A Well-Read Woman

So it wasn’t just a “practical” decision after all; Ruth clearly had a sense of idealism when it came to her decision to pursue librarianship. She was willing to reveal her childhood in Nazi Germany to the faculty of Berkeley’s library school and use it to boost her chances of admission when her transcript consisted of mostly Bs and Cs. Ruth wanted to emphasize that she was not just another library school applicant who wanted to enter the profession because she liked to read or because she had failed at another career. Books and libraries held a deep meaning for her, and she had the foresight to know that being a librarian didn’t mean that you read books all day, a common misperception of the profession. She recognized that it meant interacting with people who sought information and were beholden to its gatekeepers. Ruth knew that the organization of libraries was the key to their success. Her battles in Israel over the sloppiness of the photograph archive were ample training to prepare her for work as a librarian.

In the same folder as this admissions essay (an original folder that Ruth had labeled “Graduate School Records”) was a handwritten draft list of books and a typed final version titled “Books Read over Last Six-Month Period.” Perhaps another part of her library school application or part of an assignment in one of her library school classes, it is a list of sixty-four titles:

Anthology of Japanese Literature by Donald Keene

The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki

The Story Bag: A Collection of Korean Folktales by Kim So-un

The Wall by John Hersey

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

Selected Stories of Franz Kafka

Dirty Hands by Jean-Paul Sartre

The Respectable Prostitute by Jean-Paul Sartre

Abel Sanchez by Miguel de Unamuno

Mondo Piccolo: Don Camillo by Giovannino Guareschi

The Colors of the Day by Romain Gary

A Literary Chronicle, 1920–1950 by Edmund Wilson

The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

Lafcadio’s Adventures by André Gide

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

Across the River and into the Trees by Ernest Hemingway

Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan

Ten North Frederick by John O’Hara

Farmers Hotel by John O’Hara

Bread and Wine by Ignazio Silone

The Man Who Died by D. H. Lawrence

The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

The Short Reign of Pippin IV by John Steinbeck

Disappearance by Philip Wylie

Devils of Loudun by Aldous Huxley

The Bad Seed by William March

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller