by Kate Stewart
The biggest thing he could do for you was buy you an ice cream cone. I don’t think he ever ate ice cream when he was a kid. And I don’t know if it wasn’t kosher in that little village. Or I don’t know why he never had ice cream. But you know, if he gave you a hundred dollars as a present, it was nothing, but if he bought you an ice cream snack, he was really in love with you—he really loved you. And every time the damn train stopped, I got an ice cream cone.4
Dora, meanwhile, had heard about the digestive troubles of people who had traveled across the Atlantic by ship. While Carl was buying Ruth ice cream at every stop, Dora was constantly giving her Feen-a-mint, a laxative gum. As Ruth joked later, “I nearly died!”5
In 1940 Seattle had about 368,000 residents, and Ruth remembered it as “a backwater town in those days if there ever was one!”6 The Jewish population of Seattle was around 14,500 in 1937, and Ruth would be one of about a thousand who came from Europe in the 1930s.7 Carl Rubinstein had immigrated to the United States around 1900, via Latin America. He had married Dora, also from Poland, in Fort Worth, Texas, and they came to Seattle in 1916. Carl started a business selling fruit and then jewelry. In the 1920s, he became the president of the Trinity Packaging Company, and when Prohibition was repealed, he became the treasurer of Northwest Distillers and began financing seafood canneries.8 He was a benefactor of Herzl’s Congregation Synagogue, among many other Jewish organizations. Carl and Dora had a son, Sam (nicknamed Sonny), and a daughter, Rose, who were both a few years older than Ruth.
Ruth recounted a family story that probably occurred before she came to Seattle. Her mother’s famous cousin, Helena Rubinstein, had visited Seattle in 1934 to open one of her salons there.9 It might have been during this visit that she asked Carl what business he was in. As it was told to Ruth, he replied, “the salmon business,” and Helena said, “Oh, isn’t that kind of smelly?” Ruth goes on: “And he looked straight at her and said, ‘So’s yours.’”10
Carl and Chaja’s brother, Abraham, had also moved to Seattle in 1916. Abe married a Russian woman named Lenore and had a son, Marvin, who also went by the name Scott. Abe did not join Carl in his businesses but instead worked as a salesman in men’s clothing. Members of the family later remember Abe as quiet and scholarly, and he often gave books as presents to his nieces and nephews.11
Another brother, Leo, came to Seattle from Leipzig in 1937, an event that Ruth had written about in her diary. Like his brother Carl, Leo was married to a woman named Dora, with whom he had four children who by 1940 had scattered throughout Seattle, Palestine, and Germany.12 Only their youngest, David, had come to live with them in Seattle. They lived in an apartment on Howell Street, just north of Seattle’s Jewish neighborhood.13 Carl Rubinstein and his family lived in a large house in the Montlake neighborhood. Ruth noted in her diary that on the train from New York to Seattle, she was told she would live not with Carl, as she had expected, but with Leo. She wrote, “If I am being honest, it was nevertheless a very little bit unpleasant.”14
She had good reason to feel apprehensive. She wrote of Leo’s wife, Dora, just a few weeks after she arrived in Seattle:
From the beginning, she explained to me that even with an Aunt I was not at home. As if I had left my parents behind in Germany with pleasure in order to travel towards “happiness” on my own. Even in Zurich, at someone else’s house they said to me: we hope that you feel like you are at home with us. Because the question now was about school, she clearly and precisely made me understand that I could not perch there at her expense and lead a pleasant life, I had to make myself self-reliant and independent as quickly as possible in order to be my own mistress.15
Ruth did not find much camaraderie with her cousins either. She liked her cousin Sam, who reminded her of Roger Garfunkel from Zurich. But David, whom she had grown up with in Leipzig, always acted superior toward her. David’s son, Michael, stated that his father had long regretted coming to Seattle with his parents and wished he had moved to Palestine with his brother and sister instead.16 Ruth wrote in her diary that David’s mind-set, developed in the Zionist youth groups of Leipzig, made it difficult for him to adjust to Seattle. Rose pointedly excluded Ruth from her circle of friends. Both Sam and Rose were born and raised in Seattle’s assimilated Jewish culture. Although they had come of age in the Depression, their father had done well and they had plenty of money to spend on clothes, cars, club memberships, and outdoor activities. Ruth’s foreign accent and awkwardness probably embarrassed them, and she was fully aware that she didn’t fit in: “I know that I must appear very funny to Rose and Sam here, I can’t dance, can’t play tennis, don’t ride, don’t drive a car. Would like to know what they think about me.”17 Near the end of her life, she remembered what seemed like a petty complaint of Rose’s at the time, especially compared to what Ruth had experienced in Germany: “One cousin’s biggest unhappinesses . . . she couldn’t join the fashionable Christian golf club . . . she had to join Glendale, the Jewish Club!”18 Even though it might have been easier for her to have lived with Carl’s family instead, Ruth was wary of their bourgeois lifestyle: “If I lived with the other Rubinsteins, I would certainly have painted myself up if only in order to look like the others. But in any case, what I do not want to have happen is to become different over time. If I become just like the others I at least want to be conscious of it. Today wearing heels, tomorrow having my nails done, one week later smoking, etc. Either or!!!”19
Because Leo made significantly less money than Carl, Ruth was a financial burden on this branch of the family, although it appears that Carl paid for Ruth’s new clothing, including a fur coat. Leo’s wife complained to Ruth that she had been forced to financially support Ruth’s maternal grandfather and her mother in Leipzig and now had to support Ruth in Seattle. Her resentment was impossible to ignore. Ruth wrote:
Since the first day I have been here I have known that as soon as Aunt saw me she thought: Ruth is here, I have to care for her, and it will be good for her here, and my children have to work hard in Palestine and for a long time have not had the things that they have needed the most, and none of my relatives are here, everything is going poorly for them. Moreover, she must always think: why didn’t she stay at her Uncle Rappaport’s in Brooklyn? She has often spoken only of that with me, and if she doesn’t say it, she constantly lets me feel it.
Hopefully no one will ever read my diary.20
Ruth wondered if she had made a mistake in coming to Seattle. Would she have fared better moving to Palestine to live with Mirjam or staying in New York with the Rappaports? At times even remaining with her parents in Leipzig seemed preferable to the pain and exclusion she felt in Seattle.21
Chapter 9
Ruth returned to school as a junior at Broadway High School, which enrolled other young German Jewish refugees and a large Japanese population as well.1 She was irritated that she had missed so much school. After repeating a year of school in Leipzig and losing a year in Zurich, she felt old compared to the other students in her grade, even though they may have been at or near her age, sixteen. She considered whether she should go to a trade school after earning her diploma and wanted to ask Sam how he had graduated high school early. She complained about the large amount of homework she had every night but also noted it was easy.
In January 1940 Ruth wrote that she had already failed three civics assignments and wondered if it was because she was still struggling with English. If she was struggling, she didn’t remember it that way in her oral history: “I passed every single [English] college course, high school, and college entrance by exam. The only thing I couldn’t pass was Shakespeare.”2 Perhaps with distance she didn’t remember how she struggled with English or just didn’t want to admit it. Ruth still preferred to write in German in her diary, which she kept regularly until the end of 1942.
She soon came to realize that her earlier interest in Socialism and Communism, or at least in discussing it in an intellectual sense, was out of fashion at Broa
dway High School. She observed, “In school we are now talking about Communism, and I have such a funny feeling when I hear the others speak about it so disdainfully. At the moment, I myself know too little about it in order to be able to judge.”3 This last statement seems disingenuous considering that in 1939 she claimed that her friends in Hashomer Hatzair in Zurich were impressed with her knowledge of Communism and current politics, but perhaps she was referring to the specifics of the American Communist movement.
Ruth maintained her instinct for social activism in Seattle: “The first thing that happened when I came to Seattle, Washington—I heard about fair housing. And I don’t think I’d been in Seattle more than a month and I trooped off to the state capitol, demonstrating for fair housing.”4 As African Americans streamed into the city for jobs at shipyards related to the war buildup, they faced restrictive covenants and quotas in public housing. The local branches of the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People grew exponentially during the early 1940s and relied on help from the Jewish Anti-Defamation League.5 She probably became involved in this protest either through Herzl’s Congregation Synagogue or a local Jewish group, or perhaps she had read about it in the newspaper.
Ruth looked into joining organizations where she hoped to make new friends, but she was pessimistic. She anxiously waited for letters from friends she had met in Leipzig and Zurich (some of whom were now in the United States) and wondered if she would ever have friends like them again. She made plans to attend a German club but remarked that she knew she would feel cold toward the other members.6 She also wanted to go to Sunday school at the Talmud Torah, Seattle’s only Hebrew school. After attending a Zionist lecture with her cousin David and uncle Leo, she wrote that only a few other young people were there, but at the end of the meeting the group had decided to start a Zionist youth organization. She was unclear what her role would be and wondered whether this would be a true Zionist bund, since she doubted that anyone else in Seattle wanted to immigrate to Palestine. But she enjoyed meeting the other girls who were interested in starting the group, especially Hilde Schocken, who was a few years older than Ruth and had grown up in Bremerhaven, Germany, and spent the past year in Switzerland before immigrating to the US at the end of 1939.7 It is unclear if this group actually got started, and if so, what it was called, but later in the summer of 1940 Ruth joined the local chapter of Junior Hadassah, a Zionist women’s group.
In January 1940 Ruth’s cousin Rose announced her engagement to Julius Jacobs, known as Jay.8 Ruth did not understand why the Rubinsteins opposed the marriage. Little did they know that he would later own Jay Jacobs, a successful national chain of clothing stores for teenagers. Ruth was concerned about the upcoming wedding because she did not own an appropriate dress to wear for the occasion and would have to ask for one. She also didn’t know how to dance and agonized over whether she should try to learn beforehand. For her there was one possible upside to the wedding: Rose would move out of her parents’ house, freeing up a bedroom. Perhaps Carl and Dora would then ask her to live with them. Ruth had apparently decided she could overlook their bourgeois tendencies. Ruth reported a month later, “It was a wonderful wedding. I should have tried to dance, I certainly would have been able to do it. There were certainly enough people there who wanted to dance with me.”9
Ruth constantly worried about her parents and sisters because she heard so infrequently from them. Even when she received a letter after her first two months in the US, she felt unsettled:
Yesterday I finally got mail from my parents. Everything seems so bleak to me. Poor Papa is sick again. I am so afraid for him. I do not think I will see my parents in America. 1. because of the war and 2. because of the laws. It is so frightfully far away, because everything seems so bleak to me.
I don’t know, here I have everything I need so far, I know where I am living, go to the school, have clothing, am busy here, safe from the war and from the police, and yet I have never been so unhappy as here. I felt much happier in Switzerland.10
She soon realized that her uncles probably would not be able to help her parents get out of Germany, and she conveyed to them that she understood “the circumstances” and that “they can’t help anything and have other cares.”11 But, thinking of how her own family was no doubt suffering in Europe, she seethed whenever she saw her uncles spend lavishly on clothing, trips, or weddings for their children. In April 1940 her sister Clara had a baby, Guy, in Paris. When Ruth found out sometime later, she worried even more about how her sister’s family would survive in France. Even though Dora bought many new things for her, Ruth clung to what she had brought from Germany: “It is funny that the things that Aunt Dora buys are costlier, more beautiful, and better than the things that I brought with me and in part cannot wear. But nevertheless, I keep them, because I know they are from my parents and because I have always had them with me.”12
Ruth’s anxiety about her parents and her loneliness in Seattle began to affect her ability to concentrate or to spend her time productively. She wrote:
I have never dawdled around so much as I did now. I sat there for a long time and did nothing, or something dumb and useless, but didn’t sit there for a long time reading or doing something sensible. That means, I am getting better at reading, and am also getting up earlier than I did at the beginning, but I am not spending the time well. Even when I read I sometimes read the words on the page, but not their sense.13
Reading had always been her escape. English novels were more cumbersome than she was used to, but once she got over this hump, she returned to her old “ferocious” pace. In 1941 she noted that for school she had been reading Pearl S. Buck’s The Exile—a memoir with a feminist tone—which was about Buck’s mother and the sacrifices she made to be a missionary wife in China. Ruth also described her difficulties writing an essay for a school assignment about a book that had been very special to her:
This week in English with Miss Ohlson, we had to write an essay and I wrote about the book that I will never forget, I chose Rachel’s poems. Before I started I thought that I wouldn’t be able to write something worthwhile about a book, as it’s more something I feel than analyze. And because I have an emotional history with these poems and know about “Rachel’s” background, and the poems sometimes vocalize what I am feeling in such simple but wonderful language, I thought it would be too sentimental/idealistic for an essay in an American school. But I thought we won’t have to read it out loud and Miss Ohlson will maybe like it because it is so different from all the other essays. But to my horror, she gave the essays to the class to correct and evaluate, and of course no one was interested in my essay, plus the fact, and maybe I should be happy about this, that probably nobody could actually read it.14
“Rachel’s poems” were written by Ra’hel Bluwstein, the first famous woman poet in Israel. An immigrant from Russia, she suffered from tuberculosis and wrote much of her poetry in the last years of her life before she died in 1931. They were published under only her first name in the Israeli newspaper Davar and became very popular, especially among Jewish women. Her poems had first been published in German in 1936, when Ruth was thirteen; perhaps they were first recommended to Ruth by someone in her Habonim youth group. Rachel’s poems are known for their simplicity, because they were written in Hebrew, a language Bluwstein struggled to learn, and address topics such as forbidden love, biblical figures, the land of Israel, and her love of nature.15
Ruth probably went frequently to the Seattle Public Library, both its main downtown location and the Yesler branch in Seattle’s Jewish neighborhood. The main library, a large, beautiful Beaux-Arts building, was built in 1906 with money from Andrew Carnegie, who was donating his fortune to the construction of new library buildings across the country at the time. During the Depression, the Seattle library and its branches were teeming with unemployed men, while budget cuts forced the libraries to scale back their hours and book purchases. In 1932, librarian Natalie Notki
n, head of the foreign books division and a Russian immigrant, was fired for supposedly offering Communist books in Russian. Notkin was offered a job at the University of Washington libraries, where she worked for the next thirty years, but the foreign books division of the public library suffered in her absence. Luckily, by the end of the 1930s, the library system had received funding from New Deal programs and a new Friends of the Seattle Public Library organization, both of which helped the library system hire more staff, buy more books, and paint its aging main building. However, with the onset of the war, ordering books from Europe became virtually impossible.16
Although German books would have been relatively scarce in Seattle, Ruth was part of a network of other German refugees who lent each other books. She traded and discussed books with Mrs. Sarkowsky, a family friend of the Rubinsteins who had left Germany in 1934. Ruth wrote about how much she enjoyed reading the American novel What Makes Sammy Run. Written by Budd Schulburg, the book is a cautionary tale about a young Jewish man from New York who achieves success as a Hollywood screenwriter through backstabbing and plagiarism. As Ruth became more fluent in English, she gained access to a whole new genre: the American Jewish novel. These books often addressed European immigration, refugees, and anti-Semitism—issues that Ruth herself faced daily—against the backdrop of assimilated Jews’ dramatic rise to success in the United States. When she lived in Leipzig and Zurich, she had found comfort in reading about the struggles of Jews in Europe; in Seattle, she would seek out books by and about American Jews, in hopes of making sense of her new situation.
Ruth enjoyed going to the movies too, another form of escapism that also helped her learn English. She mentioned seeing Tevya with her aunt Dora, uncle Carl, and the Sarkowskys, their friends. This film was an early version of Fiddler on the Roof, and it sparked something deep inside her: