New Search

If you are not happy with the results below please do another search

33 search results for: ruth gruber

1

The Legacy of the Late Ruth Gruber Lives On

I keep a Google Alert on for my old friend and longtime author, the humanitarian and photojournalist Ruth Gruber (1911-2016), as I still enjoy seeing mentions of her and her many accomplishments when they appear in media, as they still do with some frequency. One such item popped up yesterday.

I was tickled to see that one of the refugees Ruth helped rescue and escort to America on the Henry Gibbons ship in 1944—as related in her book Haven: The Dramatic Story of 1,000 WW II Refugees and How They Came to America, and in the 2000 CBS mini-series “Haven,” with Natasha Richardson playing Ruth’s role—has celebrated her 101st birthday. As reported by journalist John Benson in this Cleveland[.]com article,:

“Liberated by the British in 1944, Musafia, her mother and sister were one of 1,000 women and children selected by Ruth Gruber, per instructions from President Roosevelt, to be relocated to the United States.

They arrived with $17 at Fort Ontario camp in upstate New York, where Musafia finished high school and learned how to type.
‘My mother and sister, we were always together,’ Musafia said. ‘In that respect, we were very lucky. My father was a different story.’

Sadly, while her father escaped the Nazis by fleeing to Hungary to live with his sister, he eventually died in a Russian prison.

After spending two years at Fort Ontario, the family relocated to Cleveland. Eventually, Musafia moved to New York City, where she married a fellow Holocaust refugee.
They were married for 36 years; Musafia said he died 36 years ago.
She lived in Florida for a while before deciding to move closer to her niece, who lives in Northeast Ohio.
‘In my old age, I figured it was time to come here, so I bought a condo,’ Musafia said. ‘I don’t particularly like the weather, but what can you do.’
As a Holocaust survivor who sees fascism once again rearing its head, Musafia offers sage advice.
‘Believe what they tell you,’ Musafia said. ‘People can do very good and people can do very, very bad. What’s going on now, some people can’t believe it. But I believe it because I know what I went through.’”
In Haven, there is a census printed at the back of the book listing the names of the refugee passengers on the Henry Gibbins. I took a photo of the census and include it here for the record. On the fourth line down from the top left, it shows that Gordona (spelled Gordana in Benson’s article) Milinovic (Musafia being her married name) was born Jan 2, 1922 in Yugoslavia, thus confirming the content of the story.
[caption id="attachment_13723" align="alignright" width="175"] In 2000, “Haven” was adapted for a TV movie with Natasha Richardson playing Ruth Gruber. That year, I published a trade paperback edition of Haven with a Foreword by Ruth’s niece Dava Sobel, author of the bestseller Longitude.[/caption]
A hearty happy birthday to Gordana Musafia, who’s lived her long life thanks to Ruth Gruber, and the USA who brought her out of war-torn Europe.

If Ruth Gruber is a new name to you, I invite you to read some of the other posts on this blog about her, and view some of her photographs, like the ones below, of refugees embracing, and a photo of Ruth from a different period in the 1940s when she worked for the FDR administration in Alaska.

2

Ruth Gruber: Friend, Mentor, Surrogate Grandmother by M.G. Turner

[caption id="attachment_17658" align="alignleft" width="192"] Ruth Gruber April 2007[/caption]

A few months ago, while undergoing an ultrasound for something disconcerting I’d found on my body—which mercifully turned out to be, officially, nothing—I was suddenly hit by a wave of gratitude for an old friend: author and photojournalist Ruth Gruber, who despite our wide age gap was one of my closest confidants, and even at times a surrogate grandmother.

The reason for my gratitude was simple: in 1944, as a newly appointed general by the Roosevelt Administration she personally escorted 972 refugees to America; many, though not all, were Jewish. Among these refugees was a man named Alex Margulis who, as chronicled in Ruth’s 1983 book Haven, would go on to invent the CT Scan, MRI, and other examples of medical imaging technology which have saved an unfathomable and beautifully absurd number of lives. As I was having my procedure I couldn’t help but think of Ruth, and all she meant to me, and to the multitude of people who knew her. After passing away in 2016, at the age of 105—nerd that I am, I admit it’s titillating to use the actual numerals for her age, as in the Chicago Manual of Style only numbers under 100 are spelled out—she left behind a legion of admirers, followers, and yes, even fans. I consider myself as belonging to the latter category, but at the start my connection to her was a personal one. Yet beyond personal and professional appreciation lies my aforementioned feeling, gratitude: especially as the technician utilized that life-saving device and informed me with a wink that, because the doctor did not want to see any more, I was “good.”

***

I don’t recall the first time Ruth and I met, but it had to have been around my seventh or eighth year—as in 2004, when I was still very young I subjected her to an interview, filmed by my mother on a camcorder, one steamy day in August, while I was on summer vacation. I still have the video, rendered into digital form but no less evocative of that early VHS period: amid wavy lines there I am, in almost knee-high white socks, sitting lackadaisically in a stuffed armchair, rattling off a list of question I had memorized, forgotten, then memorized again; while Ruth herself, looking dignified and very well at just ninety-three, listened and nodded and tried with honesty and precision to answer my questions—the questions of an eight year old who was very much wowed by her, and kept repeating after her every statement “That’s a great answer!” in an effort to impress a woman who could not have been kinder-hearted or more willing to engage with a young person.

It is important to stress the reason for my early acquaintanceship with her which soon blossomed into a friendship: my father was her editor—and according to a quip she made on more than one occasion at dinner parties and events to the chagrin of some present, he was her favorite editor. This favoritism was likely rooted in her appreciation of his no-nonsense editing style, and his direct, fearless approach to publishing. It matched her own brand of journalism, which was in the words of one of her mentors Edward Steichen to “Take pictures with her heart.” Not only did she take pictures with her heart, she wrote with it too! As any of her readers know there is a declarative majesty to her prose that is only outmatched by her subject matter; she had so much to say and a great deal of life experience to back it up—whether becoming the youngest Ph.D. in the world, doing so in Germany in the mid-thirties and seeing the tail end of the Weimar Republic give way to Nazi Germany; or having tea with Virginia Woolf in London—the very subject of her thesis—and being struck by the author’s corrosive nonchalance, and low-grade anti-semitism, while still managing to hold a nuanced view of her; or when in 1944 she, as mentioned, escorted by ship nearly a thousand refugees who were escaping persecution in Europe, and fighting for them to be accepted by the virulently anti-immigrant State Department, despite President Roosevelt being considered a friend to the Jews.

This is to say, she had something unique—content. Like other, more famous writers and journalists of the time—Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Gellhorn come to mind—after literally living her stories, she put her experiences into words that could be understood by everyone. But her egalitarian style permeated not just her written work but the way she spoke about her career—this held even while speaking about it to me on that sultry day in 2004 when my mom and I stopped by to see her to conduct and impromptu interview. There would be many days and evenings like this, when we would look at each other, and one of us would ask: “Do you want to go see Ruth?” and the answer was always, invariably, the same.

***

Ruth had been living in the Eldorado—a quintessentially regal Central Park West apartment building—for several decades when I first became acquainted with her. Just going over there was a grand experience for me; at the time I had not yet glimpsed New York’s magisterial splendor; the lobby looked like an art deco palace. But visiting Ruth was the start of something more than architectural or stylistic appreciation. I can easily recall these visits as the first time I considered an importance beyond the aesthetic; or rather, that the aesthetic and the moral and meaningful could coalesce into something highly impactful: the notion that one’s life could be an adventure.

[caption id="attachment_17660" align="alignleft" width="202"] Ruth Gruber embarking on the voyage to bring nearly 1000 refugees to America in 1944. They sailed from Naples, Italy, crossing the Atlantic protected by a convoy of US warships. The story is told in her book, “Haven,'” and the 2000 CBS miniseries of the same name, with Natasha Richardson cast as Ruth.[/caption]

It was this adventurous spirit that Ruth embodied, as well as a presentation of self that prized dignity and demeanor. Whenever we saw her—it didn’t matter if we had come on three consecutive Sundays—she got dressed up; always with her light gold hair perfectly coiffed; her jewelry always tasteful; her greetings broad and demonstrably delighted, as if she wanted us to know, really know, how glad she was that we had stopped by. And we stopped by many times, whether to simply have tea and talk, or to take her out to Central Park, or even have dinner with her.
It was on these nights that my conception of an intellectual community was formed—namely that such a thing could exist, and that I could be a part of it. This feeling carried over into my schooling; in college I had the unique experience of going with my archives class to visit the New York Public Library to see Virginia Woolf’s diaries, which my friend had been mentioned in, however unkindly by the sadly disturbed writer, whom Ruth saw as a woman trapped by her own mind. Though Woolf used an anti-semitic slur in her journal to describe Ruth, she did not hold a grudge beyond feelings of sadness and disappointment.

[caption id="attachment_17661" align="alignright" width="219"] Ruth Gruber photo “The Embrace”[/caption]

While I stood with my class looking at Woolf’s pages—most of which were written in a flourishing lavender hand—I knew that among them were those referring to my friend.

Despite Woolf’s callousness, I cherish these kinds of synchronicities. Growing up in New York brings one into the vicinity of great people, particularly if your parents happen to know some of them. These same great people can in their own way sum up entire eras, especially if the person in question is a centenarian. Ruth was born under President Taft and died in November of 2016 while Barack Obama was mercifully still President—though about to leave office to make way for the degraded eventuality that was to come. In one final act of goodness, to add to her litany of mensch-like deeds, the recently turned 105-year-old was taken by her daughter to the polls and cast her last vote for Hillary Clinton. It is unclear whether in the coming hours Ruth was cognizant of the election results, or fully grasped their implication, but it didn’t matter, for she had raised her voice one more time. This was something she’d grown accustomed to, whether from her efforts to counter the anti-semitism and isolationism of the United States government; or in 1944 reporting for the NY Post on the fate of refugees on the ship Exodus; or her early contributions to the newly-named field of Feminism in the 1930s.

***

[caption id="attachment_17662" align="alignleft" width="300"] Ruth Gruber is showing me a hinged, painted case my mother, artist Kyle Gallup, made. Inset in the case is a collage Kyle also made comprised of photos Ruth took documenting the refugees on the Exodus ship. It became part of the cover art for Ruth’s book—”Exodus 1947: The Ship that Launched a Nation”—which my father published with Ruth in 1999.[/caption]

Despite her far-reaching influence, my dearest recollections of Ruth remain rooted in more personal soil. She was simply an older woman whom I cared for, and who at times felt like a surrogate grandmother to me. Given that my biological grandparents lived far away and I did not see them often, Ruth became a special friend, who was not relation nor teacher, but a figure whose influence was hard to define or put into a single box. It was in fact so unique, that, due to my own immature faculties at the time, I was unable to fully comprehend how lucky we were to know her and be close to her.

Yet where nomenclature fails, one recollection appears to sum up this relationship. And it was that, in my third grade year, she took it upon herself to attend Grandparents Day on my behalf. While most children had their family relations with them, Ruth was at my side, explaining who she was to the awed faces of the class. I remember my mother thanking her, and Ruth saying it was her pleasure—in her parlance everything was almost always “her pleasure”—and walking her back to her Central Park West apartment building where I knew we would soon have another one of our special get-togethers. Sometimes the canvas of memory is confused, disjointed, opaque; but not my memories of Ruth. There is a single beam of clear light which is cast upon all my imagistic renderings of her, and it starkly illuminates the privilege of having sat in her company, of hearing her stories that always seemed to conclude thematically with the victories of dignity over oppression, of passion over indifference—I took these tales to heart without deciding to, for there was something so indelible about her influence. Among her many gifts was the ability to make you feel that life could be made better by the simple act of putting pen to paper, or pressing the camera shutter. Sometimes the simplest actions have the greatest impact; sometimes saving one life can save many others.

Ruth’s influence transcends an easily measurable calculus; many close to her said if she had been a man she would have won the Noble Peace Prize, but Ruth herself did not think in those terms. She simply did the work she was passionate about, and believed to be right, and encouraged others to do the same. For a long life well-lived what more can anyone ask?

M.G. Turner

October 1, 2022

3

For my friend Ruth Gruber, Sept 30, 1911-Nov 17, 2016

The funeral for my dear friend and longtime author Ruth Gruber will be this morning, Nov 20, 11am at B’nai Jeshurun on W 88th St in Manhattan. She died on Thursday at age 105. One of her mentors was Edward Steichen, who urged her, “Take pictures with your heart,” which she always did. Here’s an album with two pictures of her, and a few of her images. Among her hundreds of great photographs, these three are some of her most moving. Links below offer more info on Ruth’s long life and career.

 

NY Times obituary

AP obit

All my blog posts on Ruth Gruber

 

 

4

As Alaska Notches 56 Years Since It Became a State, a Note on Ruth Gruber’s Role in the March to Statehood

On this date in 1959 Alaska became the US’s 49th State. Til then the Interior Department had a big hand in administering the territory, though there was also local government. Spanning 1941-46, Ruth Gruber—now 104, and the most senior living member of FDR administration—worked in the Cabinet-level department, and during that time served in Alaska as Secretary Harold Ickes’ Special Representative to the region. Her work there began in Spring 1941, a strategic place to be, especially when just six months later the Japanese air force bombed Pearl Harbor. After Hawaii, Alaska was the US’s other key Pacific outpost. She was a natural for the role in Alaska, which she got at age 29, as Harold Ickes had read her 1937 book I Went to the Soviet Arctic, a travelogue she wrote after becoming the first journalist or scholar—Westerner or Soviet, male or female—to travel in Siberia and observe the country’s population centers above the Arctic Circle. She explains how she got that earlier opportunity—after a Letter of Introduction to Soviet specialists by the mentor and Arctic explorer Viljalmur Stefanson, in her terrific memoir Ahead of Time: My Early Years as a Foreign Correspondent. One role she took on in Alaska was the establishment of homesteading in the vast land, anticipating especially the appeal the offer of land to settlers could have for US troops being demobilized as WWII ended. Her efforts helped lead ultimately to statehood, not even fifteen years following war’s end. You can read much more about Ruth’s career in her 18 books, 6 of which I helped her publish, many available nowadays from Open Road Integrated Media, and in my many blog posts about her, linked to here. Here she was photographed with local people.

5

Celebrating with Ruth Gruber on her 104th Birthday

The 104th birthday of my longtime author—the storied photojournalist Ruth Gruber, with whom I’ve published six books—was last Wednesday, so yesterday Kyle and I joined Ruth and her daughter Celia to celebrate the latest milestone in Ruth’s remarkable and event-filled life—from meeting Virginia Woolf in the 1930s to journeying through the Soviet Arctic later that decade to working in Alaska as a representative of the FDR administration to chronicling the voyage of the real-life Exodus ship in 1947 to being honored by the International Center of Photography (ICP) in 2012, aspects of her life I’ve chronicled several times on this blog. Photos from our birthday celebration are below, but first note that the ICP’s exhibit of Ruth’s work is now at Brooklyn College where it will be up until February 12, 2016, with an opening this Thursday, October 8. NB: Five of the six books I published w/Ruth in the 1990s and 2000s, including her two remarkable memoirs Ahead of Time and Inside of Time, as well as her book on Virginia Woolf, are available from Open Road Media.

Ruth birthday cake 2Ruth birthday cake

6

Appreciating Ruth Gruber’s Lifetime of Humanitarian Activism and Photojournalism, at the JCC til Feb 25

Ruth at JCC, Dec 9, 2014Kyle, Ewan, and I had a great time last night at the opening reception for an exhibit of Ruth Gruber’s photojournalism at the JCC. This is essentially the same exhibit that was mounted in 2012 at the International Center of Photography, the year that Ruth was awarded the ICP’s Infinity Award. If you’re unfamiliar with Ruth’s work, this show is a great way to begin. If you’re not in NYC to go see it, this link will lead you to many of the images. If you’re not familiar with her remarkable career, here’s a primer:

Born in 1911 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Ruth was always precocious. She received her B.A. from NYU at age sixteen; an M.A. in German language and literature from the University of Wisconsin at eighteen; and at twenty was offered a fellowship to participate in an exchange program at the University of Cologne. Early in her studies there, in 1931, she was asked by a professor if she would consider reading the work of Virginia Woolf, and writing a doctoral thesis about her. I’ve imagined that Ruth’s professors must have realized they had this bright female student in their midst, a reader of English and German who could tackle the Englishwoman’s books and write about them, asking themselves when they might again have such an opportunity, especially with the inter-war years—which they turned out to be—increasingly fraught by international peril? Ruth demurred—she had not yet read Woolf’s work, she could afford to be in Cologne only one year, her parents would not let her stay longer, the work would surely take more than a year—but soon, though she hadn’t read any of Woolf’s books when the professors asked her, she said, “I’ll try.” Taping up a picture of Woolf in her room, she undertook to read all of Woolf’s books then published, pondering their meaning and the significance of Woolf’s creative enterprise.

Despite the notoriety that her youthful doctorate brought her (she was heralded in the NY Times as the “World’s Youngest Ph.D.”), the Depression was in full swing and Ruth found little work upon her return to the States. She continued traveling and trying her hand at journalism and photography. In 1935, she was delighted when the thesis on Woolf was published as a book in Germany by the Tauchnitz Press, which had a list of English-language titles, including Woolf’s The Waves. Ruth sent a copy of her thesis to Woolf in London, thus beginning a lengthy correspondence between the two women that culminated in Ruth paying a visit to Woolf at her Bloomsbury home in 1936 or ’37. For more on this period of Ruth’s life, including the meeting between the two women, you can also read my post, Virginia Woolf and Ruth Gruber, Driven to Create as Women her on this blog.

After her experiences in Germany, she won a Fulbright scholarship, which included attending a rally at which Hitler spoke, where the foreign students were seated very near him, she devoted an extended period of independent study to the examination of “women under democracy, fascism, and communism.” She became the first Western journalist to tour the Soviet Arctic, and in 1937 published her second book, I Went to the Soviet Arctic, which she parlayed in to a new career as a public lecturer. In 1940, Ruth continued her association with the peoples of the polar regions when she became a member of the FDR administration, under Interior Secretary Harold Ickes who named her his special field representative for the territory of Alaska. She is doubtless one of the Roosevelt administration’s eldest surviving staffers. She worked for the government off and on during and immediately after WWII, leaving at times to work as a foreign correspondent for the New York Post and the Herald Tribune. In 1944, Ickes assigned Ruth a mission she urged him to give her, that of escorting nearly 1,000 WWII survivors from Naples, Italy, on the Henry Gibbins, a ship that also carried wounded American troops back to the US. In 1947, she was working as a foreign correspondent when she covered the fate of the Exodus ship, and chased its thousands of stateless passengers all over the Mediterranean and central Europe the summer of that year.

To read more about Ruth Gruber’s lifetime of humanitarian activism I recommend any of the six books I published with her, five of which are currently available in new editions from Open Road Integrated Media, whose executives Jane Friedman and Philip Rappaport were also on hand at the JCC. The titles I published with Ruth are 1) Exodus 1947: The Ship that Launched a Nation, Introduction by Eleanor Roosevelt biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook; 2) Haven: The Dramatic Story of 1,000 WWII Refugees and How They Came to America, which was adapted for a TV movie in 2000 (Foreword by Dava Sobel, author of Longitude, and Ruth’s niece); 3) Raquela: A Woman of Israel, winner of the Jewish Book Award in 1978 (Introduction by novelist Faye Kellerman); 4) Ahead of Time: My Early Years as a Foreign Correspondent (also the title of a documentary on Ruth), Introduction by Vanity Fair writer Marie Brenner; 5) Inside of Time: My Journey from Alaska to Israel: My Journey from Alaska to Israel; and 6) Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman.

I have written about Ruth several times on this blog, posts that are all illustrated with photographs by Ruth or of her: 1) Ruth Gruber’s Photojournalism at Soho Photography; 2) My Friend Ruth Gruber, Pioneering Photojournalist; 3) Virginia Woolf and Ruth Gruber, Driven to Create as Women; 4) Celebrating Photojournalist & Author Ruth Gruber’s 102nd Birthday With Her; and 5) Marking Photojournalist Ruth Gruber’s 103rd Birthday. Below are photos I took at last night’s reception, and photos I’ve taken of her book jackets.

7

Marking Photojournalist Ruth Gruber’s 103rd Birthday

As a book editor, I’ve had the privilege of working with dozens of talented authors. Amid all the superb writers one sub-group stands out: authors in their 80s, 90s, or even older, in their 100s. This group has included Edward Robb Ellis (1911-1998), author of A Diary of Century: Tales by American’s Greatest Diarist. Here is a collection of posts Ive written about him. Another of these remarkable authors is Ruth Gruber, also born in 1911, with whom I’ve published six books, including her memoir Ahead of Time: My Early Years as a Foreign Correspondent, also the title of a documentary about her. Ruth turned 103 this week, and is still going strong. This is a collection of posts I’ve written about her. Please join me in celebrating her amazing life and career.

8

Celebrating Photojournalist & Author Ruth Gruber’s 102nd Birthday With Her

LIFE magAs some readers of this blog may know, I’ve had the personal and professional privilege to edit and publish photojournalist and author Ruth Gruber’s books over the years. I’ve done six of her eighteen books. Her first publication was a thesis on Virginia Woolf, written in Cologne, Germany in 1931, while an exchange student there. She was then just 20, a young woman from Brooklyn on the verge of what became an amazing career as a refugee advocate, chronicler of the displaced, humanitarian, and journalist. She met with Woolf in London around 1935, a story she’s told in her book Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman, which I wrote about at this link on The Great Gray Bridge.

In the early 1940s, Ruth was a member of the FDR administration, under Interior Secretary Harold Ickes as his special field representative in Alaska. She is doubtless one of the administration’s eldest surviving staffers. To read Ruth Gruber’s work I recommend any of the six books I worked on, five of which are currently available from Open Road Integrated Media. The titles are Haven: The Dramatic Story of 1,000 WWII Refugees and How They Came to America; Ahead of Time: My Early Years as a Foreign Correspondent (also the title of a documentary on Ruth); Inside of Time: My Journey from Alaska to Israel; Raquela: A Woman of Israel; the Virginia Woolf book named above; and Exodus 1947: The Ship that Launched a Nation (the only one of these not available from Open Road, it’s currently published by Union Square Press).

There is also this link to a post I wrote when the International Center of Photography (ICP) gave her their lifetime achievement award in 2012. After a stop in Alaska, the ICP’s exhibit of Ruth’s photojournalism is now traveling the country. The picture above, of an Inuit girl reading LIFE Magazine with Ted Williams on the cover, is part of the ICP exhibit. It is one of her most whimsical; by contrast, she also photographed Holocaust survivors in DP camps after WWII. Those pictures are also part of the ICP exhibit. Here are a dozen pictures from a birthday party that my son Ewan and wife Kyle Gallup attended with me yesterday. (Most pictures by Kyle.) You may click here to see all images.