A Well-Read Woman

by Kate Stewart

  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.”

  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.