Virginia Woolf (2 page)

“Hitler’s stormtroopers are now burning books in the university courtyard.”

I wondered if they were burning a copy of the paperback book I had sent her.

“What strikes me so forcefully in your books,” I said, “is the hope that women will help end the horror and create peace. Men make wars, not women.”

“Once,” she said, “we had such hope for the world.”

The words rang in my head.
Such hope for the world.

I stood up. Half an hour had passed. I knew I should not take more of her time. I bent over and shook her hand.

“Thank you so much. Your writing gives me the will to write as a woman.”

She nodded, “Thank you.”

Leonard took my arm and led me out into Tavistock Square.

I returned to my hotel and swiftly jotted notes in my notebook, though I needed no notes to remember this day. I would remember it all vividly for the rest of my life. I was in rapture. I had met Virginia Woolf.

It was late October 1935 when I left London and sailed home on the SS
Normandie.
In the busy New York harbor, I looked around the pier. No one was there to meet me. I guessed my family was getting used to my comings and goings. I tossed my suitcase into the trunk of a yellow cab, and in the taxi’s back seat clutched my camera bag and checked my briefcase to make sure that my notebooks and the Virginia Woolf book were all safe.

Driving through Manhattan, then across the Williamsburg Bridge to Brooklyn, I kept breathing the air. Free air. Everything seemed peaceful, serene. The crowded streets seemed purely American with pushcart sellers selling fresh vegetables, while other vendors shouted, “Bargains, everybody. Come get your bargains here,” as they pointed to the housedresses hanging from racks. The dark shadow of war had not yet crossed the Atlantic.

I had scarcely rung the doorbell on Harmon Street when Mama opened the heavy black gate, kissed me, and said, “You must be starving.”

“Not at all.”

“Come in the kitchen anyway.” Mama, in a starched white apron, hurried me inside. “I prepared a whole meal for you.”

To Mama, food was love. I knew I was home.

In the sun-filled kitchen-dining-living room, Papa sat at the head of the table, waiting for me. I kissed him as he put his arm around me. “Thank the Almighty you’re safe,” he murmured. I took my favorite seat at his right. Mama was already filling our soup bowls with hot chicken noodle soup; and then she sat down to join us.

“We were so worried about you,” Mama said, “when we got your letters from Germany, Poland, Russia. All you hear on the radio is Hitler with that little mustache. He looks like Charlie Chaplin. Who goes to those countries now? Nobody. Only my
mishuggeneh
[crazy] daughter.”

She looked at Papa to make sure he agreed. He said nothing but smiled at me. Mama went on, “My aunt Mirel in Poland wrote us you left a lot of your clothes with her granddaughter Hannah.”

“I wish I could have brought her to America. She’s fifteen. In a couple of years, they’ll marry her off. What future does she have?” I turned to Papa. “What future did you have in Odessa?”

Papa stroked his white mustache for a minute. “I had to leave Odessa,” he said, “when I was sixteen. That’s when the police picked you up, put you in the army, and nobody ever saw you again.”

I decided it was safe to tell them something I had never written about to them, knowing how worried they would be. “In your
shtetl
, Mama, I was sitting with all your relatives who wanted to know about everyone in America until two o’clock in the morning. Suddenly two Polish policemen came banging on the door. One of them, a fat one, said, ‘We hear you have somebody from America.’ He pointed a club at me. ‘Open your bags.’ I opened my suitcase and watched him silently holding everything, even my panties and bra, up to the candle light. Then he went into my briefcase, opened every book, even a copy of my Virginia Woolf book, and shook them all.”

“Those police can’t read, can they?” Mama looked defiant.

“Certainly not English. I was worried they might take my notebooks with all my notes. But they left the notebooks alone. I must have looked very suspicious to them, especially carrying a typewriter and a camera. They told me to get out of Poland by morning or I’d be arrested.”

“What I was always afraid of,” Mama sighed.

“Your Aunt Mirel looked shaken. ‘You must go right now,’ she said. ‘You don’t know what they can do to you, arrest you, maybe, God forbid, kill you.’ Mirel’s son Yankel put me in his wagon, covered me with straw up to my neck, and made his poor old horse go faster and faster until we got to Warsaw.”

Papa put his head in his hands. “That was Poland? What happened to you in Germany? We read every day that hundreds of Jewish men are thrown in concentration camp. Jews can’t work. Even Jewish judges can’t sit in court any more. Jewish children can’t go to school. You weren’t scared?”

“It was scary sometimes,” I admitted. “Hitler has been in power almost three years and the country is completely changed. Completely Nazified. But there were some very brave people, real fighters. I went to see a woman in Berlin, a Jewish social worker. She kept looking out the window, to make sure the SS didn’t see me enter her office. ‘My daughter is your age,’ she told me. ‘She can’t get out. No visa. No country wants us. Go home and scream. Go home and scream in America what Hitler is doing to us.’ ”

The kitchen-dining room fell silent. A thought flashed across my mind. We’re three thousand miles away from Virginia Woolf. Except for mentioning my book about her, we haven’t said one word about her. We were fixated on the terrible news from Germany.

“What did Hitler do to your friends?” Mama persisted.

“I found a few of them. They all had to leave the university. One told me his Ph.D. thesis was stolen from his locker. It was his only copy. He’s desperate to get out of Germany. But the lines are so long with people trying to get out.”

“Master of the Universe,” Mama said, looking up to the heavens. “He took care of you.”

I didn’t sleep well that night. Images of Virginia Woolf in front of her fireplace, Leonard hunching over to hear about the Soviet Arctic, the talk about Hitler’s terrifying voice all kaleidoscoped in my head. Long past midnight, I finally fell asleep.

The next day, I called on Helen Rogers Reid, the wife of the
New York Herald Tribune’s
publisher Ogden Reid, and George Cornish, the senior editor. They were not interested in my interview with Virginia Woolf. “Ruth,” Helen Reid said, “we want to hear about your trip to the Soviet Arctic. You know you scooped the world.”

George Cornish nodded. “We want you to write a series of four articles on your experiences up there.”

The articles were syndicated and then appeared full-page four Sundays in a row, with the photos I had taken. The
Trib
received a score of letters, but none of them meant as much to me as Helen Reid telling me I’d scooped the world.

Virginia Woolf began to recede from my mind when Max Schuster, head of Simon and Schuster, asked me if I had enough unpublished material to write a book on the Soviet Arctic. I could hardly believe my luck when I signed the contract. I realized how timely such a book could be. War was in the air. The Arctic, at the top of the world, would soon serve as the shortest distance between the continents. Planes from New York, Chicago, and California could fly across Alaska to the Soviet Arctic, then across eleven time zones to Moscow, bringing butter and guns. A book I had planned to write on women in a changing world would have to wait until I finished this one.

I Went to the Soviet Arctic
was published on September 1, 1939, the very day Hitler’s tanks and trucks and armies blasted into Poland. The war in Europe had begun. Virginia Woolf and the book on women were relegated to the drawer in the filing cabinet where the three letters written in 1935 and 1936 would be found almost seventy years later.

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.