by Kate Stewart
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
In 1964 Ruth was notified that she was eligible for another 5,000 deutsche marks due to her loss of education, although it is unclear if she ever received the funds.13 The correspondence between Ruth and the URO seems to have ended in 1965. This money surely helped Ruth financially, but it is doubtful that it ever brought her any sense of closure or justice concerning the gaping loss of her parents and her trauma as a refugee.
Chapter 25
In the spring of 1958, Ruth took Librarianship 220B, a course that required her to write a substantial bibliography. Writing bibliographies was a significant part of a librarian’s job at the time, especially for those who worked at university libraries. Not simply a list of books, these bibliographies were guides—organized by source format and often including substantial overviews—that addressed the scholarship on specific topics. They sometimes included summaries or short critiques of each item. They were often collaboratively written and published by library-related organizations. In the information era before the internet and online union catalogs like WorldCat, bibliographies and other reference works were the first stop for anyone performing serious research on a topic. It was a task that librarians with subject expertise and language skills took on with great seriousness; they were not simply offering unbiased lists of sources, but also critiquing them and guiding researchers to the best and most appropriate publications for their specific research purposes.
Ruth chose German Jews in the United States, and, more specifically, those who had immigrated since 1933, as the topic of her bibliography. Considering her own experience as a German Jew in the US and her concurrent restitution claim, she took advantage of this assignment to pursue a personal research interest. Her bibliography was intended to provide a survey of materials available for a future sociological study of the group, and she pointed out that no definitive work had yet been written on the topic. She defined this group of recent immigrants to include those who, like her, were born in Germany and not considered citizens of that country but were classified as German according to the US. She pointed out that this group did not have its own Library of Congress subject heading, foreshadowing the work she would take up twenty years later.
Ruth selected what she considered the best material, mostly in English, from the following genres and formats: general reference works, general newspapers, Jewish periodicals, scholarly journals, publications by special agencies, fiction books, monographs, dissertations, biographies, and autobiographies. She scoured the catalogs at the University of California Library and the Hillel Foundation Library at Berkeley for sources.1 She also contacted the American Jewish Historical Society, the United Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society Service (HIAS), the American Jewish Committee, and the Leo Baeck Institute. In total, the bibliography lists 292 sources, with a short comment or explanation by Ruth for each one. Along with other bibliographies written for this class over the years, it is still held in the Berkeley library. “A Selective Guide to Source Materials on German Jews in the U.S. from 1933 to the Present Time” reveals how Ruth channeled her past trauma and yearned to make sense of it through systematic, dogged research. She earned an A in Librarianship 220B.2
In the 1950s the faculty of Berkeley’s School of Librarianship decided to take an active stance concerning McCarthyism in general and, more specifically, censorship in California’s schools and public libraries. The witch hunt to root out Communists from both the federal government and Hollywood had also spread to librarianship, as many local libraries were accused of providing Communist books to the public. Professor Fred Mosher was the head of the California Library Association’s (CLA) Intellectual Freedom Committee when a woman named Anne Smart alerted the state legislature to what she believed to be Communist materials in the Marin County school libraries. A bill was proposed to ban subversive materials in school libraries, but the CLA successfully lobbied against its passage. After this incident, the CLA decided to fund a study of censorship in California libraries but backed off the project when alternative funding was secured from the Fund for the Republic. Because this organization had supported other efforts against McCarthyism, CLA members feared more backlash. Despite opposition from the board of regents, the School of Librarianship stepped up to sponsor the study with funding from the Fund for the Republic. 3
Marjorie Fiske, a professor in the Sociology Department, was tasked with managing the study. Along with a team of research assistants, she interviewed librarians across California about book challenges, pressure from the community and library boards, and their practices of book selection. The study uncovered the fact that while book challenges by the members of the community were relatively rare across the state, librarians were cautious about selecting books considered controversial or subversive, and when they did purchase these books for the library, they often kept them behind the reference desk or in offices. California librarians had been spooked by McCarthyism and cases of censorship in the news and, to protect themselves, had exercised what Fiske termed “preventative censorship.”4
On July 10–12, 1958, the School of Librarianship hosted a symposium titled “The Climate of Book Selection: Social Influences on School and Public Libraries.” Scholars outside the field of librarianship presented papers on censorship, and Fred Mosher gave an overview of the recent book challenges in California. Marjorie Fiske concluded by giving a summary of the findings of her report, which was to be published the next year. Librarians from across the country attended, weighing in on discussions after each paper. Mosher later explained his overall reasoning for advocating for both the study and the symposium: “I think that the idea was that library schools particularly, and library school students, ought to be made thoroughly aware of the problems of intellectual freedom and approved methods of combatting censorship of books, and also they should push to get policies so they would have backing from their board whenever a censorship incident occurred.”5
In Ruth’s collection at the University of Washington, there is a ticket stub for the symposium. She probably sat in the audience, mulling over how the blatant censorship she had lived under as a teenager was alive and well in California, just in a more subtle and polite form. Ruth may have also bee
n aware of the widespread segregation of public libraries in the South and no doubt knew that the state of America’s libraries was not what it ideally could be. She would graduate from the library school just a few weeks later and had already applied for several jobs. She hoped that whatever job she landed would finally give her the chance to live up to the ideals that she had been cultivating, not just in library school but also throughout her whole life. She was now fully prepared to claim a calling and a professional title that would give her a new lease on life: librarian.
Chaja and Mendel Rappaport, ca. 1922.
Courtesy of Guy Rosner
Ruth Rappaport, 1929.
Courtesy of Guy Rosner
Chaja, Ruth, and Mendel Rappaport, undated.
Courtesy of Guy Rosner
Ruth Rappaport, undated.
Courtesy of Guy Rosner
Unknown man, Ruth, Chaja, and Mendel Rappaport at a café in Leipzig, undated.
Courtesy of Ben Zuras
Photograph of Clara and Mirjam Rappaport at the Monument to the Battle of the Nations in Leipzig, 1929.
Courtesy of Guy Rosner
Chaja and Mirjam Rappaport on Salomonstrasse in Leipzig, July 17, 1937.
Photograph number 51879, Ruth Rappaport collection, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Ruth Rappaport in the courtyard of her apartment building, November 8, 1938.
Photograph number 51874, Ruth Rappaport collection, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Photograph of Ruth Rappaport watching Ursi Herzog climb on her carriage in Zurich, February 5, 1939.