by Ruth Gruber
Working side by side with Maressa were three brilliant young women who, as my assistants, can type as fast as I can dictate. An ad on the Barnard bulletin board in the fall of 2004 caught the eye of Leah Krauss, a freshman, whom I promptly hired. Leah proved invaluable when she found an entire plastic bin hiding against a wall beneath a stack of miscellaneous cartons. It held most of the photos of the Oswego, Exodus, and Yemenite experiences. I also dictated a good part of the book to Laura Palotie during her summer vacation in 2005. Jennifer Lai worked with me almost daily for seven months while I wrote the book.
Others to whom I'm indebted include my stepdaughter, Barbara Seaman, the prominent author and women's health activist; and her sisters, the artists Jeri Drucker and Elaine Rosner. My two surrogate daughters, Doris Schechter, who came when she was five years old among the one thousand refugees to a safe haven in Oswego, New York, and Patti Kenner, a Renaissance woman, gave me unlimited encouragement.
My heartfelt thanks go to Zachary Wagman, former able assistant to Vicky Wilson, and to the nine authors and poets of my writing group, who critique one another's work without malice. Others who have been helpful include my good friend Barbara Ribakove Gordon; the playwright and author Dan Levin; Michael Patrick Hearn, the author and critic; Leah Rabinowitz, Petrina Crock-ford, and Zachary Sussman, who all helped copyedit the book; and my children, Celia Michaels-Evans and Dr. David Michaels, whose constant faith in me has been a great source of comfort and gratitude.
I cannot end these acknowledgments without telling my daughter; her husband, Stephen Evans; their children, Michael and Lucy; and my son; his wife, Gail Dratch; and their children, Joel and Lila how thankful I am that they are my children and grandchildren, and how I hope that they will help make ours a world at peace.
The Soviet Arctic
1935–1936
In the summer of 1935, I traveled through Europe and Siberia on a fellowship given at the recommendation of the Guggenheim Foundation, studying what was happening to women under Hitler's fascism, Stalin's communism, and European democracy. At the same time, I was taking photographs and writing articles as special foreign correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune.
My last stop in Europe ended in Moscow, where I was granted an interview with Professor Otto Yulyevich Schmidt. He was the chief of the Soviet Arctic, which stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific across eleven time zones and from the Arctic Circle to the North Pole. There were rumors that the Russians were secretly preparing for war by using settlers and political prisoners to build up their Arctic empire. Those rumors were not unknown to me, since I had spent months translating German documents on the Arctic for the American Arctic explorer and anthropologist, Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Stef, as we all called him, was preparing a report for our War Department on the whole Arctic world. When Stef heard that I was going to be in the USSR, he gave me the letter of introduction that opened Professor Schmidt's door.
“So you know Stefansson,” said Professor Schmidt, who looked like a modern-day prophet in his white naval uniform and his white beard. “We consider him the greatest Arctic explorer in the world. What are you doing in Moscow?”
I launched into my study of women: What was his opinion of women in the Arctic? Why were they going? What was their status? What of the old sex prejudices—the dangers, the hardships, the cold? Did they belong?
Professor Schmidt laughed. “Do women belong in the Arctic? Why not? We have destroyed sex prejudice in industry and in politics, why not in the Arctic, too? You ask me why women are going north. For the same reasons that men are going north. I guess most people don't know this, but we have women working as mayors of cities, meteorologists, and radio operators, doing practically everything men do.”
Suddenly he looked at me as if he were seeing me for the first time. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-four,” I said, hoping I looked older and more worldly.
“How would you like to see what our women are doing up there?”
My heart was pounding. “It—it would be very interesting.”
Back in my hotel room, I telephoned Ralph Barnes, chief of the Herald Tribune bureau in Moscow. He couldn't believe that I'd met Otto Schmidt. “Don't you know every journalist in Moscow has been trying to see him? He won't see any of us, not even journalists who've been here for years.
“It's the biggest story in Moscow today,” Ralph went on. “They're sending one of their best pilots, Sigismund Levanevski, to fly from Moscow to California across the North Pole. We suspect Schmidt doesn't want to talk to reporters about the flight in case it turns into a disaster. Maybe that's why he chose to send you, to show the world that if a young woman can safely fly alone through the Arctic, they're solving one of their biggest problems: transportation. I'll write New York that you'll be cabling stories to me as you travel around, and I'll forward them to the Paris Herald Tribune, and then to the New York Herald Tribune.”
In the next days, my journalist friends began showering me with sweaters, scarves, long underwear, mittens, wool hats, and even a hot-water bottle. I packed what I could in a duffel bag, slung my camera bag over my shoulder, and, carrying my little Herm's typewriter in my hand, took off from Moscow.
Flying by commercial planes and spending nights in hotels in towns along the Siberian route, I met with people who were curious to know what an amerikanskaya jurnalistka was doing more than six thousand miles from her native Brooklyn.
A week later, I reached Irkutsk, boarded an open-cockpit seaplane, and flew to Igarka (pronounced ee-GAR-kuh), a boomtown north of the Arctic Circle. It was autumn, late afternoon, and the sun had already set on a town of one-story wooden houses stained brown with weather and smoke. Ships were in the harbor, loading lumber. Logs were floating downstream.
Because there was no hotel, I was given a small room in the port administration building. It had a bed, a desk, a chair, a nail on the wall to hang clothes, and an electric light. Outside the kitchen door was the outhouse.
It was diplomatically important that I call first on the mayor, a woman named Ostroumova, who sat at the foot of a long conference table. Her black hair was cut short; she wore a white shirt, a tie, and a blue jacket, looking more like a naval officer accustomed to giving orders than the head of a new town. When she saw me resting my camera on the table, she barked, “No pictures! Put that thing away!”
I wondered if she hated to see pictures of herself. I put the camera in my bag and handed her the letter Professor Schmidt had given me to use as I traveled. It was to inform his people that I was a journalist for the “New York Gerald Tri-boon.” (In Russian, the H is almost always turned into a G.) I could feel her contempt for me as her eyes swept across the letter.
“I don't know why Professor Schmidt sent you. I have no time for you, but you can ask me one question.”
The first question popped into my head: “What is the importance of your city?”
She answered as if she were making a speech: “Igarka is important economically and industrially. Here we cut Siberian lumber, which many experts consider the best in the world. Then we export it through the Kara Sea into the Arctic Ocean on ships that come from England, Germany, Scandinavia, and of course from Siberia.”
She stood up.
“If you want anything, call me or write me a letter and I'll see that it's arranged.”
One morning, with the temperature close to freezing, I slushed through mud and tundra to reach the chief agriculturalist of the Polar State Farm, Maria Mitrofanovna Khrenikova. She was waiting for me in her doorway, dressed in a sweater and long skirt. She had a cigarette in one hand and a pencil in the other.
Unlike the mayor, she greeted me warmly. “I'm happy to show you how we grow vegetables in the Arctic, but I don't want you to take any pictures of me.”
“Why not?”
“I'm an old lady of forty-three, and I don't like the way I look.”
“You look fine to me,” I said, once again putting my camera back in my bag
.
She looked grateful as she took my arm. “Let me show you my polar farm.”
We trudged through the fields and greenhouses in which she was experimenting with vegetables. “We try about five hundred experiments each year,” she said, “and so far, about thirty or forty have been successful. One of our real successes is kohlrabi. It's a turnip cabbage. It's delicious, even uncooked. It has more vitamin C than lemons. We no longer have to worry about people dying from scurvy up here. I call it the ‘Arctic apple.' Here, try one.” She handed me a round, reddish vegetable the size of an apple. It tasted like a combination of cabbage and apple. It was delicious.
She continued, “We're even having success with wheat growing taller than you. That's what we're doing here—feeding the people with fresh vegetables and grains and keeping them healthy.”
She invited me into her kitchen and served me hot tea with lemon.
“You must be cold,” she said. “What are you really doing up here so far from home? You're such a young woman. Aren't you homesick?”
“Not at all. I'm fascinated by people like you and your mayor, who are doing in 1935 what most of the world considers men's jobs.”
My stay in Igarka ended when I was invited to embark on the SS Anadyr. The ship had come to Igarka from Vladivostok, the major Soviet town on the Pacific Ocean. It was attempting to open the Northeast Passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic across the Arctic Ocean. The captain invited me to join the voyage.
“It's a historic trip,” he told me on the deck one day. “No commercial ship has been able to do it in one summer. Every other ship that has tried was caught in the ice floes and the fog. Yes, fog and ice. Those are our two enemies.”
He maneuvered the ship through the fog and ice until we reached our goal, Murmansk, where crowds waved and cheered, calling out in Russian, “Heroes of the Arctic!” Ships blared their welcome. Banners blew in the wind.
The Anadyr stopped at Igarka to bring new people and take others aboard. I heard about the ship and hurried to the harbor to watch it enter. Later, the captain invited me to come aboard. “Have a meal with us,” he said.
I was given my own stateroom and I ate with the officers. Among the passengers were two polar bears who had been picked up at one of the polar stations and were being brought to Murmansk. On board the ship, an older officer and a younger one began to fight over me. Rudolph Samoilovich, a renowned geologist and explorer, had told me in Leningrad that they never took a Caucasian woman on an expedition because if she became interested in one man, the rest of the men would be so jealous that they might do terrible things to one another. When the officer told me he was in love with me, I said, “I don't even know you.” He said, “You're not in love with me, you're in love with him, because he's so handsome and young. And what does he talk to you about, how deep he can go under the ice? I want to talk to you about love.”
Everything Samoilovich had warned me against, I had done unknowingly. I felt I was doing my job as I went around the ship interviewing everybody, writing their stories. I explained that to the older officer, but he didn't believe it. “You're in love with him. I can see. But I'm the one who really loves you. He's not interested.”
I said good night and avoided both men for the rest of the journey.
My bag was full of unprocessed film and dozens of notebooks as I left Murmansk, traveled across Europe by train, and stopped off in London to interview Virginia Woolf.
Three years earlier, as an exchange student at the University of Cologne, I had written the first doctoral thesis analyzing the writing of Virginia Woolf. When the thesis was published in Leipzig, Germany, in 1935, I mailed it to Mrs. Woolf and was invited to tea. It was a magical day. Dressed in a long gray silk gown, she lay in front of the fireplace with a cigarette between her fingers, looking elegant and graceful. My thesis was published for the first time in the United States in 2005 with a long preface, when three of her letters to me turned up.
In New York, Helen Rogers Reid, the owner of the Herald Tribune, invited me to her office to discuss a series of articles. I started by telling her about VW when she interrupted. “That's not what we're interested in. We want you to write a four-part series about the Soviet Arctic. We're going to syndicate them. Ruth, you've scooped the world.”
NANA (the North American Newspaper Alliance) then asked me to write even more articles on the Soviet Arctic, which they sent to newspapers around the world. I laughed as I read some of the headlines. The Milwaukee Journal took three lines to tell its readers, “American Girl First Correspondent to Study Soviet's Arctic: Dr. Ruth Gruber Flies to ‘Waste' Places of North, Finds Thriving Towns.” The Boston Globe's headline was more hilarious: “ROLLING BACK THE ICE AGE: American Woman Flies to Land of Long Nights and Long Days where Time Has Stood Frozen at Dawn.”
The top of the world. Three miles separate Alaska from the Soviet Arctic, the shortest distance between the two continents. When I joined the SS Anadyr in Igarka on its historic voyage, we sailed north along the coast of the Arctic Ocean for several weeks, until we reached Murmansk.
The book I had planned to write about women was sidelined when Simon & Schuster asked me if I had enough material to write a book about the Soviet Arctic. Max Schuster leafed through my photos and said, “We want this book.”
I sent the Trib articles to Professor Schmidt with a note that I was writing a book. He answered, “Before you finish it, you must come and visit the Yakutia Republic to see how we are taking care of the Yakut people and the other native peoples of the North.”
In the summer of 1936, I called to tell Max Schuster I was taking a few months away from the book to return to the Arctic for more material. Helen Reid again asked me to travel for the Herald Tribune.
In Moscow, I was told that I needed a visa to enter the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Each day I visited the visa office only to be told, “Not today. Come back tomorrow.”
Time was my enemy. I spent the days in libraries reading up on Yakutsk and visiting with friends. At lunch one day in the restaurant of the Novo Moscovskaya Hotel, where I was staying, I asked Maurice Hindus, the well-known American novelist and Soviet expert, how to break through Russian and Yakut bureaucracy.
“You can't speed up bureaucrats,” he said to console me. “Remember, they haven't allowed any of us into Yakutsk, though God knows I've tried. Just be patient. The Russians invited you back because you're willing to see with an open mind. You're willing to learn. Some of us old-timers are cynical or biased or weary. You haven't gotten to that stage yet.”
I told myself, “He thinks I'm naive. I am naive. Naive and female in a tough man's world.” Now twenty-five, I wanted to be a working stiff like the male correspondents who were traveling across the world with a typewriter and camera.
“Maurice,” I asked him, “how would you sum up this year of 1936?”
“Darkness,” he said. “Blackness. Spain ripped apart by civil war. Ethiopia crushed by Mussolini. Hitler arming troops, terrorizing Jews. Russia arresting Bolsheviks, some of them my old friends.”
After three interminable weeks, the Yakutia visa office in Moscow finally stamped my passport. Wasting no time, I bought a train ticket and climbed aboard the Trans-Siberian Railway Express.
The days were hot, and the landscape was a canvas of unbroken forests with intermittent towns where the train stopped for passengers and mail and where we could run out to buy food. After five days, I reached Irkutsk. From here I was to fly north to the Arctic.
I spent a restless week at the Grand Hotel, waiting for the plane. War was in the air. In the parks, children and their parents practiced putting on gas masks. In the evenings, after work, they learned how to shoot.
Finally, at six one morning in a heavy rainstorm, I was driven to the water-front, where I saw a Junkers monoplane. It looked like a slender bird with the markings in Cyrillic letters: CCCP-H5 (USSR-North 5). Victor Galishev, a tall, brawny pilot in a long brown leather jacket with a scarf a
round his neck and a cigarette in his fingers, helped me aboard. There was one other passenger: Ilya Andreevich Adamovich, a political leader who was flying home to Yakutsk. I knew he was either important or rich: his mouth was filled with gold teeth interspersed with pearly white ones. He told me, “Everyone in Yakutsk is waiting for you. Professor Schmidt sent word for us to take good care of you.”
We flew along the Angara River and then along the Lena River, which Adamovich pronounced lee-YAY-nah. The inside of the narrow plane was freezing and pitch black. Galishev insisted, despite my protests, that I wear his thick leather coat.
In the darkness, I made my way to a tiny window and looked down. Lake Baikal lay in the distance, separating Russia from Outer Mongolia. Adamovich joined me at the window and pointed out the sights. “We're flying over the Alexandrovsky Central, a terrible prison.”
Below us was a large stone fortress. I shuddered as Adamovich went on. “Many of our leaders were imprisoned inside it or exiled close to it. Stalin, Molotov, others—they were all in this area. Many of the others were killed.”
It was the gulag.
On the third day, we reached Yakutsk. An outdoor thermometer read eighty degrees Fahrenheit. The heat was welcome. We were greeted by a tall, heavy woman. Adamovich introduced her. “She is Tonya Kliukvina. She will be your guide. She can do anything you need, show you where to send your cables, be your secretary, take you all over Yakutsk.”
She gripped my hand like a wrestler. I suspected her real job might be to spy on me. I decided to act casual and escape her whenever possible. We were both housed in Adamovich's modern home, while he stayed with friends. We each had our own bedroom. Adamovich left us his young live-in cook and housekeeper, whom I trusted and who soon became my friend.