The Untold Journey

by Natalie Robins

  Diana Rubin had entered college in 1921. She was just sixteen. “In those days all you had to do to get into college was pass your college entrance exams,” she later wrote. “I certainly didn’t feel I’d been touched by the hand of God because I was admitted to Radcliffe. I picked it out of the telephone book.” This was not exactly true. She had read about it in her high school library and liked that it was near Boston—and near Harvard.

  She was one of three Jewish women in her freshman class and the only one to admit to being so. She was a novelty, so much so that one of her dorm mates asked her to come and meet her parents, who lived in nearby Concord, because the family had never before known a Jew. (She didn’t go.) Ancestry was often a topic at dormitory meals, where after saying grace—“Oh Lord, we thank thee for these and for all Thy gifts, for Christ’s sake, Amen”—the students ate their food at tables covered with white damask and lace doilies and were served by waitresses in black uniforms, white caps, and aprons. (Maids regularly cleaned and polished their dormitory rooms.) Diana said that at dinner she was often “tempted to interpose my rude boast: no, my ancestors hadn’t sailed on the Mayflower; my father had peddled macaroons on the Staten Island ferry, a different test of seaworthiness.” Over time such verbal temptations would be voiced—even pompously, some would later say—although Diana’s witty remarks were her way of making up for the conventional sense of humor she felt she lacked, the writing of Snitkin notwithstanding.

  She was firmly middle class, and her family very comfortably well-off—they even had a chauffeur, although mainly because neither parent could drive—until the stock market crash of 1929 ruined her father’s women’s hosiery business. His showcase factory—Merit Hosiery Corporation—on Long Island was said to be one of the first all-glass plants in America, a factory with music piped throughout its four stories, a medical office with a nurse on site, and a large cafeteria providing hot meals for all the employees.

  The Rubin family moved several times, from an apartment near 225th Street in the East Bronx, where Diana was born in 1905, to a spacious house in Larchmont in Westchester County, New York, that had a yard with peach and plum trees tended by a part-time gardener and even a flock of chickens, cared for by Mrs. Rubin. “My mother with her own beautiful hands chopped off the heads of the chickens she prepared for dinner—she was a gifted cook,” Diana said; “our Larchmont household was much more a European than a Westchester home, much more rural than suburban. Pickles and sauerkraut were stored in barrels in the cellar. We ate spareribs and tripe and stews made out of the innards of large animals.… When it snowed—and often the snow was so heavy that the bell tolled at the town firehouse to announce that school would be closed—my mother rose early to clear a path from our porch to the street for my father.” A few years later the Rubins moved to an even bigger house, in New Rochelle, because that town had a Jewish population (which Larchmont did not). In 1914, when Diana was nine, the family moved again, to another large house at 935 Ocean Parkway in the Midwood section of Brooklyn (to be close to a braid factory Joseph Rubin had recently set up in Bush Terminal, the first industrial complex in New York to house a multitude of warehouses and manufacturing plants). And finally, in 1922, when Diana was in her second year at Radcliffe, the family settled in an elegant apartment at 498 West End Avenue near Eighty-Fourth Street, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The Rubins were now part of well-to-do metropolitan Jewish society.

  Joseph Rubin, raised in a Warsaw ghetto with study of the Talmud his sole education, had left Poland at eighteen to avoid military service. To reach the boat that would take him to America, he had to hide under the thick straw in a peddler’s cart to avoid being seen by border guards. It was not difficult because he was small, just five feet, one inch. Rubin was a little odd-looking, with a head that seemed too large for his small frame. He arrived on Ellis Island penniless, and because he spoke no English, the only job he could find in immigrant-filled New York City was one selling fresh-baked cookies. He needed no words for that; the rich almond aroma of the macaroons spoke for him.

  Diana wrote that she was her father’s favorite child because he played with her “more precisely than he did with her siblings” (an older sister by five years and brother by three years) and that although her father could be a bully to just about everyone who crossed his path (he once told her when she expressed an interest in singing that he’d build her “a stage in the toilet”), she was, in fact, devoted to him because he was one of the most intelligent people she ever knew. She said also that he was the most ardent believer in the power of the mind over the body she would probably ever come across in her lifetime. From her father she learned at a young age that she was smart, really smart, and that she had something neither of her siblings had: a special kind of intelligence that, her father taught her, was connected to feelings and imagination. Young Diana Rubin learned also to be sensitive to seemingly contradictory situations. She figured out how to cope with—and even rise above—inconsistencies others couldn’t handle. She knew her parents were dedicated to the well-being of their three children, yet the word love was never used around them except, she would later recall, “in irony or mockery.” She knew as a young girl that a dark band of mistrust held the family together. “Fear was my accustomed state as a child,” she later said, “a condition so prevailing that it’s a wonder that it left room for my other emotions.”

  She suspected that her mother was threatened by her youngest daughter’s intelligence. “I was locked in a kind of negative confirmation of her poor opinion of me,” Diana said. “My mother became a little paranoid toward my father and me, and she believed my father was bribing me to say certain things to put me on his side.”

  Her mother, Sadie Helene Forbert, was an orphan who lived with an older married brother she worshipped and a loathed sister-in-law so parsimonious she bought teacups with ridges at the bottom so her guests would think they were stirring lumps of sugar. Forbert, a lithe, seductive beauty who loved to sing, had also come to New York at eighteen but from the Polish countryside, far from the dark and crowded Jewish neighborhoods of Warsaw. She earned a living by modeling in New York’s garment district—she was a perfect 36-24-36—and eight years after her arrival she met Joseph Rubin through her brother. She was at first put off by Rubin’s lack of height—when he sat his feet didn’t even touch the floor—but she was soon captivated by his mind. After her marriage she and her new husband moved to California and lived in the Chinatown section of San Francisco, where Joseph sold straw braid from their tiny apartment, and Sadie created elaborate women’s hats from the braid that remained unsold. She had given up modeling because she grew tired of rebuffing unwanted advances, even though she continued to have admirers—maybe even more than admirers—up until her death at fifty-three of an anemia that was incurable in the 1920s.

  When Diana picked Radcliffe, Mrs. Rubin was puzzled by her daughter’s choice. What about nearby Adelphi? (At the time the college was situated in Brooklyn, not Long Island.) Why did she have to go away to college? In truth, she wanted her daughter to be done with her education, to stay in New York under her supervision, and to find a suitable husband. But Joseph Rubin prevailed on his wife, and the teenage Diana went up to Cambridge.

  She was not at first a serious student. Halfway through her first year she was failing all her courses, not only because she was not studying but also because she didn’t even see a reason to go to her classes. Fortunately, one of her professors—Charles Homer Haskins, one of the country’s first experts in medieval history and a longtime adviser to President Woodrow Wilson on government affairs (he was present at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 where the Treaty of Versailles was drawn up), looked up her high school record. Professor Haskins discovered that Diana had attended the rigorously academic Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, the first secondary school to be chartered in New York State, and realized his student was capable of outstanding work. (Her brother also went to Erasmus, but her sister went to a
commercial high school where she learned to be a secretary.) Professor Haskins warned Diana she’d flunk out if she didn’t start making an effort. Out of sheer politeness, she took his advice.

  She majored in art history (as at most colleges in the 1920s, the study stopped short of modernism) and thought she could eventually work in a New York museum, the Frick or the Metropolitan. She was not going to graduate immediately into marriage as most young women did. A similar-minded friend suggested that a private gallery or even a bookstore would be a suitable place to work. Her father, a socialist at the time (he would eventually become a Republican), didn’t understand what art history could do for his daughter’s future and wanted her to become what he would have liked to have been: a political journalist. Nevertheless, if art was really what she wanted, he recommended with his typical crude bluntness that she sweep floors in a Manhattan art gallery “to learn the business.”

  Diana had become something of a star in the art history departments of both Radcliffe and Harvard, although it hardly mattered: her Jewish name would bar her from desirable jobs. But a favorite professor who happened to be Jewish—Paul J. Sachs, the creator of one of the first museum courses in America—asked her to become his assistant at Harvard’s art museum, the Fogg. (Sachs’s maternal grandfather had founded Goldman Sachs, and his father was one of the original partners.) Diana turned her professor down, as she did his suggestion that she start a Fine Arts department at Mount Holyoke College. She told him that she needed to return to New York. Her mother had been ill for many years, and her condition was worsening, and she did not have long to live. But the real reason she wanted to return to West End Avenue was that she was not ready to become independent.

  Diana had wanted to sing in the Radcliffe Choral Society (she had minored in music, having inherited her mother’s good singing voice) but didn’t make the cut and later quipped that “they refused to have a Jewish chorus line.” She was, however, allowed to sing in a small independent choir that often performed before special lectures. She recalled that “religious bias was the given of anyone’s experience as a Jew in America in my girlhood and young womanhood, annoying but manageable.” Her father had wanted his children to learn about being a Jew and had given them casual Sunday school exposure, as well as some perfunctory involvement in certain holidays.

  Diana always found a way to deal with whatever life brought her, from the limitations of her parents to the constant teasing, often bordering on the sadistic, she received from her siblings, even her brother, Samuel, once throwing tennis balls at her treasured porcelain tea set, breaking every cup and saucer, or Cecilia tossing her younger sister’s cherished, if eccentric, collection of ledgers and account books into the basement furnace, reducing them to ashes.

  When Diana’s mother told her she must not ever try to surpass her brother and sister, she listened as she was trained to even though her every fiber resisted such advice. “I raged all the way to submission,” she later wrote. Her mother’s order of “don’t win a tennis match with your brother when he visits your summer camp” made her arm and hand tremble so much that it took years for her to play the game again successfully. During her only experience riding, when her brother brought his horse next to hers, she knew she must not attempt to gallop ahead, so she fell off the horse. “I brought with me to college and took away with me from college a fear of success that could never be matched by my desire to succeed,” she insisted; yet Diana would look for ways to counter such inhibitions, which never completely stopped her from reaching for something she wanted, even when it involved a mere object. As a child, when she discovered that her mother had removed her picture from her father’s watch (she said her mother considered her homely), she made up her mind that someday she would own the watch despite tradition holding that it belong to her brother. In fact, it became the only family keepsake she wanted. Many decades later, when she received her bittersweet prize, she saw it still as a triumph over a treachery.

  In spite of everything, Diana respected her mother for many things—her lack of vanity, her elegant simplicity, and her meticulous work ethic, which extended to embroidering the family’s tablecloths and napkins, canning all the fruits and vegetables, and scrubbing the crevices of furniture with a toothbrush. “My mother just didn’t look like other women—she wouldn’t have dreamed of using colored nail polish. She didn’t go to beauty parlors except very rarely,” Diana said. “I don’t know where she found her clothes, but they had no relation to anything anyone else wore. She wasn’t the least bit interested in being in style, but was just innately one of the most elegant people. She wasn’t boastful.” Diana was perplexed that her mother had no friends independent of her father, not even among the neighbors. And Diana could not ever feel the warmth she saw her friends sharing with their mothers. Her mother thought she was selfish. They shared no common ground, no hobbies or interests. Her mother had discouraged her even from reading because she thought her daughter would discover in books a life beyond the one her parents had provided her; reading might turn Diana from her family.

  She took only two courses in literature at Radcliffe: a semester of Tolstoy and a yearlong course on romantic and Victorian poetry, taught by John Livingston Lowes, a Coleridge and Chaucer scholar. She wrote what she considered her best paper for him, a comparison between Swinburne’s epic poem Tristram of Lyonesse and Matthew Arnold’s narrative poem Tristan and Iseult. She later said that “contrary to Radcliffe habit” she did only a minimum of secondary reading but applied herself “diligently to the texts,” adding that “the project strangely excited” her. She received only a C-minus for her work and said that when the paper was returned to her, “it looked like an illuminated manuscript, the margins were so richly decorated with the instructor’s queries about my right to the opinion I expressed. ‘Source?’ he demanded. ‘Source?’ ‘Source?’ I should have written, ‘Me,’ under each of these queries and confronted the instructor with his implied charge that I was using without acknowledgment ideas that weren’t my own, but I was unable to do this at the time.”

  She was troubled about the study habits of her fellow students, noting that “if the authorities saw the state the girls work themselves up to they would cut out exams altogether.” She included herself, of course: “Studied all day for my Fine Arts exam. I’m simply crazy about that one, too. Honestly, these are the awfulest [sic] days I’ve ever lived through. A continual state of nervous strain.… Slept almost all morning. Studied all afternoon and evening until 12:20. It’s a great life if you don’t weaken. I’ll be a wreck by the time these exams are over.”

  In general, she thought her education was much too focused on the historical instead of the critical, though she did learn to apply high standards to whatever she studied, most likely as a result of her membership in the Debating Society, where she argued her positions with a ferocious righteousness. She also knew from an early age that she had a capacity for abstract thought. Diana often drove friends and relatives mad with her unforgiving emphasis on logic, an attribute acquired partly as a response to her mother’s habit of dodging the truth by telling white lies. So in her childhood, when her mother would announce, “there are no cookies,” and Diana knew there was indeed a cupboard full of them, she would confront her mother, who would then respond, “Well, it doesn’t make any difference if there are or are not any cookies; you can’t have any.” Such twists of logic drove young Diana into a frenzy. When her brother and sister went off to grade school, Diana, still at home, would “tag at her mother’s heels” and ask, “Mama, what should I do?” Her mother would tell her with a straight face, “Put your head out of the window and holler, ‘fire!’ ” That sort of treatment made her desperate, she recalled. As she grew up, she learned to calm herself by framing her world with logic—all words, phrases, sentences, and punctuation had to make the strictest sense, or she would be forced back into what she considered an irrational universe.

  Diana managed to defy her mother by reading consta
ntly. At a bookmobile near her summer camp, she had bought with her own money a volume of Rudyard Kipling’s poems, the first book she had ever purchased. Her father liked to collect books and bought dozens of leather-bound volumes from a door-to-door salesman. But Diana was warned not to dirty them or wrinkle their pages and was told to wash her hands before touching them. With all these deterrents, she let the books—by Mark Twain, Balzac, Hugo, Moliere, and George Eliot, among others—remain in the family’s two glass-fronted mahogany bookcases. (Her father dipped into them only occasionally.) Instead, Diana snuck copies of her brother Sam’s Rover Boys books, an adventure series involving three brothers at a boarding school; the stories were full of antiauthoritarian pranks and mischief and often featured the latest turn-of-the-century inventions like cars and airplanes. At the local library she read George Barr McCutcheon’s popular Gaustarkian romances (so named after a fictional country in Eastern Europe), stories that told of strange conspiracies among royalty. She read Mark Twain and came to know Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women by heart. For what she called its “sexual excitation,” she read the novel by Theophile Gautier Mademoiselle de Maupin—based on a colorful seventeenth-century singer and swordswoman. “Sex was volcanic in the mores of my girlhood,” she added; “it roared its path over the virgin land.” So Diana also read to discover what she had not yet discovered firsthand, or had heard about in her high school’s Twenty-Nine Lessons in Home Hygiene, a course given by the American Red Cross. And then there was also the book her father had brought back for her brother and sister from The Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, the institution run by Dr. J. H. Kellogg, the brother of the creator of corn flakes. Joseph Rubin had become a disciple, believing that the body needed proper diet and adequate exercise and that 90 percent of disease started in the stomach or bowels. For weeks he insisted that the family eat only dates, figs, olives, and nuts, until Mrs. Rubin put a stop to it.