A Well-Read Woman

Part IX:

Come Sit Awhile

WASHINGTON, DC, 1993–2010

Chapter 34

As a librarian and reader, I can’t resist a good library book sale. The Federation of Friends of the DC Public Library chapters at both the Southeast Neighborhood Library and Northeast Neighborhood Library on Capitol Hill host used book sales every few months. When I started writing about Ruth, my browsing and buying at these sales and bookstores swerved toward any topic, no matter how tangential, related to her life and the historical period she lived through. At one of these sales at the Northeast Neighborhood Library, I approached the cashier with a huge stack of books on Nazi Germany, Judaism, and the Vietnam War. He seemed amused by my purchases: “You must really like history,” he said. He eventually got it out of me that I was writing a book and asked what it was about. I explained it was about a woman named Ruth Rappaport, who had lived in this neighborhood for many years. His eyes lit up and he said, “Ruth! Oh, I knew Ruth.” Over many years Tom Fenske had run into her at meetings of the Friends of the Northeast Library and the Stanton Park Neighborhood Association. Time and again I was reminded that it seemed like everyone in this neighborhood had known Ruth and that everyone had a story about her.

After Ruth retired, she found it easy to stay in touch with her coworkers and friends from the Library of Congress. Because she lived just two blocks away, they could easily stop by her house, and she ran into them while walking near the library. She recalled that they came by to “pick her brains” and ask her advice related to work, especially about how to supervise difficult employees.1 She had tried to start an official Library of Congress group for retirees to meet and stay in touch, but library administrators shot down the idea.2

Ruth had joined many organizations as soon as she moved to Washington, but one issue in particular became important to her as she aged: preserving historic buildings and the Capitol Hill neighborhood. In 1976 she had joined DC’s commission to celebrate the American bicentennial, and she had also helped preserve the Sewall-Belmont House (now the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument), a historic building and museum—across the street from the Capitol—dedicated to the history of the women’s suffrage movement. Also in the 1970s she protested the renovation of Union Station, an ill-thought plan that gutted the station to build a visitors’ center in time for the American bicentennial and that moved the Amtrak station to an ugly nearby building. The renovation was so unpopular that it was redone in the 1980s, bringing back its function as a train station and adding many new shops and restaurants. Ruth joined the Capitol Hill Restoration Society, an organization founded in 1955 that successfully worked toward the goal of getting the neighborhood designated a historic district and placed onto the National Register of Historic Places.

Raymond Gamble was a deacon and custodian at the Faith Tabernacle Church, just a few doors down from Ruth’s house. Ruth approached him about hiring him to mow her lawn. He agreed and the two became friends. Ruth often enlisted his help in her disputes with neighbors about following the rules set by the DC Historic Preservation Review Board, which governed what homeowners in historic districts could do concerning renovating the exterior of their homes and landscaping. Ruth often spotted violations of these codes, and she badgered Raymond to help her report them to the authorities.3 She earned a reputation as a busybody, nosing her way into neighborhood squabbles and eager to enforce preservation rules that, to some new neighbors, were a bureaucratic headache.

She also joined causes that impacted her quality of life, particularly as a carless resident of Capitol Hill. Ruth was appointed to the advisory commission on Eastern Market, the historic food market and flea market at Seventh and C Street SE that was easily walkable from her house. She also joined an effort to change the laws regarding how DC cabs charged customers. The move would switch cars from a zone-to-zone system to time-and-distance meters that were used in other major cities.4 The meters were more beneficial, financially, to customers who used cabs to travel short distances, much like Ruth did. Even though she supported public transportation and walkability, she was irritated when bus routes were diverted around the Capitol in 2004 by new security checkpoints built around the complex. Several bus lines now went by her house on Third Street, which was not a thoroughfare that could easily handle bus traffic. Her complaints about the pollution and noise were quoted in the Washington Post, and soon enough the routes were changed.5 She could get back to reading and visiting on her front porch in peace, one of her favorite activities in retirement. One neighbor later praised the efforts of Ruth and another woman in the neighborhood, Margot Kelley, and noted that they were an incredible team known for getting things done to help their community.6

Sig Cohen started a group for Jews on Capitol Hill because there was no synagogue in the neighborhood. He invited his Jewish friends to a seder and encouraged them to invite other Jews who lived nearby. This group later officially organized as the Hill Havurah. Ruth heard about it and started coming in its early days, sometime after the year 2000. By then she was already in somewhat poor health and needed assistance getting to the group’s meetings and events. Ruth “was a presence,” Cohen said. “You could feel her presence . . . and was fascinating to talk with . . . She embodied the word ‘chutzpah.’” Laurie Solnik, another leader of the group, met Ruth through the Hill Havurah. She said Ruth was very wary of institutional Judaism and warned them not to become too big or to become a synagogue (the organization is led by lay members). She remembered that Ruth said she had no use for established synagogues or the patriarchy of the rabbinate.7

Ruth summed up her involvement in the Capitol Hill community in an email to Cohen:

Surely even you will admit that by comparison, serving on the DC Bicentennial Assembly, helping to keep Sewall-Belmont House as a historic structure, being active on the Eastern Market in its various incarnations

, Stanton Park Neighborhood Assoc., CH Restoration Society, AFSCME Local 2910 and AFSCME Council 26, Havurah and CHV [Capitol Hill Village] are pretty tame and lame activities! I wonder if to some extent my DC activities benefited me more by keeping me active and involved than I contributed to their success. Oh I guess I did some good…..I think my fight against the “hole in the ground” at Union Station was commendable. I think my efforts at residential parking enforcement have proven worthwhile, and lastly, but NOT LEAST, it looks like I’m on the winning side of the cab zone-vs-meter controversy. I spent a lot of time these past few months lobbying city council members for meters….had interesting conversations and emails with Ward 6 member, and Jim Graham, and Carol Schwarz…..years ago, when she ran for mayor, I started the “Democrats for Carol” movement.

I guess to some extent staying involved helps me as much or more than I help the causes I’m involved with.8

Although Ruth seemed to be firmly rooted in Washington once she got her job at LC and bought a home, she still traveled regularly and sated her wanderlust with at least a few overseas trips. In 1983 she took two separate trips to Spain and the British Isles, and in 1984 she traveled to China. She wrote a long, travelogue-style letter to friends, detailing China’s customs, clothing, food, and historic sites.9 At some point before the reunification of Germany in 1990, one of Ruth’s friends convinced her to take a trip back to the country of her childhood, despite her deep misgivings.

Her friend Alice was working as a teacher in Frankfurt at a school for American children. Ruth decided it would be a decent place to visit, because she could do many day trips by train from there. As she put it, “There’s nothing to do in Frankfurt except have coffee at a coffeehouse . . . And that takes care of Frankfurt.” She took boat trips up and down the Rhine River, and visited smaller towns such as Otzberg. She and Alice rented a car and drove along the Danube River to Vienna and Budapest. But due to the fact that Leipzig was still under Communist control in East Germany, Ruth was unable to go back to her childhood home.

She explained her feelings about visiting Germany: “I went back with a horrendous amount of reluctance. I didn’t think I was ever going to go back . . . I went back under, really, duress by a friend.”10 Since Alice didn’t speak German, Ruth made their travel plans and conversed with Germans in restaurants and hotels. Although it was very subtle, Ruth noticed something distinct in how these Germans treated her:

And the Germans are very polite. And when we sat and I would order the meal in German, and inevitably they wouldn’t say, “who are you, or where are you from or what is your background?” What I was getting was, “for an American you are speaking excellent German.” Now this is a whole bunch of bullshit, because I do not speak excellent German. I speak a teenage German. I speak a slang German. Well, not really, just semi-slang. And it was the German way of trying to find who, what I am, without being too inquisitive.11

These were probably Germans who, like her, had been children during World War II. They had grown up with the heavy burden of the Holocaust. And while they may have wanted to ask Ruth directly if she was Jewish, where she was from, or what she had gone through, they knew they couldn’t cross this boundary. As Ruth put it, “They were too polite to do too much fishing, but they knew there was a story. And so without being too obviously curious, they accepted the story.”

Ruth was asked if she had any desire to go back to Leipzig in the future, perhaps a rhetorical question because it was obvious she was near the end of her life. She bluntly answered, “Not really. It’s all so far—I mean, I’ve outgrown Leipzig.”12

In the spring of 1996, Ruth traveled to Israel for two months, her first time back in the country since 1949.13 On this trip, she went to Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center. It was no doubt a moving experience for her, as she later explained that she felt more of a connection to this museum and memorial site than she did to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which opened in 1993 (it is unclear when exactly she first visited the USHMM).14 She visited her sister Mirjam, who now lived in Beersheba. The two sisters had last seen each other in 1981, when Mirjam came to DC for a visit; now Ruth noticed that, at eighty-six, Mirjam was losing her short-term memory. She wrote in a statement concerning Mirjam’s mental fitness at this point in her life, “In fact, Mirjam had said to me she would rather kill herself than leave her apartment to live in an old age home if the time came that she could not live alone anymore.”15 In 1997 Ruth wrote a letter to her cousin Rosel, expressing her sympathy that Rosel had recently moved into a retirement home. She acknowledged, “I realize that is something I will need to give some thought to also[,] some time in the not too distant future, though at the moment I’m avoiding giving it serious thought.”16 Like Mirjam, Ruth thought of herself as fiercely independent, and as she approached old age herself, she began to take steps to ensure she could remain in her own home.

Chapter 35

In 1987, when Ruth was sixty-four years old, she became the chair of LC’s Employee Health Assistance Joint Advisory Committee. In this capacity, she started an eldercare discussion group for LC employees. In 1988 Ruth received an award from Dr. Billington for her efforts to bring in guest speakers and gather information for the group.1 The discussions focused on caregivers who were helping elderly parents or relatives, and Ruth learned about which services were available and kept these in mind as she aged. She relied on a network of friends and neighbors who checked in on her and helped with errands and chores. Ruth hired Peter Bartis’s partner and future husband, Ben, to take care of her yard and do odd jobs around the house. In 2006 a group of Capitol Hill residents started the organization Capitol Hill Village, modeled on Beacon Hill Village, which helped seniors stay in their own homes, a concept known as “aging-in-place.” Members paid an annual fee to access services such as social events and senior clubs and to get help with errands and chores from volunteers.2 Ruth was one of the group’s first members.

As Ruth aged, she seemed to embody the stereotypes about older single women, especially librarians. Although she had long found cats a nuisance, she adopted two of them, Sparky and, later, Murphy. Ruth initially fostered Sparky, a Maine coon cat that had belonged to a friend who couldn’t keep him because he didn’t get along with another pet. Although Ruth was reluctant to take him, eventually she adopted and became very fond of him.3 After Sparky passed away, Ruth adopted Murphy. A friend who helped her with the process noted that Ruth felt guilty for initially overlooking Murphy because he was an older cat. She dreaded people overlooking her for the same reason.4 Ruth may have seemed like a “crazy cat lady,” but Sparky and Murphy gave her the companionship she needed as she aged and continued to live alone.

Since at least her early adulthood, Ruth had issues with messiness and an inability to throw things away, and it seemed to get worse as she got older. Everyone who came to her house noted the piles of stuff everywhere; it got so bad after she retired that visitors noted it was difficult to walk through some rooms of the house. She stockpiled food and kept an overflow of canned goods in her first-floor bathroom and in the basement. She asked friends and neighbors if they could drive her to Costco, where she bought enormous quantities of food. She enjoyed cooking and invited friends to come over and eat with her. Peter recalled one incident, regarding her pressure cooker, that for him seemed to embody Ruth’s inability to throw anything away:

Ruth loved cooking with her pressure cooker. She had a pressure cooker that must have been forty-five years old. This thing was pockmarked, the shine was off of it. Just had to see it.

One day she called me up and said, “I need your help. I can’t take the cover off my pressure cooker.”

I said, “Oh Ruth, not now.” You know she always had some chore for me. I said, “Don’t use it.”

She said, “I already used it. I can’t open it.” So I get over there with my tools. Now, I have a lot of tools. And I tried everything to get this pressure cooker open. I yanked on it, I used hammers, I used vise grips. I couldn’t get it open. And inside was corned beef, potatoes, carrots, cabbage.

So I said, “Ruth, I can’t do this, throw it out.” The next day I called up, said, “What did you do with it?” There’s a silence. She said, “I sent it back.” I said, “Oh, you opened it?” She said, “No, I just put it in a plastic bag and sent it back.” And I said, “Ruth you’re going to get arrested for doing this! You can’t do this, you can’t do this.”