Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
1984 by George Orwell
Animal Farm by George Orwell
The Law of Civilization and Decay by Brooks Adams
Toulouse-Lautrec by Gerstle Mack
One Little Boy by Dorothy W. B
aruch13
This remarkable list offers a window into Ruth’s reading life that she only occasionally mentioned in the letters and diaries she left behind. If she truly read every book on this list over six months, she would have completed one about every three days. The list reflects Ruth’s wide-ranging nonfiction interests: Israel and the Middle East, Asia, sociology, philosophy, psychology, history, art, and drama. She had included Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex on her draft of the list but for some unknown reason left it off the final version. The fiction she read was challenging; some of the titles written in the mid-twentieth century are now considered classics. Most of them addressed social issues she was concerned about: censorship, race, gender and sexuality, religious fanaticism, and alienation. Twenty years after she read banned books as a teenager in Germany, she continued to read books by those banned authors, including Hemingway, Kafka, Zweig, Thomas Mann, and Heinrich Mann.
Chapter 23
The person deciding Ruth’s fate concerning her admission to library school was J. Periam Danton, known as Perry, the chair of Berkeley’s School of Librarianship. The son of two American German teachers, Danton had grown up in China. Michael Buckland wrote in his introduction to Danton’s oral history at the University of California Archives, “His undergraduate experience was also highly untypical because he accepted an invitation to join his father in Leipzig for the academic year 1925–26 . . . Leipzig was still in the twilight of its greatness, not yet undermined by Nazism and by the devastation of the Second World War . . . To spend a year in Leipzig was, predictably, a powerful experience. German and Austrian scholarship and librarianship became central to his interests.”1 If he indeed read Ruth’s admissions essay, perhaps her opening paragraph would have sparked an interest in her. Whether they ever knew about each other’s backgrounds in Leipzig remains a speculation.
Danton had earned his undergraduate degree in librarianship at Columbia University and his PhD in library science at the University of Chicago. With experience at the New York Public Library, the University of Chicago Library, the Colby College Library, and the Temple University Library, he was recruited as dean of Berkeley’s School of Librarianship in 1946. His ambitions were to take charge of a small and quasi-professional program with only three professors (including himself) and develop it into a much bigger school that would include a rigorous master’s degree and a PhD program.2
In 1954 Danton laid out his plans for the program in an article in California Libraries. He noted the school was not a place for future librarians to learn the lower-level tasks often delegated to technicians or assistants, a pedagogy he described as akin to teaching doctors how to empty bedpans. He revealed his frustration with library schools’ second-class status:
A school of the kind we are describing is not a refuge for the individual who has been patently unsuccessful elsewhere—since, in general, the attributes of success have a certain commonness—for the person who seeks escape from the maddening [sic] crowd, for those with “difficult” personalities (you know the kind: “Of course, he hasn’t the qualities to make a good teacher but I think he’d be a fine librarian.”) or for those whose intellectual ability or what you will, is sub-normal.3
He argued that Berkeley should recruit men and women with “the best possible personal and intellectual qualifications” and that the school would focus on the theory, practice, and professional ethics of librarianship. He wrote that schools of librarianship should generally not accept candidates over age thirty-five (Ruth was thirty-four when she applied), because this age apparently revealed that the candidate had failed at other careers. He noted the difficulties of recruiting faculty to library schools: a miniscule number of people had PhDs in the field, and it was difficult to recruit excellent librarians to teach when they would rather advance in library administration.4
Despite his mostly admirable ambitions, Danton was not especially well liked during his long tenure at Berkeley. Fred Mosher, a library school professor who was hired in 1950, revealed in his oral history that Danton had divorced his wife to marry the recently divorced wife of the university’s assistant librarian, causing a scandal and rift among the faculty and staff of the library and School of Librarianship.5 In his memoir, No Silence! A Library Life, William Eshelman recalled that when he attended Berkeley’s School of Librarianship in the early 1950s, the students referred to the school as “Danton’s Inferno.”6 Mosher candidly summed up the faculty and students’ attitudes toward Danton:
My impression and the impression of the faculty I admired most was that he was considered to be—that he knew how to keep the paperwork going, but that his relationships with students and his relationship with many of the faculty was not very good. I don’t know how to phrase it. It seemed to me that he was interested mainly in himself and not in the school or the students, and that he made many judgments that were against the interests of the students, especially, because of his own personal feelings.7
It appears that Danton was not impressed with Ruth. In a recommendation form he later filled out for her first job as a librarian, he wrote—after begrudgingly giving her middle-to-high rankings in the categories and admitting she “has a good mind and is a hard worker”—“Miss R. is a compulsive talker, without any terminal facilities, completely self-centered, not receptive to criticism, was a disturbing force in her class; uninterested in the needs or rights of others.”8 Like other students, Ruth did not get along well with Danton. They both seem to have had strong personalities, and Ruth was unwilling to back down when expressing her opinions and ideas. Perhaps Ruth was truly difficult in class and bulldozed over her classmates in discussions; perhaps Danton was so turned off by an opinionated Jewish woman that he exaggerated this evaluation.
Chapter 24
In the fall of 1957, Ruth became occupied by another matter that surely distracted her from her library school classes. Friends of hers who were also displaced European Jews had begun to apply for restitution, and she decided that she should too. She wrote the following letter to the United Restitution Organization (URO) in November:
Gentlemen:
After contacting the San Francisco [Émigré] Committee, I was advised to get in touch with your organization concerning the following matter.
I was born and raised in Germany, and as so many others, had to leave and resettle somewhere else. Both my parents remained in Germany and died in concentration camps. As far as I know, my sister, living in Israel[,] is taking the required steps for compensation, etc. concerning both of us as heirs. However, I have been told that independently of this claim I am entitled to personal compensation for my own resettlement, loss of schooling while waiting for an American visa in Switzerland (while legally of school age), etc. Could you please mail me whatever forms are necessary for me to fill out and whatever other pertinent information I should have[?] Is it correct that all such claims must be initiated before December 31, 1957?
Thanking you for whatever assistance you can give me, I remain,
Ruth Rappaport1
The United Restitution Organization was founded in 1948 as an international legal-aid society to assist Jews around the world with their claims for compensation from the German government. In 1945 the Allies had made a commitment to pursue justice for Jewish victims; the next few years resulted in enormous confusion over certain types of claims and unclaimed property. The four new zones controlled by each of the Allied powers had different regulations concerning restitution. After the unification of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in 1948, the new chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, made a speech to the German parliament in 1951 declaring the new country’s responsibility to alleviate the suffering of Jews the Nazis had persecuted. A series of laws passed in the 1950s and ’60s, officially called the Bundesentschädigungsgesetz, or BEG, dictated the types of claims and rules for eligibility. The URO established offices around the world, primarily run by German Jewish lawyers, and had a total staff of around twelve hundred people to assist applicants with the complicated forms and interpreting the responses and settlements from the FRG.2
Edith Dosmar of the URO’s New York office explained to Ruth that she could file for compensation for her parents’ deaths, along with Mirjam’s claims for the same. Ruth could also apply for a loss-of-education claim and for the money she and her family had spent on her travel expenses to the United States. She instructed Ruth to write a curriculum vitae explaining her education, career goals, and how the Nazi regime had interrupted them.3
Ruth set to work gathering the necessary documentation she would have to submit. She wrote out her curriculum vitae, detailing the events in her childhood and young adulthood related to leaving Germany and the loss of her education. She explained how no one paid for her college education, which she had to complete in fits and starts across eighteen years while supporting herself (she made no mention of her inheritance from her uncle Carl, however). She enclosed the documentation in her letter back to Dosmar, in which she stated that she was unclear if she had written it correctly. She also expressed her frustration that she knew so little about her parents’ financial and business dealings and what had happened to them after she had left for the US. She asked how to go about obtaining the necessary proof for these matters with her application. Dosmar instructed Ruth to copy her certificate from the girls’ high school she had been admitted to in Leipzig, any documentation about travel expenses, the letter notifying her of her parents’ deaths, and proof of tuition paid to the University of Washington and the University of California. Ruth mailed all this documentation in February 1958, along with more questions that she had about the process and various claims. In September she received a notification that her application had been accepted for processing in Hanover.4 Later in the fall she heard back that the URO needed proof of her and her parents’ residency in Leipzig.5 The U
RO received it at the beginning of 1959. In June of that year, Ruth received a check for 5,000 deutsche marks, or about $9,300 in 2018 dollars, as compensation for her loss of education.6 However, her claim for the deaths of her parents was not approved because at the time of their deaths Ruth was, at age twenty-one, considered an adult.7 For years Ruth and Mirjam continued to appeal this decision. In one letter to Ruth in 1962, the URO explained that since Mendel had not been deported outside of Germany, he and his descendants were not eligible for compensation that was given only to those deported beyond the country’s borders.8 A letter that she received later, regarding her mother, simply stated with no explanation, “There are clearly no claims here.”9
While Ruth lived overseas in the early 1960s, she missed many pieces of correspondence from the URO that never got to her until 1964. In a long letter back to the organization, she answered point by point many pending questions from the URO and expressed her frustration with the process: “Frankly, I am at a complete loss to understand either what further documentary proof is expected of me, [or] the decisions reached concerning my various claims.”10 She corrected the mistakes in the previous correspondence: she had never been on a Kindertransport to England nor received financial help from a Jewish organization in Switzerland.11 She concluded this letter:
As to the other losses, it is obvious, having left as a child of 15, I do not know the intricate details of my parents’ financial affairs. I do know however, that at one time there was a fair income on the side of my father in the fur trade and on the part of my mother for managing the restaurant for the “Oesterreischisches Vaterlandsheim.” There has also been considerable property (furniture, silver, household goods, etc.) as well as a complete dowry for me. Apparently all this was confiscated at the time of my parents’ deportation if not before.12