Federal Bureau of Investigation. Lowenthal had trouble finding a publisher, but William Sloane had finally agreed to do it, although the company refused to promote it. Released in November to a storm of mostly negative reviews and editorials, the book was denounced by Dondero, who told Congress that Lowenthal was “a menace to America whose exposure would prove him a Soviet spy more dangerous than any since Benedict Arnold.”11 Also in 1950, Lowenthal’s son John, a Columbia University law student, assisted the defense lawyers for the espionage trial of Alger Hiss (also a friend of Max’s), likely bringing even more suspicion to his father.

In the Max Lowenthal papers at the University of Minnesota, there are hundreds of newspaper and magazine clippings on the publication of Lowenthal’s The Federal Bureau of Investigation and his correspondence with the publisher and friends, including Truman, who had enthusiastically read a draft of the book. Lowenthal sent a note to his publisher in August 1950 with revised galleys of the book, stating that more were coming and that “Miss Rappaport will be able to note on them any new changes in blue pencil.”12 In a response to a friend who had asked Lowenthal how he had managed to complete such an enormously detailed book, he explained:

Some friends sent me clippings from time to time over the years. The reading of official hearings and reports I had to do myself. Probably I missed some recondite items, depending so much on myself. The biggest use of staff, in fact only one, was after the material was in galley proof. I got a number of graduate students to check on every statement in the book, against the sources. Some chapters checked four times. It was eminently worth doing that, though it took rather more energy than I could command at the time.13

Ruth was this staff of one and may have directed this effort to check the sources and revise the book over the summer of 1950. Her initials “rr” are in the corner of many documents dated from the fall of 1950, indicating that she typed both lists of names Lowenthal planned to send the book to and the corresponding letters.14

Lowenthal’s FBI file is over seven thousand pages long, and he was under heavy surveillance in 1950.15 In a personal letter to President Truman, Lowenthal detailed the harassment of himself and his family by a HUAC staff member:

Some day I hope to tell you the stories of the attempts in the past week to stop the book, through the operations of the staff of a House Committee, one of whose Republican members wants to go to the Senate and perhaps fears that the book’s incidental reference to his public record may hurt his chances.

You may be particularly interested in that Committee’s staff visit to my home late at night when my wife was alone and undressed, on an apartment floor all of whose other tenan

ts were obviously away, and how a strange man, carrying the Committee’s credentials[,] “politely” intimidated her into opening the door, tried to scare the daylights out of her, and then came back still later that night to repeat the performance, possibly after phoning Washington and getting instructions. This was followed by a daytime visit to my publishers, a showing of the Committee credentials, and “casual” comments indicating that the publishers might be unwise in publishing a book written by me.16

In all the job applications, résumés, and lists of references Ruth would use later in life, she never mentioned working for Max Lowenthal. But working for him made a deep impression on her at the time. She wrote to her friend Lynn, “I feel what else can one do in this mad world, but to contribute one’s time, effort and limited ability to stave off the course of madness, or at least to try. The consequences are still rather uncertain.”17

Chapter 21

While Ruth lived in New York City, she inquired into going back to school. She knew she could not continue to work as a secretary or typist for the rest of her working life and dreaded performing these mundane tasks that had been designated “women’s work.” She wrote in August 1950 to her friend Esther Elbaum, “If nothing else pops I shall leave N.Y., as I do finally want to finish school. Have what I think are some good ideas for the future . . .”1 She asked about starting in the fall or, if she had been too late in applying, the following spring at University of California, Berkeley, which she had applied to in 1947 before going to Israel.2 She also took an entrance exam for Columbia University and passed. Notified of this on January 26, 1951, she may have already been on her way to Berkeley, where she would be able to transfer her credits from the University of Washington and enter as a sophomore.

If Ruth thought that in Berkeley she would escape the Red Scare, she was sorely mistaken. Robert Gordon Sproul, president of the University of California since 1930, had begun targeting and firing professors and graduate students who openly admitted to Communist Party membership. In 1949 California state senator Jack B. Tenney introduced thirteen bills to root out Communists from state government. The same year, President Sproul forced all University of California faculty and employees to sign a loyalty oath. The faculty senate voted to change the wording of the oath, and after months of negotiations between Sproul, the senate, and the regents, in the summer of 1950 Sproul fired thirty-one faculty members who had refused to sign it. Two years later the California Supreme Court ruled in Tolman v. Underhill that the university had unjustly fired these employees, and they were reinstated.3

When Ruth enrolled at Berkeley in February 1951, the university was beginning to contract from its postwar growth in enrollment, when the GI Bill encouraged returning World War II veterans to attend college tuition-free.4 At twenty-seven, Ruth considered herself to be an older student, a square peg among the silent generation, who had been children during World War II. She had inquired about living at Berkeley’s International House but had either missed an application deadline or decided instead to live off campus.5