by Ruth Gruber
My life now revolved around the war and refugees fleeing from Hitler. I was determined to try to help them. But how? I was helpless, frustrated, angry. There were frightening rumors that Hitler was murdering whole villages of Jews in Poland. If only we could rescue them, snatch them from Hitler’s clutches. Were our own relatives in danger? What was happening to Hannah? Papa sent money for her older sister to go to Eretz Israel—the Land of Israel, the Holy Land. Her parents sat the seven days of mourning for her, weeping. They were sure the Arabs would cut her throat. Later we learned that she was the only one in the family who survived the war.
The United States was still not at war, though most of Europe was burning. Refugees were running across the face of Europe, trying to flee Hitler and his bombs and hordes of soldiers.
Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941—a date of infamy, our president called it. Now we were fully at war. There were thousands—no, tens of thousands—of Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler’s armies. But America’s doors were shut. We saved famous people—Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger.2 But the so-called “common people,” though they were not really common at all, were barred.
Virginia Woolf receded even further into the back of my mind, and, after her suicide in 1941, with no new books or essays appearing, she receded in the minds of others in America, and in England. American and British feminists rediscovered her in the ’60s and ’70s. Books and articles about her began to appear.
Dr. Deborah F. Stanley, president of SUNY Oswego, told me one evening how Virginia Woolf influenced her life. “She was really seminal in my awakening to the importance of feminism. It was in the seventies. I was at Syracuse University and formed a women’s reading group. We were four young women who sat around evenings discussing Virginia Woolf and exploring our souls.”
I learned what I had not known while writing my dissertation: she suffered severely from manic depression (the disease is now called “bipolar disorder” by scientists and psychiatrists). One of its manifestations is the tendency to suicide. In 1940, as Nazi planes were bombing Britain, she asked Leonard to buy poison for both of them. She knew that if the Nazis invaded England, Leonard, as a Jew, could be arrested and even murdered. London was on fire.
Virginia, tired, ill, seeking shelter from the nightly incendiary bombs, was ready to give up. She confided cryptically in her diary on May 15, 1940, “If England defeated: What point in waiting? Better shut the garage doors.”
Nor had I known that twice, in deep depression, she had tried to commit suicide. When she was very young, she kept hearing birds singing in her head in Greek. In 1941, at 59, she put stones in her pockets and walked into the river Ouse.
The time I had spent with her and Leonard was apparently one of her better days. She seemed neither manic nor depressed, but vitally alive. By a strange coincidence, not knowing that Virginia suffered from bipolar disorder, I had written repeatedly in my thesis about the polarity of her writing.
“A law of polarity, of conflicts as irreconcilable, as endless as night and day, reverberates through all of Virginia Woolf’s writing and reaches ultimate expression in The Waves,” as I wrote in my essay.
Even in her struggle for a style, she describes swinging from doubt in herself to “an ebb and flow of self-confidence, of doubt, of attempted change, and grim resolution.”
The odyssey of how I met Virginia Woolf, and how her life and work became intertwined with my life as an exchange student in Germany, began, oddly enough, when, in the autumn of 1926, at fifteen, I entered New York University and took my first course in German. Already a lover of Beethoven and Bach, I spent my undergraduate years learning more about the land and the culture that had produced them, and the language they spoke.
Ending my sophomore year, I spent the summer vacation in a six-week German program at Mount Holyoke College. The program was filled with American professors of German who came as students and who, despite my denials, were convinced that I was the granddaughter of Franz Gruber, the author of “Silent Night, Holy Night.”
English was verboten—prohibited. We ate, studied, sang, talked, and, I swear, even dreamed in German. Often, after morning classes and a hot New England lunch, I climbed a hill and shouted German poetry into the winds. German became my second language, and it was to be my mainstay when I brought a thousand refugees to America in 1944. German was the lingua franca of central Europe.
After spending another summer at Harvard, this time studying Shakespeare, I had enough credits to graduate from NYU, in three years. My philology professor, Dr. Ernst Prokosch, suggested that I apply for a fellowship to the German Department at the University of Wisconsin. Prokosch’s name on a letter of recommendation was magic. Within weeks, a letter arrived from Wisconsin:
“We congratulate you on being selected for the LaFrentz Fellowship in the graduate program of the German Department. You will receive full tuition and a stipend of $600.”
I was elated. Fellowships were one of the ways students survived during the Depression. In August 1929, I left for Madison, Wisconsin, planning to hitchhike the whole way. Instead of trying to stop me, Papa was so proud that he took me to his service station to get maps of the best route. No one worried. The roads were full of students holding up signs such as “CHICAGO HERE I COME” or “LA OR BUST.” Hitchhiking in those days was safe and fun. Truck drivers, often lonely on long drives, were glad to have someone to talk to. My one mistake was landing in a whorehouse in Troy, New York. One of the girls, in a tight-fitting blue satin dress and high-heeled blue satin shoes, stared at me in my brown oxfords and white socks, my blue skirt and white blouse. I looked more like a fifteen-year-old than eighteen in that outfit.
“Hey, kid,” she said, “what are you doing here?”
“I’m on my way to college in Wisconsin.”
“Well, you better get out of here fast. This is no place for you.”
That one year from 1930 to ’31 in Wisconsin was a year of stretching, of walking along the shores of the beautiful lakes, trying to discover who I was, making new friends, and writing my masters’ thesis in the German Department on Goethe’s Faust.
While in Wisconsin, I applied for a second grant, this time to travel to Germany, given by the Institute of International Education, known by the letters IIE.
The letter telling me I had won the fellowship and could study in Germany from 1931 to 1932 arrived during Easter vacation. I decided the news was too good to tell my parents by phone, so I hitchhiked home. Impatient after a full day, I decided to take a train from Albany to Manhattan’s Penn Station. I telephoned our housekeeper, telling her to ask my parents to meet me.
I learned later that in the Studebaker, driving from our house in Brooklyn to Manhattan, Mama asked suspiciously, “Dave, why is she coming home now? She didn’t even come home for Christmas. I tell you, she must be pregnant.”
Papa, who never lost faith in me, tried to reassure her. “Wait. We’ll find out soon enough.”
At the station, I flung my arms around them. “Guess what,” I could hardly control my excitement, “I’m going to Germany!”
Mama shook her head. “I wish she was pregnant.”
Unlike their pride in the Wisconsin fellowship, this exchange fellowship to Germany was a nightmare for them. They did their best to prevent me from going. They offered me a car. They offered me the equivalent in money. Mama was sure that Adolf Hitler, who was not yet in power in 1931 but was in the news almost every day, would come off a stage and shoot me.
“He won’t shoot me, Mom,” I told her. “I’ll wear a pin with an American flag on my lapel and I’ll carry my American passport in my blouse.”
Mama, sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued, said, “And Hitler can’t shoot through a passport?”
I told my father, “Papa, you knew at sixteen it was time for you to leave Odessa. You knew you had to get out of Czarist Russia. I know it’s time for me to go to Germany. I want to find out what Hitler is up to.”
Though I kne
w how anxious they were, I had the money in my pocket. Restless to get out of Brooklyn and begin my journey, I gave myself the whole summer to travel through Europe. The classes in Cologne would start in late September.
Seeing me off on the S.S. Milwaukee of the Hamburg-Amerika Line, Mama wept. “I don’t know if we’ll ever see you again.”
“You will, Mama. It’s only for one year.”
She acted as if she were already sitting in mourning.
It was June 1931 when I arrived in Paris and spent a month taking morning classes at the Sorbonne and whiling away my afternoons sipping tea at the Metropol Café, hoping to see some of the American writers in exile, especially Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. I never saw them, but I was thrilled, telling myself the world was opening up for me.
London was next. I took my first airplane ride from Paris to London. I felt like an adventurer. I was exploring two cities I had grown to love from books. I was also exploring myself, a nineteen-year-old who had grown up in the cocoon of a loving Jewish family, yearning to break free, yearning to embrace the world. I was happy to travel alone so that no one diverted me from meeting new people and marveling at the beauty of these two cities. Elsewhere in England, I wandered through Oxford, visited Stratford where Shakespeare had lived, and breathed the literary air of England so that Charles Dickens’s novels and Wordsworth’s poetry came alive to me as never before.
From London I took a train and ferry to Holland, sat on its beautiful beach at Scheveningen, watched Dutch women walk in wooden clogs, and finally arrived in Cologne on a balmy September day in 1931.
Dr. Hugo Gabriel, thirtyish and effervescent, representing the IIE at the University, had found a Jewish home for me with Papa Otto and Mama Frieda Herz and their daughter Luisa, my age. They treated me as if I were their second daughter.
For some reason, as soon as we met, Dr. Gabriel told me that his parents were Jewish, but he was Protestant. Hitler was not yet in power, but some Jews, fearing his virulent anti-Semitic threats, sought to save themselves by converting. I did not feel that I had the right to ask him why he had abandoned his Jewishness.
He helped me choose the courses I would take. We agreed that I would attend classes in German Philosophy with the renowned Nietzsche scholar Ernst Bertram; “Englisches Seminar”; and art history.
I had been at the university for about a month when Professor Herbert Schöffler, a round, fatherly-looking, middle-aged man, head of the “Englisches Seminar,” called me to his office.
“We have been watching you,” he said. “We would like you to stay and work for a Ph.D.”
A Ph.D.!
I shook my head. “My parents would never give me money to stay for another two or three years—or however long it takes to get a Ph.D. in Germany.”
“Nobody,” Professor Schöffler was smiling, “nobody in Germany has ever gotten a doctorate in one year. But maybe you can do it. I have a special reason. I love Virginia Woolf’s writing. None of my students knows English well enough to analyze her writing. You are the only American student here. I would like you to write a dissertation—in English—analyzing her work, her style, her language.”
I managed to say “I’ll try,” shook his hand, and rushed downtown to my favorite bookstore. There they were, all of her novels published to that point, including her latest, The Waves, all in English, all in paperback, all published by the Tauchnitz Press.
I was soon mesmerized by Virginia Woolf’s writing. I hung her picture on my bedroom wall. A Room of One’s Own became my Bible. It gave me the courage to later dispense with the objective journalist’s voice and write from my heart and soul. I was fascinated by her will to write as a woman, and distraught by her anxiety and fear that male critics would tear her books apart. She was on the side of the creators, the dreamers, the poets, the women. On the other side were the critics, the predators, the destroyers, the angry, hostile, women-loathing men.
She wrote Orlando, my favorite of her novels, as an ode to Vita Sackville-West, one of the women she loved. In a sense, the character “Orlando” was physically bipolar—a charming and heroic man who metamorphoses into a charming and beautiful woman.
In one of my sessions with Professor Schöffler, I told him how much I was enjoying Woolf’s writing and how much more I wanted to know about her.
“Very good,” he said. “Why don’t you write to her, care of the Hogarth Press?”
He checked his files and gave me the address, “52 Tavistock Square, London, W.C.1, and here is her telephone number, Museum 3488.”
I wrote a letter which included some questions about her work and, a few weeks later, received an answer from her secretary, Peggy Bolsher.
16th Dec 1931
Dear Madam,
… Mrs Woolf has always preferred to let her readers decide for themselves as to the meaning of her books, and therefore can not reply to your questions as to the autobiographical elemkent [sic] in Orlando; but it is generally known that the story is based, so far as it is based on reality, on the life of Miss Sackville West; and the house is underatood [sic] to be Knole, the home of Miss Wests [sic] ancestors in Kent.
Yours faithfully P. Bolsher (Secretary)
During the Christmas vacation, I took some of Virginia Woolf’s books with me on the train to Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s favorite vacation town. I was with four other American exchange students, each of us invited by the U.S. State Department to spend the holiday together at a ski lodge. A State Department official greeted us as we entered the lodge, told us he was in charge and that if we had any problems, we were to come to him.
He told us to meet for dinner at 6 P.M. in the ski lodge. Five townspeople were our hosts, all jovial-looking, the women in brightly colored dirndl skirts and starched white blouses, the men in knee-high leather pants, leather vests, plaid shirts, and green felt hats with feathers darting up from the brim. I was placed next to a robust, red-faced peasant in his mid-twenties. After he had drunk several beers, he became a little too friendly, putting his arm around my waist.
“You’re different, even though you’re an American,” he said to me in German. “I don’t like Americans, and I hate Jews.”
I pulled his arm away, stood up, and said, “I am an American, I am a Jew, and I will not listen to anyone denouncing my country and my people.” I stalked out.
The State Department official rushed after me. “You insulted him. I want you to go back and apologize.”
“I apologize to someone who denounces America and Jews? He should apologize to me.”
The State Department official’s face flushed with anger. “This is no way to treat our host.”
“Then I will leave here in the morning.”
Back in my bedroom, freezing with cold, I asked for hot bricks for my feet. They were poor comfort for the anger I felt that a U.S. governmental official would defend an obvious Nazi. True, I was his guest, but I did not have to submit to a Nazi insult. I was angry too that the official was more concerned with proper manners than with racial slurs.
I packed my clothes and my Virginia Woolf books the next morning and took a train to Vienna, where a friend of my sister Betty was studying medicine.
“What would you like to see today?” he asked me.
“I’d like to the see the university where you’re studying.”
“I don’t think you’re going to like what I have to show you.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see.”
We entered the lab; broken glass lay strewn on long tables and on the floor.
“Nazis came in here yesterday,” he told me, “and broke every one of our experiments. Months of work ruined.”
“It’s horrible,” I said. “How can you go on studying here?”
“I have no choice. I couldn’t get into a medical school in the States. They all have quotas limiting the number of Jewish students. I was lucky to be accepted here, and I’m going to stay.”
I left Vienna, rushed back to Cologne, a
nd continued working on the dissertation while attending courses on Nietszche, modern English literature, and Albrecht Durer in art history. At the same time, I followed the results of the German elections that were taking place every few months. The greatest lesson I learned in Germany was how one can become a dictator legally. Hitler entered every election and won nearly all of them until he reached the top and overthrew the government.
In the summer of 1932, I handed Professor Schöffler my thesis, “Virginia Woolf: A Study.” A few days later, I would take the oral examinations. Three examiners—Professor Bertram, Professor Schöffler, and a professor from the art department—sat on chairs in a circle in Bertram’s office, like inquisitors in an interrogation chamber. One of my Jewish friends in the university had told me that Professor Bertram hated Jews, hated Americans, and hated women. But he was a charismatic teacher who had taught us enthusiastically about what a great philosopher Nietzsche was.
Stories of how many students Professor Bertram had failed in their orals flashed through my brain. German students could take them over and over, but if I failed, it was the end for me.
I stood before the three men, my hands cold as ice. Professor Bertram, speaking in German, began the ordeal with questions about Nietzsche and his philosophy.
“What stands out most for you in Nietzsche’s philosophy?” he asked.
I tried to control my teeth from chattering,
“His search to lead the German people to new heights, to help Germany rise above even the evils we see confronting her today.”
What if he’s a Nazi? I thought. How will he react to my talking about evil today?
But he went on, asking more questions, until I startled myself by shouting my favorite Nietzsche line, “Nacht bin ich, ach dass ich Licht ware [Night am I; ah, that I were light].”
Professor Schöffler took over. Beads of sweat ran into my eyes.
“In your thesis,” Professor Schöffler began, “you describe how much more sympathetic Virginia Woolf’s women are than most of her men. Please explain this.”