by Kate Stewart
Many of Ruth’s memories of her parents’ Judaism focused on their traditions, including food:
My mother lit the candles and you know we always had challah, and gefilte fish or regular fish, or matzo ball soup, or noodle soup… My mother kept kosher for my father. So, we had a kosher kitchen. But, when we traveled, she and I ate treif and actually with my father’s blessing. He just said he was raised Orthodox, he couldn’t get himself to change. But he was really, he was sort of an accepting, liberal kind of guy. And, like if I was sick in bed and needed a treat, he’d come home and bring me a package of ham. For sandwiches. So, you know it was a tradition, not religion.14
If Ruth attended synagogue regularly with her family, the services would have been sex segregated and led by men. Ruth never learned Hebrew or had a Bat Mitzvah, which was the norm for girls at the time, but she attended the Hebrew school at the synagogue and her teachers gave her good marks on behavior in her report cards. Although she probably learned stories from the Torah and Jewish culture at the school, she was not participating fully in Jewish life in Leipzig. She revealed later that she had stopped believing in God when she was about eight years old, although she did not explain what in particular had led her to atheism.15 Perhaps she came across the concept in her extensive childhood reading, or maybe something traumatic led her to question the existence of God. In her seventies, when she joined the Hill Havurah, a Jewish group on Capitol Hill, Ruth warned the group to not let any one person become too powerful and to guard against Judaism’s traditional sexism.16 The roots of this sentiment were laid when, as a girl in Leipzig, she questioned long-held practices of silencing women from religious expression.
Ruth’s family lived in a mixed neighborhood in Leipzig at 18 Salomonstrasse, just a few blocks east of the center of the city in the Graphisches Viertel (Graphics Quarter), famed for its many publishing houses and bookbinderies. The apartment building at 18 Salomonstrasse was large, with three wings separated by courtyards. The Rappaports lived on the second floor of the middle wing, B. In addition to apartments, several businesses were housed in the building, including a restaurant and sausage company. Ruth’s apartment was just a few blocks from the train station, the University of Leipzig, the symphony hall, and the Brühl, the street where her father probably worked. She played with non-Jewish friends and attended a public elementary school (Volksschule), a mixed school with both Christian and Jewish children, although the records for this school do not survive.17 She described herself at this age as “a snot-nosed kid,” but, she added, “I was bright.”18 She may have been quiet, but the books she rapidly consumed started to introduce her to new ideas and instilled in her a sense of skepticism.
When asked what kinds of activities she participated in, she explained, “Mostly reading. I wasn’t too much into sports, because I was really nearsighted as a kid. And in those days, we didn’t have plastic glasses. So, you know, I couldn’t go in for sports. A tennis ball and pair of eyeglasses can be fatal. So, I was a little bit removed from sports and tended towards books.”19 A photograph of her around age five reveals that she didn’t wear glasses yet, but some time in elementary school, Ruth developed eyesight problems—including a lazy eye, likely inherited from her father, who also had the same ailment—and her nearsightedness was no doubt caused by intense reading. Even though she claimed she did not participate in sports, among her papers from her childhood is a certificate showing that she passed swimming lessons; it would remain her favorite form of exercise throughout her life. She also belonged to Bar Kochba, a Jewish sports club in Leipzig for children, and a photograph reveals that she played basketball with a group of other children when she was thirteen.20
To Ruth, the most important group she belonged to was the Brith Habonim, a Zionist youth organization. Her small group, or the Bund, as she called it, was known as the Arbeiterbund or labor union. She recalled that she was one of only two in the group that were considered middle class, while everyone else was classified as the Jewish working poor.21 Leipzig’s Zionist movement grew throughout the 1920s and ’30s as it became increasingly clear that Jews were not welcome in many areas of public life. There were several organizations for adults, including the Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland, a mainstream group, and Poale Zion, a group for the working class. Ruth’s father considered himself a Zionist, and her sister Mirjam probably joined an organization as well. Ruth remembered attending a Zionist meeting at age six, where she questioned the reverence of a Zionist hero:
It was sort of a commemoration of somebody who was a hero, Joseph Trumpeldor, who died, ta-da, ta-da, and here’s this little six-year-old and she says, “What’s so great about dying for your country? Isn’t it more important to live for it?” I thought that was a pretty astute comment from a six-year-old.22
Although Ruth would remain involved in Zionism for the next twenty years of her life, this story illustrates how from the beginning she was wary of the movement’s ideology. She would later mull over in her diary her feelings about it, her arguments with other Zionists, and whether establishing a Jewish homeland was truly a solution to the “Jewish question.” More than anything, this commemoration that she remembered more than eighty years later is reflective of Ruth’s inclination to question everything.
Reading was central to Ruth’s childhood. Her parents encouraged their children to read, as Ruth remembered that her sister Mirjam was also a bookworm. But like most parents of children who read voraciously, they also had their frustrations when their daughters would read so much they avoided other activities. Later in life Ruth wrote, “I remember when I was a young child, sometimes father or mother would scold Mirjam because she would read a book rather than do a chore . . . She did a lot of living through books.”23 Like Ruth, Mirjam remained a lifelong reader.
The Rappaports took advantage of living in a city that revered books. Since the seventeenth century, Leipzig had hosted an annual international book fair. By 1930, Leipzig had 436 publishing houses, 277 printers, and 69 bookstores, and one in ten residents worked in the book industry.24 Growing up in this publishing neighborhood influenced Ruth’s interest in books and intellectual pursuits. She remembered:
There used to be a very famous German encyclopedia called Brockhaus… and the Brockhaus family lived across the street from us. Leipzig, of course, was a publishing city, and very few people know that, but not pocketbooks, but paperbacks, quality paperbacks, were published in Leipzig long before the names were coined, because we had these publishing houses in Leipzig. And boy, I had a whole collection of English novels by the time I was ten years old.25
During the 1930s, there were thirty-nine publishers or other businesses in the book industry located within three blocks of Ruth’s childhood home. In her apartment building alone, there were seven: Johann Ambrosius Barth, a medical publishing company in existence from 1780 to 1999; Curt Kabitzch, another medical publishing company; Alfred Mesiter, a printer; Quandt & Händel, a science publishing company; Leopold Voß, a publishing company started as a bookstore in 1791 and noted for its specialty in science and philosophy, including the works of Kant; G. Fr. Wanner, a book binder; and Wilhelm Wobersin, a travel bookstore.26
Leipzig had another advantage for young people interested in foreign languages. A special school for translators trained and hired them to work at the industrial fairs, which attracted merchants from across Europe. This program was also open to local children. Ruth had already begun studying English in school when she was eleven years old, probably because her mother wanted to immigrate to the United States to be near her brothers. But this program (probably a summer class) seemed to have been very effective for her:
It was a three-month course… I didn’t have to live at the school, because I was from Leipzig, but most students lived there. And it was immersion study. You had breakfast with your teachers. You went for a walk. You couldn’t use anything but English. If you couldn’t say it in English, you couldn’t say it. It was agony while it lasted; however, when I came to t
he States as an immigrant, I didn’t have to take a single required English college course.27
Chapter 2
What had been a typical childhood for a Jewish girl in Leipzig suddenly changed when Ruth turned ten, soon after the Nazi Party came to power. Even at such a young age, she understood the seriousness of this new political regime. She heard about it for the first time on the radio around her tenth birthday in May 1933 and sensed the fear that was in the air. At some point later, Ruth was crossing a street in Leipzig when a motorcade passed by; she knew instantly it was Hitler. He was sitting up straight in his open vehicle with his arm raised in the air. “Sig heil!” he yelled. Others in the crowd around her repeated the salute. But Ruth refused to, and in hindsight she doubted that anyone would have noticed the defiance of a short Jewish girl, just one of many in the crowd.1
In April 1933 Ruth was accepted to the höhere dreistufige Mädchenschule der Stadt, Leipzig’s college preparatory public high school for girls, based on her test scores.2 In 1935, a law was passed banning Jewish children from public schools.3 She had to return to her public elementary school for a time before transferring to the local Jewish high school, the Höhere Israelitische Schule, also known as the Carlebach School, which was founded by Ephraim Carlebach in 1912.4 It is unclear why Ruth and her parents did not opt for Jewish schools to begin with. Perhaps attending public schools was a sign of belonging to the bourgeoisie. But Ruth remembered one advantage of attending this Jewish private school that had had its origins in anti-Semitism: almost all of her teachers were Jewish professors from Heidelberg University who had been fired in the sweeping bans of Jews from many professions.5
Hillel Shechter, who grew up in Leipzig and also attended the Carlebach School, remembered that some teachers belonged to the Nazi Party, including a biology teacher who wore his Hitler Youth uniform to class and others who made it clear that they had anti-Semitic leanings.6 The Carlebach School was overwhelmed with new students and asked the Leipzig School Board for funds for a new building. The request was denied because most of its students were designated as foreigners, like Ruth, even though a majority of them had been born in Leipzig.7 It is clear that she struggled for the first few years at the Carlebach School. Her teachers’ comments on her report cards at this time included, “Ruth is immature, she has no concept of order . . . She is very impertinent . . . Her work is barely acceptable . . . Ruth is not industrious or diligent and does not participate in classroom activities.” The subjects she struggled with were religion, English, and math.8
The year 1933 was significant in Ruth’s life, and not just because of the obvious political changes in Germany. Ruth’s mother, Chaja, became the manager of the österreichisches Vaterlandsheim (or ÖVLH), a local club and restaurant for Austrians in Leipzig, specifically Jewish immigrants. She may have worked there before becoming the manager, but regardless, it appears to have been a demanding job, and she was not at home most evenings. Ruth remembered this as a time when she had to step up at home and become more self-reliant.9 She may have also assisted her mother at the restaurant and claimed in her diary, “Through the Ö.V.L.H. I had a certain amount of life experience.”10 She described the members as “pompous con men—with debts—but, worldly and bon vivant, [who] look down on people, and bamboozle others.” It appears that it was also a sort of second home for the Rappaports; she remembered that on Yom Kippur in 1938, the last one she would spend in Leipzig, her family ate dinner together at the restaurant.
Her mother may have started working because Mendel’s business may have been failing, likely because of Jewish boycotts and the worsening economic conditions of the Depression. When asked about this, Ruth answered, “I don’t think he was closed, shut down, or anything like that. It was just the Depression. Actually, I think it’s kind of funny looking back.” She joked, “I don’t know if there was a middle-class Jewish trade or not, but you know Jews were never poor—they just had cash flow problems.”11 One of Ruth’s uncles (probably Leo Rubinstein) had done very well financially in Leipzig; Ruth remembered that he owned a Rolls-Royce that her family borrowed occasionally. Ruth’s parents also continued to employ a maid named Else, who Ruth took a photograph of washing dishes at the sink at home in the summer of 1936. Else wore an apron and a scarf on her head and faced away from the camera as she diligently worked, but she seemed to be suppressing a smile, as if knowing that Ruth was trying to artistically capture her.
Since 1927 Ruth’s sister Mirjam had worked as a clerk for the film company Globus AG in Berlin. The company closed in 1930, and she had trouble finding work.12 In 1933 Mirjam decided to go to Palestine and left the day after Ruth’s tenth birthday.13 She probably went with her friend Hadassah Schneider, who moved with her family to Palestine in the 1930s. Mirjam later married Hadassah’s brother, Max, in 1940 in Jerusalem.14 Between 1933 and 1935, eight hundred Jews from Leipzig immigrated to Palestine.15 Mirjam came back to Leipzig in 1937 for a visit, looking tanned in a photograph with Chaja in front of their apartment building.
One of Ruth’s most vivid memories was a book burning in Leipzig in 1933. Across Germany in April and May, university students burned or destroyed “un-German” books and literature, in what became known as the Action Against the Un-German Spirit. Initially the plan was to burn writings by Jewish authors, but it quickly expanded into a sweep of all literature considered pornographic, Communist, modernist, or any other “ist” deemed a threat by the Nazi Party. A librarian, Wolfgang Herrmann, created a list of books to purge from Berlin libraries. He had Nazi leanings, although the book burnings themselves were not ordered by the Nazi Party or the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. In Berlin the bonfire of books at the opera house on May 10 was accompanied by a speech by Joseph Goebbels and broadcast nationally.16 During the month of April, Leipzig’s public libraries and the private libraries of Communists were searched and forbidden books were taken away.17
On May 2 the library at the Volkshaus, a community center for trade unions and Communists in Leipzig, was ransacked. Books by Karl Marx, Heinrich Heine, Kurt Tucholsky, Erich Kästner, Sigmund Freud, and eighty-nine other authors were torched by University of Leipzig students.18 The building was south of downtown Leipzig, and Ruth, just ten years old at the time, heard that it was happening. She set out to see it for herself and described the heaps of books set on fire in the road. She was stunned to see this happening in her hometown, the world-famous city of books, and did everything in her might to not cry as she passed by and watched.19
This book burning, however, was one of just two that occurred in Leipzig. On May 14, 1933, the Association of German Booksellers met in Leipzig. Joseph Goebbels spoke about Leipzig’s importance in the international book trade and tried to calm the outraged booksellers, who were concerned about Leipzig’s reputation. He promised that their businesses would not be damaged and encouraged publishers to stop printing un-German literature and focus on printing new Fascist books. Although there were no more book burnings in the city, many publishers in Leipzig left Germany altogether.20 Members of the Brockhaus family, who owned the publishing company across the street from Ruth’s home, were deemed half-Jewish or one-quarter Jewish, but they petitioned Hitler directly for permission to be included in the new Chamber of Literature (approved publishers), probably because of the prestige of the company and the fact that they published two well-known pro-Nazi writers, Sven Hedin and Colin Ross.21
Since 1930 certain magazines and journals had been banned in Germany, but in February 1933 President von Hindenburg issued the “Decree for the Protection of the German People,” which allowed local police to confiscate books that were “apt to endanger public security or order.”22 Other regulations expanded the types of materials used and the power of the federal authorities to intervene if the locals in charge were not obeying the new censorship regulations. In 1941 Jews were banned from public libraries (they had earlier been banned from many other public places, such as movie theaters and concerts). The banned book
s list created by Herrmann, as well as other lists, such as one crafted by librarian Ernst Drahn, were managed by Goebbels and the staff of the Chamber of Literature.23 But these lists did not prevent Germans from seeking the forbidden books, if they didn’t already own them. Ruth and other members of the Habonim had access to at least some of them. They gave each other books by Jewish authors and those considered radicals and destroyed them when they were finished. Ruth reported, “By 13, I had already read Trotsky, Maxim Gorky, Traven, Remarque, Sholem Asch. At 12 and 13, I was very knowledgeable and involved with socialism and communism. I questioned if there is a God and thought about the effects of industrialization.”24 These authors deeply influenced Ruth. Besides shaping her views on Socialism, Zionism, and Jewish identity, authors like Erich Maria Remarque, whose antiwar book All Quiet on the Western Front was banned in Germany, would affect Ruth’s views on war and violence.
In a city with such a thriving publishing industry, it was not too difficult for Leipzig’s teenagers to acquire these banned books that had yet to be destroyed or confiscated. But what level of risk were they taking if caught? Would they be imprisoned, fined, beaten? In this frightening new era, friends, family, and passing acquaintances fled the country or disappeared. To Ruth, breaking the laws regarding what she was allowed to read was worth the risk, whatever the consequences might be.
Chapter 3
The Brith Habonim had a large influence on its young members, and it was in some ways a more significant influence in Ruth’s life than her parents. She noted that Zionist youth groups were “a double-edged sword” for the parents.1 The older generations, particularly those who were native Germans, were not so supportive of Zionism, because it implied that Jews could not fully assimilate into German society. They worried that it gave Germans a pass on their responsibility to be a fully democratic, inclusive nation. Many German Jews, and even a Zionist immigrant like Ruth’s father, viewed Nazism as a temporary aberration in Germany’s history that would soon blow over. Ruth remembered her father feeling this way even though he was an immigrant and probably experienced anti-Semitism on a regular basis: “My father was totally unrealistic. ‘Hitler’s going to last six months, and the Germans will know when to bargain.’ God almighty! I mean, never mind. When I remember, I still get angry. Because there was no excuse for being that much of an ostrich!”2