And for a couple days I’m just astonished at her for doing this. About a week later, I get a phone call. “Would you help me bring this package in?” So I opened up the package and I looked inside. There was a brand new, shiny, state-of-the-art pressure cooker. This was after a week I spent telling her she can’t do this. I had to think about it a minute, you know. Why did she do this, was she cheap? No, it was justice. She was going to stick it to the man, and she did. And she didn’t get arrested.5
Gail Kohn, the director of Capitol Hill Village, explained Ruth’s reasoning for why she had so much stuff and had trouble parting with it: “We like to call it collecting, rather than hoarding. I always loved her excuse for why it was that she collected things: She was a librarian. ‘The truth is that you could never throw anything out when you’re a librarian.’”6 Ruth could use librarianship as an excuse for her hoarding, but she explained in a letter how overwhelming it was for her to go through her things and organize them:
I not only have boxes and boxes of books, professional journals, professional papers, and knickknacks that got shipped from overseas to Washington in 1971, but it seems I never threw out anything since moving into this house, so the stuff that went from California to Asia and then to DC is still in the basement and all over the house, but when I retired, all the files from my office, 23 years’ worth of stuff[,] got moved into my house. Unfortunately I cannot just throw it out without looking at it… there is some stuff that is useful for certain archives… So in some way I am glad that the stuff I have hung onto for all these years turns out to be o
f value to somebody, it is a horrible chore to do all this, especially since personal stuff has crept into many of these boxes, stuff like personal letters that one does not want to get into official archives. But the worst of all this cleaning up is that in looking at the stuff one literally relives one’s life and gets sidetracked thinking not only of the activities but all the people involved and sometimes it gets nostalgic and sometimes it gets depressing but always it gets very tedious.7
At some point Ruth did go through all her papers, perhaps with assistance from a friend or volunteer. Every letter that made it into her collection at the USHMM archives was numbered, in pen. When I first noticed this numbering system, I asked Peter if he had written them on the letters when he found them. He hadn’t, and an archivist would never write with pen on any document. It appears that Ruth (or a helper) had numbered them, and the personal letters she feared getting into the archives were probably destroyed. In all three of her archival collections available to the public, although there are many letters to and from her friends and some relatives, there are virtually no letters to or from her parents, her sisters, or any of the men she dated. During this process of attempting to organize her papers, she also began to give away books and other possessions.
Ruth increasingly had trouble with walking and getting out of her house, but she stayed connected with friends and relatives. She had learned to use a computer at work in the 1980s and at some point had bought one to use at home for typing letters. In her eighties she started learning to use the internet at home. As someone who loved information, she no doubt was thrilled to be able to look up facts and read news so easily. She loved emailing friends near and far, and she even joined Facebook. Her neighbors, even though they knew they might end up doing some kind of favor or errand for her, enjoyed stopping by her house and listening to the stories she told. They recognized the value she added to the neighborhood and supported her effort to stay in her home. In an email to neighbor Petula Dvorak, Ruth wrote, “I don’t think there is anything I hate more than ‘age segregation.’ I don’t think I could survive in either assisted living or a retirement home, or whatever you call it. I enjoy the little kids from next door coming over to visit my cat . . . I enjoy sitting on the front porch and giving out loads of Halloween candy.”8
Halloween seems to have been a favorite holiday of Ruth’s. Peter once suggested to her that she don a lab coat for a costume as “Dr. Ruth.” Ruth no doubt was a fan of the famous sex therapist, radio-show host, and author. But it is unclear if she knew that Ruth Westheimer had also fled Germany as a child, spent a year in Switzerland, and lived in Israel.
Ruth’s neighbors always made sure that she had somewhere to go on holidays. Petula Dvorak recounted a funny Thanksgiving story. Her family had invited Ruth for dinner, however:
An hour into our meal, we rang her bell. No answer. We banged on the door. We called. No answer. We feared something happened to her and dialed 911. The paramedics came, they kicked in the door and searched the house as our turkey and stuffing got cold. As they were stomping through the house, a car pulled up and Ruth, in a silk blouse, lipstick and fresh hairdo, got out of the car, the red lights of the firetruck glinting off her jewelry and cane.
“What is going on here?” she asked. We explained.
“Well, I had other invitations to dinner. I was planning on making it to yours, eventually,” she said.9
In her eighties Ruth’s health began to deteriorate. Although she had quit smoking soon after she retired, she developed problems with breathing and a persistent cough that was diagnosed as lung cancer in 2010.10 She was admitted to the intensive-care unit at George Washington University Hospital and was eventually discharged, although she pleaded with her doctor to let her stay, because she loved the good service there. After returning home, a hospital bed was set up in her living room, where she could visit with friends who knew that the end for her was growing close. Peter and Ben visited her nearly every day. She chose Peter to be the executor of her will, because, as he put it, “she knew I would go through everything.” Ben remembered the day a friend took a photo of the three of them on her porch. In Ruth’s lap was a present that someone had given her: a large, stuffed Clifford, of the famous children’s book. He made Ruth laugh in that moment. “There was a lot of joy between the three of us,” he said.11
One friend explained Ruth’s feelings during this time: “I spent many, many, many very happy hours with her over the last several months. And she was the most engaging, interesting woman that I think I’ve ever met. She was bright until the end, her mind was lucid, she was cared for, she was comforted . . . She was mad that she was dying and sick, although she knew it, and I think she was at peace.”12 On October 14 Gail Schwartz came to Ruth’s house to interview her for the USHMM’s oral history collection. Schwartz was a longtime volunteer, who had interviewed about three hundred Holocaust survivors for the museum since 1989.13 For almost two hours Ruth told what she remembered about her childhood in Germany, her escape to Switzerland, and her young adulthood in Seattle and Israel. This would be the last time that Ruth recounted her life in such detail.
In her capacity as a lay leader of the Hill Havurah, Laurie Solnik helped Ruth make some end-of-life decisions, and later Solnik described their conversations. Ruth had a recurring dream about her own grave, with a rosebush above it, on a hillside. She considered many options but finally settled on donating her body to GWU’s medical school.14
Ruth passed away at home on November 17, 2010. Her neighbor Petula described that day:
We were on our way over with “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” on Wednesday, but she died about an hour before we got there, in her bed. She had been reading “First Aid for Cats” and “Cooking With Eggs.” […]
Ruth Rappaport left her front porch and was wheeled away from her Capitol Hill rowhouse on the mortician’s gurney while those car horns complained. The gurney cachunked into the wagon, the doors slammed shut.
It was a triumph for Ruth, leaving her home this way. And I’ve got to think she would’ve laughed to know she slowed down traffic on her beloved street for a little while. That was how she had wanted it—to die in her own home, instead of joining the millions of elderly who wind up in assisted living facilities or nursing homes.15
Ruth’s memorial service was held a few weeks later at the Corner Store, an event space on Capitol Hill. Laurie Solnik led the Jewish service and opened it by playing a segment of Ruth’s oral history. She spoke about Ruth’s extraordinary life and the reverence that everyone in the room had for her. In the Jewish tradition, Ruth’s relatives tore a garment. Others read Bible verses, including “Woman of Valor” from the book of Proverbs. Then friends and family members told their most memorable stories about Ruth, often provoking both laughter and tears from her mourners.
Peter began the long process of clearing out Ruth’s house and carrying out her will. She left most of her estate to her nephew Guy and left funds to Capitol Hill Village, the Hill Havurah, Capitol Hill Group Ministry, and the Stanton Park Neighborhood Association. The Hill Havurah named their Torah Fund after Ruth, and the Capitol Hill Group Ministry established the Ruth Rappaport Wisdom Award, which recognizes one individual each year for their commitment to the Capitol Hill neighborhood. Peter came up with the idea for a memorial bench for Ruth, which, in 2012, was installed under a tree at the Congressional Cemetery. Its inscription is simply, “Come sit awhile.”
Epilogue
While writing this book, I often visited Ruth’s bench at the Congressional Cemetery, and I brought flowers on her birthday and death date. In the Jewish tradition, I placed a stone on the bench next to the others that are always there. She might find it amusing that her bench is near the gravesite of J. Edgar Hoover, the man who unsuccessfully tried to prevent her employment as a typist at the Oakland Army Base (Hoover also lived in a row house just a few blocks from Ruth’s home). The cemetery has other well-known residents, including John Philip Sousa and many early US c
ongressmen and Supreme Court justices. The more recently departed have gotten creative with their unique and often humorous headstones. The cemetery is open to dog walkers (by membership) and hosts events such as “Yoga Mortis,” the “Tombs and Tomes Book Club,” and concerts in the chapel. A little free library now stands outside the chapel, just a few steps up the path from Ruth’s bench. When the foliage gets too thick or invasive around the perimeter fence, the cemetery brings a herd of goats to “mow” it down for a few days. No doubt, Ruth would love that she has joined this colorful, eternal community.
Since I first learned of Ruth, she has been constantly on my mind, and in a sense she’s always been with me. Reminders of her are everywhere, and not just her old belongings in my house. There are signposts Ruth left behind all over Capitol Hill: the Corner Store, the Northeast Neighborhood Library, Stanton Park, and, of course, her house on Third Street, which I liked to pass by on my way to and from work. Once, while walking down a stairwell at the Library of Congress in the Jefferson Building, I spotted a cigarette butt. It had probably traveled in on someone’s shoe from outside, but I couldn’t help imagining Ruth smoking in that stairwell when such vices were not banned at the library.
During the time that I worked on this book, a few people asked me if I thought Ruth was a librarian hero. I don’t quite know how to answer that question. She was not the president of the American Library Association, and she never headed a major library or library system. She was never famous. But the people who met her or worked with her could not forget her. Her efforts to build a library system in Vietnam were heroic, and her diligence in cataloging social science books for over twenty years was a tedious, herculean feat. Although Ruth never used the word “radical” to describe herself, I knew since I first heard about her that she was one. The more I researched her life, the more it became apparent. It is the most fitting word to describe how she approached her job, her mission, and her life’s work, even if she never called attention to her beliefs or her politics. Radicals may not necessarily be lauded in history; because they can be impatient, difficult, outspoken, and infuriating, their lives don’t always make for simple, heroic narratives. But radicals are the ones in the trenches, doing the grunt work and pushing the boulders uphill, despite the resistance from above.
I’ve thought about my grandfather Jack, a World War II veteran who liberated Rome (and captured my Italian grandmother, he used to joke) and then became the director of the Muskogee and Lubbock public libraries. I remember from my childhood his rants about battling the city council for more funding, although I barely understood what he was talking about. I’ve thought about my aunt Silvia, a cataloger for NASA’s audiovisual collections, who has long served as a Democratic Party foot soldier in Houston and has chosen to spend her time, now that she is retired, teaching English to refugees. For years I’ve had long, rambling phone conversations with my mother, Alice, about her efforts to stop the Oregon State Legislature from defunding and closing the Oregon State Library, her employer. In her retirement years, she has a part-time job at the reference desk at the Salem Public Library and volunteers at my nieces’ school library in Oregon City. As she fully admits, “I just can’t quit.”
Document by document, book by book, and patron by patron, we are nudging along a nearly invisible revolution. We may be slowed, but we won’t stop. We may be threatened, but we won’t quit.
Near the end of the interview, Gail Schwartz asked Ruth her opinions on current politics. Ruth had thought that President Obama would not be reelected in 2012, a prediction that turned out to be wrong. Gail also asked her if she thought another Holocaust could happen. Ruth bluntly responded:
Yes. Unfortunately, yes. Again, it’s less apt to happen now—we have more competition. There are other groups who also have problems. The competing minorities. But anti-Semitism is not dead. Sorry about that, but anyone who thinks it can’t happen here, I have news for you. It can happen anywhere, anytime. But I would not bet there would not be another. Yep.1
Of course, genocides have happened again in several places around the world. Until the presidential election of 2016, however, I wasn’t sure if I completely agreed with Ruth about the possibility of it happening here. Soon after, while many of us were still in shock over the results, librarians sprang into action. They called attention to libraries’ unique role during this time of increased racism, xenophobia, political violence, fake news, alternative facts, and post-truth. While we forge ahead through dark times, we can look to Ruth as an example for how to survive under new-wave fascism. The tenets of librarianship can guide us through assaults on the freedom to read and the right to accurate information.