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The Story of Ruth: The Exodus to Palestine

As Told Through the Dispatches of a Jewish-American Journalist



I'm a person.
                        I'm someone.
                        I'm me.
                                -- Ruth Gruber, the international journalist
                                                  who inspired the stories of the Haven and The Exodus,
                                    telling her Jewish grandson how he should identify himself.[1]


INTRODUCTION
        This research is intended to cast a scholarly reflection on the work of Ruth Gruber, the journalist who inspired the CBS miniseries Haven. The movie is based on a true-life account titled Haven: The Unknown Story of 1,000 World War II Refugees. Gruber also inspired the novel and movie The Exodus. The artistic works are  based on a true-life account titled Destination Palestine: The Story of the Haganah Ship Exodus 1947.
        As a foreign correspondent, she covered war stories, as well as stories about refugees and other displaced populations in Puerto Rico, in Alaska (pre-statehood) and in the nations of Israel, Egypt, Vietnam, Korea, Ethiopia, and others. Post-World War II, she covered the airlifts of Jewish refugees out of Yemen, Iraq, North Africa, Rumania, Poland and the former Soviet Union. She sought out people who lived and worked during the story of Israel's early years of development. With political acumen and compassion, with knowledge and humor, Ruth Gruber was ahead of her time, interpreting the political realities of Israel and the story of refugees for the rest of the world.
        Gruber was fascinated with other
Ruth Gruber,
cultures; her operative word was brotherhood.  At age 24, while working for the New York Herald Tribune, she became the first foreign correspondent, male  or female, allowed to enter the Soviet Arctic and the Gulag during Stalin's iron-fisted presidency. She authored 10 books. Her career spans seven decades.[2] Ruth Gruber is the journalist who popularized in modern times, the Biblical phrase that would come to describe Israel today: "  . . . and the desert shall bloom like a rose."[3]
        Ruth Gruber was born in a shtetl called Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, the fourth of five children. Concerning her early life, she knew nothing else but Jewishness because everyone on Moore Street was Jewish, even the corset maker. Her grandfather, Zayda Gruber, took Ruth, his favorite grandchild to shul early Saturday mornings. However,  she sat in the upper balcony with the women and her sister Betty, wishing she were downstairs with her grandfather, praying and singing in Hebrew. Her maternal grandmother, Baba Rockower, read out loud from a Yiddish newspaper, to her and her siblings, about the Jewish trouble (tzuris). Meanwhile, her family maintained contact with their relatives overseas. Her father sent money orders monthly to relatives in shtetls in Poland and communist Odessa.
        Soon her life expanded. While her brothers went daily to a Hebrew school to prepare for their Bar Mitzvahs, she learned the love of books from a first-grade black teacher in a school that was predominantly Irish. Her mother taught her to be industrious and to serve others in the free lunch of the family's liquor store. During prohibition, her father gave up the liquor store and turned to selling real estate. The family moved a mile way, into an all-German community on Harmon Street and Bushwick Avenue. In high school, she studied French, German and Spanish. Ruth Gruber learned early to embrace cultural differences.
        She also learned to question the evils of American racism and international discrimination. A black high school teacher taught her about discrimination toward blacks, which reminded her of the pogroms in Russia that her father had talked about to her and her siblings. Dr. Willis Nathaniel Huggins taught history, and he spoke to her and her classmates about the plight of Ethiopian blacks and Jews.  He also had an appreciation for the arts. He took her weekly to matinees, and most of the plays dealt with discrimination. She saw discrimination firsthand when the two theatergoers - the young white girl and the older black man -  rode together on the el toward Manhattan. It troubled her deeply. She was especially appreciative when Paul Robeson, then playing in O'Neill's Emperor Jones, visited her high school.[4]
        Entering New York University at the age of 15, her international education continued. She received her A.B. in three years; and a master's that included German studies at Mount Holyoke, as well as a position in which she typed up the notes of a Hungarian author, Dr. Imre de JĒsika-Herczeg, who wrote Hungary After a Thousand Years.[5] She studied Shakespeare at a a summer program at Harvard, which was still a men's college.[6] She earned a LaFrentz Fellowship through the University of Wisconsin, which paid for a year of study in the graduate program of the German Department. There she managed to do a thesis on Goethe's Faust, even though she encountered anti-Semitism in the program.[7] On a second fellowship, she went to Germany as an exchange student for the Institute of International Education, first attending classes at the Sorbonne in Paris to improve her French.[8]
        While she was in Germany, 100,000 Germans marched in Hapsburg, and many speculated about the growing threat against those of Jewish ancestry. Gruber was troubled that the children in the playground, who traditionally had played "Cowboys and Indians," were now playing "Aryans and Jews." Each day more and more university students wore brown shirts. Mein Kampf had just been published, and it was disseminated widely.  She watched the March 1932 election day with interest, confidant that ex-Field Marshall von Hindenburg would defeat Hitler, but the elderly leader only got 49.6 percent of the vote.[9]
        She feared that she would not be allowed to complete her studies in such a racially-charged atmosphere. Therefore, she took on a more ambitious program. She determined that she would complete her studies in one year. Subsequently, she was surprised to be honored by the mayor of Cologne for her accomplishment.[10] At age 20, Fr„ulein Doktor Gruber  was - reputedly - one of the world's youngest Ph.D.'s, earning the mit sehr gut (magna cum laude) level in art history (Kunstgeschichte), modern English literature, and German language and philosophy from the University of Cologne.[11]
        Meanwhile, around her she was troubled to see the growing racism. While she received honors, her Jewish friend, Nathan, confided to her that his dissertation had been stolen from his locker at the university. As she finished up her doctoral thesis, in German, which compared Virginia Woolf with other modern writers, she learned that Hitler's National Socialist Party had won 230 seats in the Reichstag. She sailed back to America on the steamship St. Louis, the flagship of the Hamburg-America Line that would become famous in 1939 for carrying a thousand Jewish refugees out of Germany, only to be turned away from ports in Florida and Cuba. Upon her return to New York, she was met at the boat by reporters. An enterprising reporter from the New York Herald Tribune got the first interview, which appeared under the headline, "Girl, Ph.D., Bewildered by Fuss Over Feat."[12]
        Like Lincoln Steffens, who had also studied in Germany, upon her return to the United States, she decided that journalism was "a better field for producing philosophers than any other field."[13] Actually, her decision was based as well on economic realities driven by the Great Depression. Gruber had applied for positions with New York University, Barnard, Cornell, Wisconsin, as well as the New York newspapers. She said: "I got my doctorate during the 1920s, and I could not find a job. I had enough rejection slips to paper a bedroom wall."[14]
        In 1934, she managed to obtain a small reporting assignment. For The New York Times, she reported that an el passing through a Brooklyn slum was to be razed. She reported the razing from the perspective of the poor urban dwellers who lived in racial pockets in the shadow of the world stock market. She said the territories of the little frontiers reflected in miniature the great social problems of the world - nationalism, economic rivalry, petty jealousies. She wrote that in the morning one could see "the unemployed and homeless trudge on, looking up at Brooklyn's skyscrapers. Men who had slept with newspapers wrapped about them roll up their covers in the shadow of a great bank building."[15]
        She framed the $25 check and pasted it on the wall next to the rejection slips. She began to have articles published in the New York papers, especially the Herald Tribune.[16] The tide had turned.

THE FIRST "LITTLE" FRONTIER
        At a party in New York, Gruber was introduced to the Arctic explorer Vilhalmur Stefansson, who reportedly converted her in one evening to the prospect of exploring the area herself.[17]He autographed and gave her all his books on the Arctic: The Friendly Arctic, Northward Course of the Empire, My Life with the Eskimos.   "Before I met Stef," she said, "I thought the Arctic was a land of ice and snow, where nobody lived except Eskimos and prisoners like Michael Strogoff."[18]
        In 1935, at the age of 23, she became the first foreign correspondent to fly over the Arctic Circle through northern Siberia, visiting Soviet outposts.[19] She did this through a $2,000 traveling fellowship, supported by the Guggenheim Foundation and  awarded to her by the New Jersey State Federation of Women's Clubs. In a time when the map of the world was being redrawn, Gruber said she wanted to study the situation of women under fascism, communism and European democracy.[20] The U.S.S.R. wanted her to report on what its women were doing as meteorologists, scientists and explorers.[21]
        Her firsthand journalistic accounts were to be published in the New York Herald Tribune.[22] George Cornish of the Herald Tribune had seen the potential of the assignment, and he persuaded Gruber to serve as a Special Foreign Correspondent for the newspaper while working concurrently on the fellowship.[23] The trip would include an interview in London with her literary icon, Virginia Woolf. Later, in her travels, Gruber discovered that Woolf had written about her as "that German Jewess" and in other derogatory terms.[24]
           It was the least of the young woman's worries. On her way to Russia, Gruber traveled through Germany. Gruber decided to do an article about the status of women there. She was shocked by the changes that had come in two short years. Jewish women who had spent years working on their degree had been thrown out of the universities. Other university women suffered the same fate unless they joined the Nazi Party. Gruber was advised to leave immediately, which she did.[25]
        She wanted to visit the extended Gruber family in Poland. From a train station in Warsaw, Poland, she was taken to a horse-drawn cart, then buried in the hay. In this way, undercover, she traveled to her cousins in Berremlya, where the family talked to her about the fear of pogroms. Policemen came to the door of the rural household, and they ordered her out. She was taken back to the train station, where she continued her travels to the Soviet Union. Ruth Gruber wrote in Ahead of Time that six years later, all of her Polish ancestors but one were shot by Germans in a mass execution. The one who got away was a Zionist, who had already made her made to Palestine.[26]
        Gruber arrived in Leningrad with a letter of introduction from Stefansson to Rudolph Samoilovich, director of the Arctic Expedition. The ensuing articles for the Herald Tribune compared the Arctic expedition to the prairie experience of the American pioneers, translated into twentieth century terms by radio and airplanes and by other inventions of humankind.[27] She said the compass had shifted, and polar bears had replaced buffalo, adding that the new Horace Greeley was Otto J. Schmidt, of Moscow, leader of the Soviet's program for reclaiming the Arctic, who had called for cooperative international northern exploration.[28] Schmidt had opened the door to the Arctic, so that she could report on the status of women in Siberia. It was somewhat of a coup. The Tribune reporter who covered Moscow said other reporters could not get past his front door.[29]
        Gruber was flown to Siberia. The Northern Sea Route had just been opened for commerce and trade earlier in the year. On November 10, Gruber reported that a new page was written in the story of human and international relations when the Anadyr passed the American Diomedes and sighted Alaska from the Bering Strait. On this historic day of the opening of the Northwest Passage, Gruber was the only American aboard the Anadyr, which was carrying 39 crew members and 170 passengers. The Anadyr was one of four Soviet ships attempting to prove that the fastest and cheapest way between Europe and the Orient was the Arctic. Despite being aboard a ship that cut through ice 23-feet thick and rising 5 meters above the vessel, Gruber said her Spartan quarters were comfortable. Ever attuned to media advances, she noted that a stamp had just been released showing a Yakut who was riding a reindeer while carrying a bundle of newspapers, with a radio-equipped fur trading post depicted in the backgrou
nd.[30]
        One assignment led to another. In addition to her article for the Herald Tribune, Gruber was asked to write a series of articles for the North American Newspaper Alliance, which served 150 newspapers in American and Canada.[31]
        After she returned stateside, she interviewed 34-year-old Sigismund Kevanevsky, the Russian airman who attempted to fly non-stop from Moscow to San Francisco, in conjunction with the Northern Sea Route Administration. The Russian flier had rescued James Mattern, the pilot who flew around the world, only to be stopped at Anadyr, Siberia.  Kevanevsky also had taken part in the air rescue of the 104 members of the ill-fated Chelyuskin expedition.[32]
        She was invited for a second flight to the north at the invitation of Professor Schmidt. On her 1936 media assignment, again for the New York Herald-Tribune, she interviewed high government officials, and exiled kulaks and Trotskyists.[33] The reporter flew to the Republic of Yakutsk in the company of scientists, explorers, fur trappers, politicians and engineers to see how the Soviet Union handled its national minorities.[34]
        In April 1941, Interior Secretary Ickes appointed her field representative to Alaska for the Department of Interior. She was commissioned to make a social and an economic survey of the area.[35] Short weeks later, her book I Went to the Soviet Arctic, which grew out of her experiences as the Herald Tribune correspondent, was brought to the attention of the U.S. House of Representatives. On May 15 the House voted 64 to 49 to remove Gruber from the government payroll.[36]
        The publicity ultimately brought about a new market for her book.  It was reissued again, revised, with new information covering developments from 1939 to 1944.[37] She came through the difficult times because strong friends stood up for her. Secretary Ickes supported Gruber as a government representative. Helen Rogers Reid of the Herald Tribune supported her as a journalist.[38]
        Gruber apparently was still on the payroll for the Department of Interior in February 1946 when her work in Alaska was again questioned.[39] After she was censured by the House, Ickes had used his influence to get a job for her on the Alaska railroad.[40] She would continue to promote the Alaska project, even after the ceasing of hostilities in World War II, in that the plans had moved toward developing Alaska in line with President Roosevelt's Bremerton speech. Following the landmark speech, Gruber said the project developers had received thousands of letters from people who wanted to live in Alaska after the war."[41]
        However, soon her life would spin off into a very different direction. She had indicated her new interest in her speech at a Herald Tribune Forum when she said:

You will hear many of our philosophers of despair wailing that frontier days are over, that the frontier spirit is an anachronism, and that, since we have not opened wide our doors to political refugees from Europe, we have ipso facto, broken the frontier pattern which made us great. I believe they are wrong. I believe we are still a frontier people, that we have not lost our virility, our love for fearless freedom.[42]


THEY CALLED HER "MOTHER"
          Gruber would soon become one of those philosophers who fought despair, but also a pragmatist who worked to open the doors to European refugees. During the war, in her government post, she was sent to Italy in 1944 with the Department of Interior's Division of Territories and Island Possessions with a mission. She was commissioned to bring to Fort Ontario, the refugee center at Oswego, N.Y., 982 displaced Europeans whom President Franklin D. Roosevelt had invited to America (on June 9) through the War Relocation Authority of the Department of Interior.[43] The president leapfrogged government refugee quotas by stipulating that the displaced persons were to be offered temporary refuge if they promised in writing to return to Europe after the war. Those who were cleared consisted of 874 Jews, 73 Roman Catholics, 26 Greek Orthodox and seven Protestants. They were transported on the Henry Gibbons, which sailed to New York from Naples, where Gruber had joined them. She arrived
 with them arrived in New York on August 3, 1944. Then they were taken by train from Hoboken, N.J., to the former Army fort.[44] At Oswego, they were restricted to camp and occasionally found themselves working with German prisoners of war. In the end the refugees were admitted to immigrant status.[45]  This is the story that was told in the recent CBS miniseries Haven.
          Gruber is said to have approached the job with anger and with humor. She was indignant concerning the plight of the refugees, but was often called "Mother" by the young and the old because of the role she took in getting them to New York.[46] She said of the rescue effort: "My job was to get to know the people, learned their case histories, backgrounds and the cultural patterns of their lives, and then help prepare them in a little way for life in America."[47]
        She related the experience of their hardships to the press, writing in one report that knowing the refugees had made her realize that "the most indestructible thing in the world is man."[48] She said the Oswego refugees reminded her of another journey:

     A whole village of about 1,000 people - patriots, Jews, Catholics - left France when the Nazis came.  For three days and three nights they traveled over a 9,000-foot pass in the Alps.  There were women with nursing babies - and when the milk gave out the babies drank blood.  There was a crippled man who made the whole journey on his crutches. Some carried holy books instead of food.
     They finally reached an Italian village safely - only to discover the Nazi had arrived there first.  At least 500 were captured and sent to certain death in Poland. About 100 of the survivors are in Oswego.[49]

        She told the press that the refugees were a cross-section of every type of refugee now pouring into Italy, there being 36,000 in the Allied camps. [50]
           After the war, Harry S. Truman relented on the disposition of their status. He announced in December 1945 that the Oswego refugees qualified as displaced persons.[51]  Following the Oswego odyssey and example, the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe declared it was time to establish temporary rescue camps in Palestine for the displaced Jewish populations.[52] Gruber would play a big role in bringing this about.
        First of all, Gruber would write a book about the experience (Haven: The Unknown Story of 1,000 World War II Refugees). However, there were more immediate consequences. The Oswego experience launched Gruber into activities as a specialist in the plight of displaced Jews and the homeland of Palestine.[53]  Furthermore, Gruber reported on the mass exodus to Palestine of the Jewish populations post-World War II. She would become an expert on the implications of the exodus.[54] She was also assigned by the New York Herald Tribune to cover the story of Israel as an emerging homeland.[55]

COVERING "LEGAL IMMIGRANTS"
        One of her early assignments would indicate how she planned to approach the job of international reporting. In 1946, Gruber served as a correspondent for the New York Evening Post, traveling with the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine. She and a fellow correspondent, Richard Mowrer, also Jewish, were quite disgusted with the political restraints under which the journalists were forced to work.  To overcome the political barriers, they interviewed each other in a March 5th dispatch from Cairo. In the contrived interview, Gruber elicited from Mowrer that they had been requested by security officials not to reveal how the committee members were traveling to Palestine.[56]
        The reporters apparently decided to make public in a sarcastic way where they planned to travel because they perceived the threats to be bogus. The officials had told them the political atmosphere in Palestine was tense. A British Army official had expressed his real fears that the reporters' committee could run into trouble. This is explained in the as-told-to article.  Then Mowrer asked Gruber what they have to be afraid of. Gruber said that they have been told they were in danger of being blown up by Jews. Mowrer responded:
Well, according to the Voice of Israel, the clandestine radio of the Jewish resistance movement, the committee has nothing to fear from them. "No danger threatens the committee on the part of the Jews of Palestine," the radio said. "It's not the intention of any Jewish organization to injure members or the committee, their officials, their assistants or their officers, nor to interfere in any way with their work or any investigation they may undertake."[57]

Mowrer added that the warnings were all nonsense:

Neither Arabs nor Jews are going to shoot anybody on the Committee - the Jews because they have hopes in the committee and the Arabs because they don't take the committee too seriously. I don't think the Arabs feel it is the committee, in the end, that's going to decide the future of Palestine.  By the way, the day before you came we were told by the publicity section of the British Embassy that committee members had been selected on the basis of not having any particular knowledge of Middle East questions, that they were selected just as members of a jury are chosen. Is that right?[58]

           Gruber responded that both the British and American members of the committees had assistants from the Foreign Office and the State Department who worked on Middle East desks. Gruber said they had heard a common cry from the Jews of Europe at every camp they had visited:

We will not live in the graveyard of Europe. We must go to Palestine." Europe is kaput and the Jews are fleeing like people running out of a burning movie house. I think some members are convinced that the Jews really want to go to Palestine.  Others believe those poor Jews are victims of a great campaign of Zionist propaganda.[59]

        Then Mowrer suggested that perhaps some committee members were victims of a great campaign of propaganda. Gruber responded in kind that she had wondered about that as well. Mowrer said they would find a lot of barbed wire fences and entanglements all over the place -  "Across streets, around public buildings and around the Regence Restaurant where the committee will doubtless eat." He added that the song most often heard in Jerusalem was "Don't Fence Me In."[60]
        A dispatch from Reuters dated a day later noted that the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine had arrived in Jerusalem under heavy guard.[61]
        Gruber reported on the evacuation of troops and ordinance stores from the famous citadel in Cairo and their move into Palestine.  She talked about the liquidation of the great refugee camps in Alexandria and the new ones established in the Suez and Palestine. She questioned the motives of the British and their political stance on Palestine. She said due to the hospitality of the Arabs against the British, there was only one place left for the "homeless" British troops: Palestine.[62]
        She campaigned against their presence there:

I remembered the young British soldiers and the Black and Tan police the British had trained to fight the Irish, who were not fighting the Jews in Palestine. The soldiers and police would stop cars and trucks at checkpoints, force people out on the road, frisk all the men and boys, arresting them if they carried a gun or even a knife.  But they were polite. They never frisked Jewish women and girls, who often became messengers for the underground army.[63]

           Gruber called the British occupation of the Jewish homeland an Anglo-Jewish war.[64] When Gruber returned to New York, she spoke at Hadassah and other organizations championing the cause of the Jews who wanted to gain entry into Palestine.  She called them "legal immigrants," saying that "the only ones in Palestine there illegally are the British."[65]
        In 1947, at the convention of the Federation of Jewish Women's Organizations, Gruber gave eye-witness reports on the DP camps (Displaced Persons werec alled D.P.s).[66]  Shortly thereafter, Gruber urged the 2,500 club women attending the annual convention of the General Federation of Women's Clubs to help the women of Europe "to lead the democratic life." She advocated a bill that would enable 400,000 displaced persons to enter the United States. Gruber said 22,000 of the displaced were domestic employees who wanted to come to America to work. She told the convention delegates: "These people are not Communists.  If they were, they'd go home. They're not Nazis they've been slave laborers of the Nazis.  They are people who want to come to a democracy."[67]
        Gruber also spoke to the Women's Press Club of New York about the problem.[68] She urged citizens to write to President Truman in support of the bills to admit displaced persons.[69]
Eleanor Roosevelt supported the bill, saying that many of the refugees who had come in recent times became employers who gave persons jobs; further, through the efforts of the Security Council in the United Nations, that Russia and the United States could learn to live in peaceful coexistence.[70]

EXODUS TO "POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE"
        A test in courage awaited Ruth Gruber. The journalist would then cover the Haganah-sponsored "Exodus 1947," formerly the President Garfield, which had originally carried Sunday excursionists up and down Chesapeake Bay.[71] The river boat had launched from an American port with the intention of picking up refugee passengers for disembarkment at Palestine against the British blockade. Heavy seas in the Atlantic had almost broken the ship apart, and it had to return to the Azores for refueling and water. The boat set out again after seven weeks, reaching the Mediterranean port of Sete, where it picked up more than 4,500 passengers who had escaped the Iron Curtain. The ship was shadowed by British men-of-war, whose officers tried to persuade the refugees to turn back. When the destroyers came close, the passengers sang "The Yanks Are Coming" and "Pomp and Circumstance."[72]
           The overloaded ship made port in Haifa, and it was there that Gruber first talked to the refugees. Off the coast of Palestine the Exodus was trapped between two destroyers of the British flotilla, and boarded.[73]  Instead of sending the refugees to Palestine, as was usually done, the British loaded the refugees on three ships.  Gruber met the ships when the refugees returned to the Port de Bouc in France, where they were offered a safe refuge. Only a handful that needed hospital care took the offer. The French insisted that the problem be dealt with, and the three boatloads were returned to Germany to refugee camps at Emden and Wilhelmshaven. Gruber wrote that she could not stand the spectacle of the refugees being dragged down the gangplanks while Germans smirked. She witnessed most of the incidents, and reported them all to the American reading audience. Later  she put the whole story under one cover in Destination Palestine: The Story of the Haganah Ship Exodus 1947.[74]
        Her photographs and excerpts from the story of Exodus were carried in Life, Collier's, the New York Herald Tribune, The New Republic, and Survey Graphics.[75]  Charles Poore said in a book review, carried by the The New York Times, that no other writer had given such compelling form and clarity to the story as Gruber had done in Destination Palestine.[76] Poore said, "The inhumanity, and the shame for it, belong, in part, to every country that did not take its share of human beings who found no open doors, and so - like others before them - heroically made one for themselves."
        It was this work by Gruber that inspired the fictional work titled Exodus, by Leon Uris, which in turn led to a movie of the same name starring Paul Newman and Eva Marie Sainte. Uris told Gruber that he had used Destination Palestine as the major resource in writing his book.[77] Her empathetic handling of the coverage inspired others as well. Decision-makers in government and the mass media urged Gruber to continue to write about the plight of the displaced persons. In fact, the New York Herald Tribune assigned Gruber to other similar stories.
        In November 1947, in between times of covering the odyssey of the Exodus, Gruber flew to Cyprus. Again, she filed first-hand stories and photographs of life of D.P.s.  This experience also was drawn upon by Leon Uris' fictional account. She was the only correspondent attached to UNSCOP permitted by the British to enter Cyprus. UNSCOP is the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine. The Jews had been detained on Cyprus since August 1946, after the British had intercepted two ships, the Henrietta Szold and the Yagur, which were carrying Jewish refugees from Europe in a bid to enter Palestine. In the two ensuing years, 50,000 Jewish refugees were detained in the camps there.[78]
        While on the island, Gruber was allowed to roam around one camp, called XyloTimbu. In the other camp, Caraolos, she was escorted by a British officer, who nevertheless allowed her to take photographs of everything.[79] She said of the experience: "Although I've been close to the Jewish problem for some years, I was completely unprepared for what I found on Cyprus, which has been curtained off from the world. Hence my article."[80]
        Her reporting of the terrible camp conditions contributed to the political pressure that led to the clearing the compounds. When Gruber viewed the camps a year later, only one in four detainees - 13,000 Jews - were still detained, some having had been in the camps for up to 22 months. She reported that she was still chagrined by the conditions. She was disturbed that 250 infants less than a year old were also held in the camps because their fathers were of military age. Gruber asked one of the women detainees why they continued to have babies under such severe conditions. One of the women replied, "Under Hitler, as soon as a woman was pregnant she was burned.  We must have children. This is the way Israel survives."[81]

ENTRANCE "PROHIBITED"
          In a time when it was rumored that the Israel army was making it difficult for the Christian population of Palestine, she reported from Nazareth that the cradle of Christianity was completely intact, its holy places untouched by bullet or fire.  The night before, she had been among a group of foreign correspondents who had been taken on a tour of the Holy City. Signs in Hebrew were posted all over the sacred sites: "Entrance prohibited; Holy place; Divisional Commander, Israeli Defense Army."[82] The only bandage she found was one on the head of The Father Superior of the Church of the Ascension. The correspondents asked about the war wounded. Gruber said, of the priest's response,  "He laughed and said no civilians were wounded in the whole city. A pimple on his forehead was probably the only casualty in Nazareth."[83]
        Gruber said the populace were so undisturbed by the occupation of the Israeli army that they greeted the reporters with curiosity, warmth and so much laughter for pictures "that the cameramen began to feel like photographers on a Sunday afternoon in Coney Island."[84] The journalists interviewed the mayor of Nazareth, a Moslem appointed by the British government. The Israel Army included troops that hailed from Brooklyn, the Bronx, Canada, South Africa and Australia, and these military units served alongside native-born Jews and dispossessed persons with concentration-camp numbers tattooed into their arms. Later she learned a suspected terrorist and his two traveling companions had died the night before. Gruber said the disturbance was caused by Arabs, who had commandeered nine armored cars and emblazoned them with the insignia of their army, the Star of David with a dagger cutting through it and the legend beneath, "We kill all Jews"; but they surrendered unconditionally before midnight.[85]
        The state of Israel was created on May 15, 1948, and Gruber began writing in earnest on the coverage of the mass migration of Jews to the new homeland, as well as on the disposition of other refugees displaced by the war. Gruber spoke out against the zealots who assassinated Count Bernadotte of Sweden, after he submitted a report to the United Nations suggesting that the Negeb Valley, comprised of 3,800 square miles, be ceded to Arab interests.  With the reduction, Israel becomes a state of 2,180 square miles, less than half its size -- about the size of Delaware, Gruber reported. She said the whole country of Israel should not be blamed for the actions of the few. She said ceding the Negev to the Arab aggressors was like ceding concessions to Hitler when he was the aggressor; that it had not worked then, it would not work now. Gruber interviewed the Israeli leadership in Tel Aviv and Paris, where they spoke with her about a handful of objections to the Bernadotte-Bunche proposal
, the main objection being that the Negeb was the only area where Israel could resettle the million new immigrants they planned to bring into the country.[86]
        Her column in the New York Herald Tribune was accompanied by an editorial written by W.C. Lowdermilk of Berkeley, who said, in part: "The Bernadotte proposal is an unenlightened approach to the basic problems that face all the people of Palestine, as well as the world today. For political stability depends upon economic stability."[87]
        In November 1948, Gruber reported from Nazareth that barely two months after its capture by Israeli forces, the city was still a bustling Christian Arab metropolis. She recorded the progress of the tenuous truce through the perceptions of Israeli soldiers on leave, whom she saw sitting in cafes with young Christian Arabs, discussing Arab-Jewish-British relations, when they are not off sightseeing the holy places like American G.I.s in Rome.[88]  Back in the states, she wrote and lectured about every aspect of the new nation Israel.
        In mid-1949, she was sent to the Mediterranean again, where she again reported on Italy's D.P.s, in a four-part series. She wrote about the displacement of Catholics, Protestants and Greek Orthodox; but she continued to show concern about the plight of displaced Jews. During the so-called years of illegal immigration, Gruber told the readers, when Jews were barred from going to the Holy Land by Great Britain, refugees would climb on anything that would float and run the blockade at Haifa, Palestine. When Israel gained statehood, there were about 25,000 Jews in Italy. A year later, only 8,000 remained. The thriving seaport at Bari was often the place where the Jews had launched their effort, leaving under cover of darkness for Palestine, but often ending up in the Cyprus detention camps. In the late 1940s, Bari was a state without quotas, and it opened its arms to every Jew in danger on in flight.[89] She wrote:

Once in Bari everything is legal. Bari is legal, embarkation is legal, ships are legal. Even the illegal movements, which start as trickles across sealed borders, become legal here.  Tiny streams of people who manage to escape at night on foot or in little boats, join the great river now pouring into Bari and from here into the Mediterranean to Israel.[90]

        Meanwhile, a former army camp in an Adriatic town called Trani had been turned into a transit camp to house thousands of Jews, virtual prisoners in an internment camp four years after "liberation." The alternative was the Italian concentration camp, called "Collection Centers."  Gruber said of the transit camp: "The story of this camp is a story of people in flux, living out of a knapsack, a suitcase, a potato sack or a wooden crate, departing for a new life in the Holy Land."[91] She wrote:

Life here is kind of twentieth-century limbo. Every one who enters has left his old world for good. Now he sits five or six days, sometimes five or six weeks, waiting for the ship that will take him to the other side of the Mediterranean. It is an unreal life, a life whose only meaning is transition. Morale rises with each rumor that a ship has come . . . . The refugees bet on who will be called next for the passage to Israel.[92]


        Many who had left post-war Germany and Austria had been processed for transit on a collective visa. All of them had to leave Italy for Israel at the same time on the same visa.[93] The refugees lived in barracks, sleeping on iron beds with straw mattresses, separated by cardboard partitions. The only other items given each was a fork, a spoon and a tin saucer.[94] It was believed one should not make the camps too comfortable, only liveable..[95] For entertainment, the refugees slaked their thirst on a new Italian version of Coca Cola called Fritz-Cola, and watched Diana Durbin and Gene Kelly in "Christmas Holiday" ("Vacance di Natale").[96]
        At another camp D.P.s called statics, or transits lodged for longer terms, were provided cultural and educational classes to learn more about the country to which they planned to immigrate, as well as to take courses in carpentry, dressmaking, mechanics, gardening and deep sea diving. They were waiting to go to Israel, Australia, Canada or South America.  Many were hoping to go to the United States under the displaced persons bill of 1948.[97]
        After the series on the camps, Gruber wrote a five-part series on a refugee voyage from Italy to Israel.  She covered a wedding of two Jews who escaped Hungary aboard the Atzabout, an Israel-owned ship carrying 1,700 Jewish refugees. After the wedding a three-man orchestra of an accordion, a violin and a banjo played the latest songs from "Kiss Me Kate" and "South Pacific," while the ragged immigrants danced the jitterbug."[98]
        Arriving at Haifa, the Jews stood on deck singing "Hatikvah, the same song Jews had sung in the ghetto and on their way to the gas chamber. Now they were singing Hatikvah, as the Israel national anthem, as they disembarked.[99]
        "Do you know the difficulties in Israel,?" Ruth Gruber asked a young silversmith from Tunis, who was on the refugee ship Atzmaut. "Do you know how much it takes to work that land?"
        "With the sweat of your brow," Itzhak Elia said, "the land will be built."[100]
        In September 1949, Gruber reported to the New York Herald Tribune that it was a dark Rosh Hashonah (New Year) for two Jewish families, the Wagenstein family in a cold flat in Bulgaria and the Gamliel family living on the hot sands of the Hashid Camp in Aden (near Yemen). The Gamliel were frightened to leave the camp because of the pogrom of 100 Jews a few months earlier. They had wandered 26 days in the Yemen desert to get to the British Protectorate at Aden City.  Meanwhile, a letter to the editor in an adjoining column of the Herald Tribune urged the U.S. government and the president to stop sending help to the so-called backward people of the world and help the poor of its own country.  Twenty-nine inmates of a country home in Fort Wayne, Indiana, had died, their daily food allowance being 38 cents per day.[101]
        In November 1949 she returned from Yemen, with a journalistic account of the evacuation of Jews from the British protectorate of Aden.  Israel was now being called "The Sanctuary" in her articles. She said the exodus was not unlike the exodus of Israelis from Egypt 3,000 years ago. Except that it was an all-American airlift comprised of C-54 Skymasters, "some wearing boots from Texas," and transporting Biblical figures with lovelocks wearing long robes, fringed hoods, and carrying Holy Books - "parting" the corridor of the Red Sea in an eight-and-a-half-hour flight.  A forced landing in any of the surrounding Arab lands would have been disastrous. They were not allowed to leave until they had paid as ransom, a final head tax of silver Yemen dollars - equivalent to one U.S. dollar. And, Gruber said the refugees looked on in terror while the money exchanged hands under a policy of "first in first out."[102]

ISRAEL, "WITHOUT TEARS"
        Gruber decided that she wanted her readers to see Israel in a new way.  Perhaps that is why she wrote Israel Without Tears, in which she discussed rabbinical interference with diet, locomotion and women, among other things.  Reviewer Hal Lehrman said the work reflects a kind of assurance through laughter that someday Israel's problems will be patched up. In the work, Gruber revealed that some colonists were fed up with the collective nature of the kibbutz. She defined nudnicks as incredibly zealous bores and phudnicks who as bores with a Ph.D..[103]
        While Gruber had been off reporting on the refugee camps, her political beliefs were again examined, this time in the espionage trial of Judith Coplon. Ruth Gruber's name was on a paper that the FBI found in Coplon's purse when the 28-year-old employee at the Department of Justice had been arrested. Reportedly the note said: "Gruber has been reported to have been a contact of F.A. Garanin of the Soviet Embassy, Wash."[104] This time it was a vitriolic columnist, Westbrook Pegler, who questioned her role in Alaska, much in the same way that the political beliefs of others were examined by the same red scare that fueled the HUAC Committee.  In the column, Pegler said Dr. J.B. Matthews, the most known authority on the Communist infiltration and propaganda, found one of Gruber's articles in a series called "Soviet Russia Today" listed by the Attorney General as "a straight Communist publication."[105]  The irony is that Gruber  - at the time of Pegler's complaint -  was putting toget
her a travel article about Israel getting ready for the tourists and pilgrims to Israel, for the New York Herald Tribune.[106]
        In retrospect, a student of history might wonder whether the Alaskan adventure were being used to get Gruber to drop her coverage of Israel and of the treatment of displaced populations, especially those of Jewish ethnic backgrounds.  Returning to New York from another international trip of reporting, Gruber finally had a chance to respond. She said, "I never knew or heard of the Coplon girl until her name appeared in the newspapers.  I never was a contact person for anyone.  My job was not secretary to Mr. Ickes (of the Department of Interior), which might imply I had access to secret papers. I had none."[107]
        Again, Gruber weathered the storm.  In 1951, she sent dispatches from Israel, which she said was living "from ship to mouth." Although construction was booming, refugees were being taken in at 1,000 per day.  More than half  the population of 1.2 million had arrived since its founding in 1948.  Although the problem of raising money for their relocation loomed very large,  Gruber reported, there was a deep sense of gratitude toward, and friendship with and a perceived identity to the United States.  Israel hoped to attract tourists and private investors.  Gruber said, "With typical humor, an Israeli seeing me off at the airport, said, "Come back soon.  We'll be exporting lumber to Canada, beet sugar to Cuba and dollars to the United States."[108]
        While displaced persons waited for news of a home, stateside Ruth Gruber continued to speak of her concerns about D.P.s  at all kinds of gatherings, even fashion shows, where the most serious consideration otherwise was whether town costumes and evening gowns had parts that could be removed for the practical woman.[109] She told the delegates at a conference for the United Jewish Appeal that the Jews of Iraq had been told that they must leave the country by March 1951, adding that "after that date, emigration will cease."[110] The United Jewish Appeal had raised $100.219 million in cash to help Jews in all foreign countries but Israel, from January to November 1949, topping the $100 million mark for the fourth consecutive time.[111]   Women of the United Jewish Appeal had raised $18.375 million in 1948, $15 million in 1949, and $7 million in the first five months of 1950.[112] Gruber supported the efforts of the United Jewish Appeal, which continued to work with the United Palestine Appeal, the Joint Distribution Committee and the United Jewish Appeal to raise hundreds of millions for migration of Jewish populations.[113]
        Some 120,000 Jews escaped from Iraq in the wake of anti-Jewish terrorism in 1950 and 1951 Nearly a million immigrated to Israel, some 400,000 of them Jewish refugees from Arab countries during a 10-year period.[114] Nearly 50,000 Jews were airlifted from Yemen to Israel in 1949 in Operation Magic Carpet.[115]
        An estimated 600,000 of homeless and uprooted Jews emigrated from behind the Iron Curtain.[116] By 1950, more than 70,000  emigrated from the U.S.S.R;[117] but by 1953 this number had risen to 400,000.[118] It was estimated that two million remained in Russia, 250,000 in Romania, 130,000 in Hungary, 30,000 in Poland and 15,000 in Czechoslovakia.[119]
        An editorial appearing at the time in the New York Herald Tribune said her description of the shipload of Romanian Jews arriving at Haifa sounded "grimly familiar" -- refugees with their small possessions and memories driven by fear. Rather than being Jews who were trying to escape Nazism, they were Zionists trying to escape Communism.[120] Gruber reported that the Romanian Jews settled in work villages in Kiryat Gath, near the ancient border of the Philistines, whose league of five cities - Gath with its Goliath, Gaza, Askelon, Ashdod and Ekron - comprised Israel's principal adversary in Biblical times.[121]
        She said the efforts at resettlement were far from idyllic, but was the 1951 technique for absorbing the newest of the 600,000 new immigrants who had come since Israel become a nation. By 1952, there were 1.4 million persons in Israel.  One tenth of its population , some 100,000 new immigrants, were living in tents colonies, shacks and abandoned army camps. The new immigrants grumbled, showing dissatisfaction and expressing a sense of disillusionment and betrayal. These dwellers of the immigrant camps were being absorbed into some 125 work villages housed 165,000 immigrants. [122] In another dispatch, Gruber wrote about a village of blind Jews that earned its own way in the work programs of Israel.[123]
        The nation had doubled its population each year of its four-year history. Israel changed its immigration policy, ruling that 80 percent of all who enter from relatively safe countries and whose passage is paid by a Jewish Agency must be under 35, must have a useful profession or a skill, or must be willing to work on the land for two years to produce food. Gruber reported that the suggestion of restricting immigration was anathema to the leaders and the people of Israel. The policy did not apply to those who were in dangerous situations.[124]
        While in Israel, she interviewed David Ben-Gurion, Israel's Prime Minister who sent her to Beer Ora, a youth camp, where teenagers on a revolving basis transformed the desert region into a garden spot. At night, they sang, reciting the words from the Isaiah that the desert would bloom like a rose, and they danced the "Hora," Israel's national folk dance.[125]

"THEY CAME TO STAY"
        As a journalist, Gruber returned from an assignment Israel in March 1953, reporting that Israel was fighting for its life. The new nation had signed armistice pacts, but was still plagued with internal disputes and inflation, and the failure to settle differences with her Arab neighbors. Israel had the second largest army in the region, with 60 percent of the population having some kind of military training. Congress had recently voted to give Israel $65 million for economic and industrial recovery through the Mutual Security Act, which also had recently provided funds to England, France, Turkey and Greece. Meanwhile, American machines were turning out steel pipes and shoes, orange juice and fertilizer from Galilee to the Negev. American experts were everywhere, according to Gruber, advising, planning and guiding the country toward economic independence.[126]
        During this time, Gruber reported that fewer than 20,000 Jews remained in West Germany and barely 2,000 in East Germany, where she said anti-Semitism was "still so virulent that the Jews were blamed for everything, even the weather"[127] An editorial in the New York Herald Tribune noted that Gruber had been reporting on the status of Jews in Germany and that Jews were once again being made scapegoats for the country's ills. The editorial urged Congress to get a handle on the situation to relieve the plight of those cast homeless by the war.[128]
        She also wrote an article in 1953 that supported the work of the American Joint Distribution Committee, so-called the "Joint" Distribution Committee, a Jewish relief agency that was founded in 1915. During World War I, U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau Sr. had asked Louis Marshall and Jacob H. Schiff to go to the American Jewish Community to raise $50,000 to aid the 60,000 Jews in Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire, who were cut off by the conflict and starving.[129]
        No one could mistake where Gruber stood concerning communism. In the article about the joint committee, she said the Russians had denounced the committee, calling it in "the weird gobbledegook of communism"--  "an international Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organization set up by the American intelligence service.[130] She said of the criticism: The Russians and their satellites have learned that it is far cheaper to herd their victims into prison trains, roll them to Siberia and the Arctic, put them to work and let them starve to death.[131]
        In 1955, an editorial  writer contrasted Mark Twain's description of the Holy Land in Innocents Abroad, written in 1867, to Gruber's reports of the works that had been achieved in the seven years since Israel had achieved statehood.  Twain described Palestine in terms of heat, bone- dry aridity, and grinding poverty.  Gruber described Palestine in terms of parks, villages, agricultural development and vast irrigation projects. However, Twain was on-target when he compared Israel's border cities to the new western towns of America, when the pioneers went armed into their field. The editorial writer also said Gruber had not missed the mark when she said the desert could bloom like a rose.[132]
        By 1959, Ruth Gruber had made eight trips to Israel, which resulted in a work called Israel Today: Land of Many Nations.[133] The work included the story of the immigrants of recent history, the mystical Jews of North Africa, who now were flourishing. She also discussed the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.[134] It is a positive history in which she extrapolates on Israel's peaceful state. However, as Gertrude Samuels, a book reviewer pointed out, Israel was a nation even then with a citizen army on constant alert. The unresolved hostility repressed from the nation's Arab citizens and the surrounding Arabs are political facts of life.[135]
        There were still 70,000 refugees in the 1960s when Ruth Gruber appeared on a program of The United Jewish Appeal of Greater New York with Yehuda Hellman, United Nations correspondent for Israeli publications. By now she was considered a recognized expert on the status of Palestine.  She said Israel's most urgent problem was the threat to the water supply posed by the United Arab Republic; more particularly, that the Arabs planned to prevent Israel from diverting the Jordan River for irrigation from the Negev.[136] In 1961, she, Eleanor Roosevelt and Ogden Reid, former United State Ambassador to Israel, were among a distinguished panel of speakers that spoke at an annual gathering of the Women's Division of the United Jewish Appeal of Greater New York, where more than 1,800 women collectively pledged $1.1 million to meet the needs of Jews in Israel and elsewhere. Reid and Gruber urged young Americans to take the trek he and Gruber had taken to spend several months in a kibbutz in Israel.[137]
        In 1964, her interests turned to the status of the common citizen of Puerto Rico.  She subsequently reviewed a book called Puerto Rico: Freedom and Power, written by Gordon Lewis, a Welshman who advocated the same destiny for Puerto Rico as that of Cuba, a Marxist revolution.  Gruber questioned his approach, labeling his viewpoint as that of a separatist and a supporter of the not-too-popular Independence movement.[138]
        In 1972, Gruber wrote a biography about a Puerto Rican she admired, Felise Rincon de Gautier, the new woman mayor of San Juan. The author characterized Gautier as a practical idealist, a cross between a Tammany Hall politician and Marie Antoinette. The mayor gave private audiences to the poor and destitute, and brought industry, sanitation, housing and education to the impoverished island, reportedly manipulating powerful mainland politicians and tycoons for the benefit of her countrymen.[139]
        During that year, Gruber also wrote about the Independentista movement in Puerto Rico, in a special for The New York Times Magazine. She quoted a young schoolteacher there, who said, "We want independence because independence gives us as sense of belonging.  This is our nation. Unlike the Israeli, who suffered and went back to their land, we were always on the island, but the land was never ours."[140]
        On September 23, 1974, Gruber (aka as Michaels) married Dr. Henry J. Rosner, an assistant commissioner of the city's Department of Social Services in charge of fiscal affairs and assistant administrator of the Human Resource Administration. The graduate of Brooklyn Law School had been a consultant to the United Nations Commission, advising on Israel during the late 1950s. The rabbi, a woman, was Sallly Preisand of the Free Synagogue.[141]
        During the Vietnamese War, Gruber traveled to Korea and Vietnam, which resulted in a book called They Came to Stay. In 1976, the book was released, a work Gruber coauthored with Marjorie Geoghegan, whom Gruber characterizes as "a very good friend."[142]  In the first part of the book, Margolies tells about how she went to Korea with the purpose of adoption, finding a 6-year-old abandoned girl to bring back to America.  Then she adopted a Vietnamese girl of mixed parentage. In the last part of the book, Gruber travels to Korean and Vietnam to ferret out the true story of each orphan child's background, helping each girl find a connection with her past.[143]  Gruber and Georghegan worked to bring other Korean orphans to the United States following her visit.[144]
        In April 1978, Gruber was thinking of the heritage passed on to children when she wrote a letter to The New York Times in which she commended Gerald Green and Herbert Brodkin for their courage, compassion and consummate skills rendered from a four-night docudrama about the Holocaust, which she said surpassed anything anyone had done to date to present the story in human and dramatic terms. Gruber said: "The Holocaust is an experience in which all of us partake. It is the watershed experience which changed our lives.  It is the story we pass on like a torch to our children and their children lest they forget."[145]
        There were other most worthy assignments in her future. Gruber also covered the 1979 Camp David Peace Treaty between Egypt, Israel and the United States, as well as the Sadat/Begin Conference in Alexandria, Egypt for 150 newspapers.[146]  However, she was soon to put forth a more ambitious effort: a definitive book-length work on Israel and its new society's impact on the Israeli woman.

"THE WHOLE STORY" TOLD BY A MID-WIFE
        As she made various journalism sorties to and within Israel, the germ of an idea was growing for the book she had envisioned. Gruber wanted to find a woman whose story embodied the experiences of the Jewish and Israeli women who had survived World War II to play a part in the struggle for development of the new nation. She was encouraged by an editor from Reader's Digest, who said she should indeed find a woman who could tell the whole story of Israel.[147] This idea transmogrified into a life story, from birth to cold-war reality. To find a subject for her work, Gruber would return once again to Israel, determined to find the true-life heroine she sought.  The journalist tracked down candidates throughout the countryside and interviewed them.[148] Gruber said:
I wanted a woman who had taken part in the so-called "illegal immigration" of ships like "Exodus 1947" that broke through the British blockage and brought thousands of survivors home to the Land of Israel;
a woman who herself had been on the front lines in all its wars; a woman who had known in her own life the joy and agony of growing up in a biblical land, of being an Israeli.[149]

        Gruber found a ninth-generation Israeli who delivered many of the babies born of Holocaust survivors from the ships who had been imprisoned in the British camps at Athlit and Cyrus: her name was Raquela Prywes.[150] Gruber's story of Racquela, in a non-fiction book by the same name, is a documentary based on a composite character experiencing the current facets of Jewish and Israel life, as a citizen, solider, wife and mother. Gruber chose Prywes because her experiences as a nurse ranged from the Hadassah delivery rooms of Jerusalem to the detention camps, during a time when medical personnel of her calling were being murdered. She served on army bases in field hospitals.  Prywes helped found the medical hospital at Beersheba. She was married to a leading Israeli gynecologist, Aron Brezinski, and after his death, she completed a research study he had begun on infant mortality.  Her second husband was Moshe Prywes, a dean at the Hebrew University-Hadassah School of Medicine, who b
ecame president of the University of Negev.[151]
        To gather information for the book and to discover the true measure of her literary subject, Gruber became a veritable shadow to Prywes. As the interview notes progressed, Gruber, in her usual methodical fashion, had Raquela initialize every page of the narrative.[152] The journalist said, "For nine months, I saw her nearly everyday, traveled with her and lived in all the places where she had lived.  I wanted to capture a sense of place and time and history in a story of a hitherto unknown but fascinating woman."[153]
        The journalist retraced the steps of Prywes and walked with her through the sites of the primitive wooden barracks of internment camps, where the nurse had met her first Holocaust survivors. Gruber obtained interviews that shed light on Prywes' character and made her come alive. There were the words of Golda Meir, who called Raquela "the best mid-wife we had in Israel."[154] Gruber also interviewed then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who talked about releasing 200 refugees imprisoned in Athlit's prison camp under the cover of darkness when he was a 23- year-old commander in the Palmach.[155]
        Writing the story of Raquela was a cathartic experience for Gruber, who had followed some of the same paths as her subject.  Gruber said:

I was able to draw on my own experiences covering Nazi Germany, the voyage of the famous ship Exodus 1947 Israel's War of Independence and the wars that followed it, the flights of refugees from Arab and communist lands, and long days and nights in the prison camp in Cyrus where, like Raquela, I felt and smelled and tasted what it meant to be a survivor living behind barbed wire."[156]

        Gruber believed that the lives of what Virginia Wolf called the obscure were perhaps the most fascinating in telling the story of Israel.  For instance, in a book review of Daughters from Afar,[157] Gruber praised the author's choice of a French resistance fighter who was decorated by Charles DeGaulle with the Crois de Guerre for saving hundreds of lives and a Warsaw woman whose baby being killed by Nazis went on to save 100 children.[158] For Gruber's work, called Raquela: A Woman of Israel, the author won the National Jewish Book Award in 1979. The book was also selected for the Reader's Digest Condensed Books.  In addition, she received the distinguished Na'amat USA's Golda Meir Human Relations Award.[159]

OLD FRONTIERS, "NEW BEGINNINGS"
        The prolific journalist has a number of other writings to her credit.  She wrote a popular column for Hadassah Magazine called the "Dairy of an American Housewife," which reportedly influenced a movie by the same name.[160] In the 1990s, the story of the Oswego refugees, as told through Haven, was adapted to a musical play by Joseph Darion, who had earlier written the lyrics for "The Man of La Mancha."  Haven more recently was a CBS miniseries. Gruber also wrote about her journalistic foray into Ethiopia to isolated Jewish villages.  The rescue of the Jewish refugees is called "Operation Moses" in her work, Rescue: The Exodus of the Ethiopian Jews. This was out of respect for her old teacher, Dr. Willis Nathaniel Huggins. In 1985, Israel agents, using more than $65 million raised in a secret worldwide effort, had airlifted 15,000 black Ethiopian Jews to Israel.[161]
        Her latest book is an autobiography called Ahead of My Time: My Early Years as a Foreign Correspondent. The work relates her voyage of personal discovery, from a childhood in Brooklyn, to her college years in Germany, just as Hitler was coming to power, with new anecdotes about her journalistic assignments in the Soviet Arctic.
        Gruber made a trip to Poland in 1990 to visit cemeteries and the ruins of synagogues that provided mute testimony to the 3.5 million Jews living in 3,000 Jewish communities before World War II - one in every three Jews who had died from Warsaw and one in every ten Jews who had died from Poland.  Gruber reported for The New York Times that more than 350 cemeteries remain, with the oldest grave dating back to 1203. It is located in Wroclaw, in southwestern Poland.[162]
        It was not enough for Gruber to just write the stories.  She wanted her children involved in her vision. One of her daughters, Celia Michaels, followed in her footsteps in international reporting, having assisted her mother on journalistic assignments in Palestine as a youth.  Michaels also worked for CBS, and was sent to Beirut during the Gulf War.[163]
        In more recent times, Gruber covered the 12-day United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women held at Beijing, for the November/December 1995 issue of Na'amat Magazine.[164] She wrote about the networking of 35,000 women form 185 nations, in the style of an observer who would like to address social and political wrongs.  She was troubled that the 5,000 delegates funded by governments were housed in superior quarters, while the other conference attendees were housed in a sealed-off compound in Huairou.  She also critically addressed China's civil rights policies.  She came under surveillance after interviewing several of young Tibetan exiles.  At the conference, she spoke out against genital mutilation during several sessions.  She was touched by a session that brought Palestinian and Israeli women together to share common concerns.  Subsequently, she found that many media sessions at the world conference were canceled with no explanation.  She compared the organization of the s
essions to that of "a floating crap game," in that presenters often did not show up.  However, she was enthusiastic over Hillary Clinton's speech about gender and human rights.  Gruber said in the article that she hoped each delegate - in her own way - would bring Beijing home."[165]
        Gruber is troubled with the rhetoric of the new right in America that has emerged with the 1990s.  She said that the rhetoric brings back a lot of memories of the German right of 1942: "They are anti-everything: they tell you what they think you should think; they tell you even what they think you should look like.  We have to guard our democracy so carefully."[166]
        She said she envisioned a future work for herself when she was six. The black teacher in the first grade had inspired her to devote a life to helping the outcasts of society.  Little did Gruber know that one day there would be a Holocaust Museum, and that hundreds of the journalist's photographs would be there. This is what she speaks about to her grandson as he runs about the extended family's Central Park book-filled penthouse.[167]
        She thinks back and ruminates on such concerns, and continues to write about them. Her concerns include making revisions and corrections to history and to the study of history. As a  historiographer, the journalist has been troubled by the interpretations that sometimes are perceived as the historical fact. Gruber said Helen Rogers Reid was her daughter Celia's godmother. Gruber was shocked that Richard Kluger intimated in The Paper, a definitive work on the New York Herald Tribune, that Reid was depicted as anti-Semitic. Gruber said, "This definitely is a lie!" Many of their contemporaries believed that Reid treated the Jewish journalist as a daughter.[168]
        Gruber paused, took a breath, and said a few more quiet words in the cadence of a poem to her grandson, whom she had pulled on her knee:

                Words can create.
                Words can destroy.
                Words can build a life.
                Words can take a life away.
                Those of use who can use words have an obligation
                and a mission to work for survival.[169]
Bibliography

Books and Booklets by Ruth Gruber

"Twenty Years After Gdansk: How Solidarity and Trade Unions Have Fared in Post-Communist Poland," World of Work [Pamphlet: The Magazine of the ILO, Geneva] (December 2000), pp. 14-16.

Ahead of My Time: My Early Years as a Foreign Correspondent. New York: Wynwood Press; 1991; New York: Carroll & Graf, 2001.

Destination Palestine: The Story of the Haganah Ship Exodus 1947. New York: Times Books, 1999.      Re-titled Exodus 1947: The Ship That Launched a Nation.

Die Bauern-Passion von Waal. With Ursula Zeidler and Gerhard Eberts. Augsburg: Verlag Die Brigg, 1976.

Felisa RicĒn de Gautier: The Mayor of San Juan. New York: Random House, 1972; Crowell, 1972.

Haven: The Unknown Story of 1,000 World War II Refugees and How They Came to America. Safe Haven, 1994; re-titled The Dramatic Story of 1,000 World War II Refugees and How They Came to America. New York Times Books, 2000.

Israel on the Seventh Day. New York: Basic Books, 1961; London: Andre Deutsch, 1961.

Israel Today, Land of Many Nations. New York: Hill & Wang, 1958.

Israel Without Tears. New York: Currnt Books Inc., 1950.

I Went to the Soviet Arctic. Preface by Vihijalmur Stefanson. London: V. Gallancz, 1934; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1934.

Puerto Rico; Island of Promise. New York: Hill and Wang, 1960.

Raquela: A Woman of Israel. New York: 1978, New American Library, 1979; Hadassah, The Women's Zionist Organization of America, Inc., 1979; New York: Hadassah Special Edition, 1998; New York: Three Rivers Press, 2000.

Rescue: The Exodus of the Ethiopian Jews. New York, Atheneum, 1987.

Science and the New Nations, Proceedings. Edited by Gruber. Sponsored by the Weizmann Institute. Rehovot, Israel: International Conference on Science in the Advancement of New States, 1960.

They Came to Stay. With Marjorie Margolie-Mezvinsky. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1976.

Virginia Woolf: A Study. Leipzig: B. Tauchnitz, 1934.

Endnotes

[1]     Ruth Gruber, interview with author, Central Park West, New York, July 1996. This interview and others with New York newswomen was made possible through a $3,000 research grant awarded by the College of Arts & Science, New Mexico State University, for summer 1996.
[2]     Marjorie Margolies Mezvinsky, congresswoman from Pennsylvania, Raquela: A Woman of Israel (New York: Hadassah, The Women's Zionist Organization in America, 1979; c. by Ruth Gruber, 1978), book jacket.
[3]     "Miracles in the Desert," editorial, New York Herald Tribune (February 2, 1953).
[4]     Ruth Gruber, Ahead of Time: My Early Years as a Foreign Correspondent (New York: Wynwood Press, 1991), pp. 17-37.
[5]     Ibid., pp. 38-44.
[6]     Ibid., p. 48.
[7]     Ibid., pp. 65-80.
[8]     Gruber, interview with author, Central Park West, July 1996. "Ruth Gruber in Jerusalem," Collier's (November 22, 1947). Mary Braggiotti, "A Trouble-Shooter for Mr. Ickes," in Daily Magazine and Comic Section, New York Post (November 17, 1944), p. 1.
[9]     Gruber, Ahead of Her Time, p. 113.
[10]    Ibid., pp. 132-133.
[11]    Ibid., p. 120. "Ph.D. for Girl of 20," The New York Times (August 16, 1932).
[12]    Ibid., pp. 126-139. Mary Braggiotti, "A Trouble-Shooter for Mr. Ickes," in Daily Magazine and Comic Section, New York Post (November 17, 1944), p. 1.
[13]    "Zdravstvuitye," The New York Times (May 18, 1941).
[14]    Ruth Gruber, interview with author, Central Park West, New York, July 1996.
[15]    Ruth Gruber, "Brooklyn Slum Aided," The New York Times (June 24, 1934).
[16]    Gruber, Ahead of Her Time, p. 148.
[17]    Braggiotti, "A Trouble-Shooter for Mr. Ickes," New York Post (November 17, 1944, p. 1.
[18]    Ibid.
[19]    Ibid.
[20]    Helen Rogers Reid, introduction of Ruth Gruber, field representative of the Department of Interior,  New York Herald Tribune Twelfth Forum, 1943.
[21]    Ruth Gruber, "Beijing Diary," Ma'Amat Woman (November-December 1995), p. 34.
[22]    Helen Rogers Reid, introduction of Ruth Gruber, field representative of the Department of Interior,  New York Herald Tribune Twelfth Forum, 1943.
[23]    Gruber, Ahead of Time, pp. 157-159.
[24]    Ibid., pp. 221-227.
[25]    Ibid., pp. 169-171.
[26]    Ibid., p. 180.
[27]    Ruth Gruber, "Dickson Island, Hub of Arctic: Men and Women Adventurers Carry Culture to Soviet North," New York Tribune (November 3, 1935).
[28]    Ruth Gruber, "All-Year Ship and Plane Routes to Tap Areas of Vast Resources Goal of Pioneers Pushing North," New York Herald Tribune (October 20, 1935).
[29]    Gruber, Ahead of Time, pp. 185-186.
[30]    "Ruth Gruber, "Carving the Arctic Sea Route; Picked Seamen on 4 Soviet Ships Open the North-West Passage," New York Herald Tribune (November 10, 1935).
[31]    Gruber, Ahead of Time, p. 213.
[32]    NANA (Russia, copyright), "Air Route to Europe Via Arctic Predicted," New York Times (May 31, 1936).
[33]    "Book Notes," The New York Times (June 13, 1939).
[34]    Braggiotti, "A Trouble-Shooter for Mr. Ickes," New York Post (November 17, 1944), p.1.
[35]    "Ruth Gruber in Jerusalem," Collier's (November 22, 1947).
[36]    "Zdravstvuitye," The New York Times (May 18, 1941).
[37]    "Books Published Today," The New York Times (October 13, 1944).
[38]    Helen Rogers Reid, introduction of Ruth Gruber, field representative of the Department of Interior,  New York Herald Tribune Twelfth Forum, 1943.
[39]    Westbrook Pegler, "As Pegler Sees It," column, King Features Syndicate (June 15, 1949).
[40]    Ibid.
[41]    Braggiotti, "A Trouble-Shooter for Mr. Ickes," New York Post (November 17, 1944), p.1.
[42]    Ruth Gruber, field representative of the Department of Interior,  New York Herald Tribune Twelfth Forum, 1943.
[43]    "984 Refugees Hee on Way to Shelter," The New York Times (August 5, 1944), p. 13.
[44]    David W. Dunlap, "1944 Refugees Meet, This Time as Guests," The New York Times (August 4, 1983), p. B1, B8.
[45]    Richard F. Shepard, "Books: Freedom for a Few," The New York Times (August 30, 1983).
[46]            Braggiotti, "A Trouble-Shooter for Mr. Ickes," New York Post (November 17, 1944), p. 1. Lucy Greenbaum, "Club women Hear Pleas to Help DP's," The New York Times (June 25, 1947).
[47]    Braggiotti, "A Trouble-Shooter for Mr. Ickes," New York Post (November 17, 1944), p.1.
[48]    Ibid.
[49]    Ibid.
[50]    Ibid.
[51]    David W. Dunlap, "1944 Refugees Meet, This Time as Guests," The New York Times (August 4, 1983), p. B1, B8.
[52]    "984 Refugees Here on Way to Shelter," The New York Times (August 5, 1944), p. 24.
[53]    "Ruth Gruber in Jerusalem," Collier's (November 22, 1947).
[54]    Ruth Gruber, "They Helped Build a Nation," review of Daughters From Afar, by Geraldine Stern, The New York Times (August 19, 1958), pp. _____.
[55]    Ruth Gruber, "Author's Preface,"  Raquela: A Woman of Israel (New York: Hadassah, The Women's Zionist Organization in America, 1979; c. by Ruth Gruber, 1978).
[56]    Ruth Gruber and Richard Mowrer, foreign correspondents, "Conversation in Cairo - 2 Post Reporters Talk Over Palestine," New York Evening Post (March 6, 1946).
[57]    Ibid.
[58]    Ibid.
[59]    Ibid.
[60]    Ibid.
[61]    Reuters (March 6, 1946), in New York Evening Post.
[62]    Ruth Gruber, "Why Britain Hopes to Crush Zion: Palestine Replacing Egypt as Armed Base," The New York Evening Post (July 2, 1946), p. 1.
[63]    Ruth Gruber, "Beijing Diary," Ma'Amat Woman (November-December 1995), p. 34.
[64]    Ruth Gruber, "Why Britain Hopes to Crush Zion: Palestine Replacing Egypt as Armed Base," The New York Evening Post (July 2, 1946), p. 44.
[65]    "Hadassah Hears Plea to Make Votes Count," The New York Times (October 15, 1946). "Rule in Palestine Called Autocratic," The New York Times (September 29, 1947).
[66]    "UNESCO Speaker at Jewish Women's Forum Says U.S. Still Has No German Peace Policy," The New York Times (January 16, 1947).
[67]    Thomas Lask, "Voyage to the Promised Land," book review of Destination Palestine, The New York Times (September 19, 1948). Lucy Greenbaum, "Club women Hear Pleas to Help DP's," The New York Times (June 25, 1947), p. ____.
[68]    "Women of Press Meet," The New York Times (May 26, 1947).
[69]    "Help for Displaced Seen Now Developing," The New York Times (May 19, 1947).
[70]            Lucy Greenbaum, "Club women Hear Pleas to Help DP's," The New York Times (June 25, 1947), p. ____.
[71]    Charles Poore, "Books of Our Time," The New York Times, Section L (September 25, 1948), p. 15.
[72]    Ibid.
[73]    "Ruth Gruber in Jerusalem," Collier's (November 22, 1967).
[74]    Ibid.
[75]    Poore, "Books of Our Time," The New York Times, (September 25, 1948), p. 15.
[76]    Ibid.
[77]    Ruth Gruber, interview with author, Central Park West, New York, July 1996.
[78]    Ruth Gruber, "Cyprus Camps for Jews Enter Their 3rd Year," New York Herald Tribune (August 15, 1948).
[79]    "Ruth Gruber in Jerusalem," Collier's (November 22, 1967).
[80]    Ibid.
[81]    Ruth Gruber, "Cyprus Camps for Jews Enter Their 3rd Year," New York Herald Tribune (August 15, 1948).
[82]    Ruth Gruber, "Unscathed City of Nazareth," New York Herald Tribune (July 23, 1948).
[83]    Ibid.
[84]    Ibid.
[85]    Ibid.
[86]    Ruth Gruber, "Why Israel Seeks the Negeb," New York Herald Tribune (October 23, 1948).
[87]    W.C. Lowdermilk, "The Lowdermilk Proposals," letter to editor, Berkeley (October 18, 1948), in New York Herald Tribune (October 23, 1948).
[88]    Ruth Gruber, "Religious Freedom in Nazareth," New York Herald Tribunei (November 11, 1948).
[89]    Ruth Gruber, "Europe's Jews Bound for Israel Pour Into Bari by Thousands, New York Herald Tribune (July 25, 1949).
[90]    Ibid.
[91]    Ruth Gruber, "D.P.s in Italian Camps Resent Regulations Curbing Freedom," New York Herald Tribune (July 26, 1949), 3rd part of a 4-part series, pp. ____.
[92]    Ibid.
[93]    Ibid.
[94]    Ibid.
[95]    Ruth Gruber, "Italian Static Camps Better Than Those Listed as Transit," New York Herald Tribune (July 27, 1949), 4th part of a 4-part series.
[96]    Ruth Gruber, "D.P.s in Italian Camps Resent Regulations Curbing Freedom," New York Herald Tribune (July 26, 1949).
[97]    Ruth Gruber, "Italian Static Camps Better Than Those Listed as Transit," New York Herald Tribune (July 27, 1949), 4th part of a 4-part series, pp. ____.
[98]    Ruth Gruber, "Aboard Refugee Ship for Israel: A Wedding Adds Gaiety to Trip," New York Herald Tribune (August 10, 1949).
[99]    Ruth Gruber, "Refugees' Landing in Israel: 'It's Our Land, It Belongs to Us," New York Herald Tribune (August 1, 1949).
[100]   Ruth Gruber, "Aboard Refugee Ship for Israel: No Comfort, But Spirits Are High," New York Herald Tribune (August 9, 1949), p. ______.
[101]           Ruth Gruber, "Rosh Hashonah for D.P.s in Israel," New York Herald Tribune (September 3, 1949).
[102]   Ruth Gruber, "Yemenite Jews Flown to Israel From Aden in American Planes," New York Herald Tribune (November 7, 1949).
[103]   Hal Lehrman, "As They Say in Haifa," The New York Times (December 31, 1950).
[104]   "FBI Coplon Data Implicate Others; 28 Notes From Purse Given Court," The New York Times (June 1, 1949).
[105]   Westbrook Pegler, "As Pegler Sees It," column, King Features Syndicate (June 15, 1949).
[106]   Ruth Gruber, "Israel Prepares for the Holy Year," New York Herald Tribune (September 14, 1949).
[107]   "FBI Coplon Data Implicate Others; 28 Notes From Purse Given Court," The New York Times (June 6, 1951).
[108]   Ruth Gruber, "Israel Today: Rush of Building as 1948's Population Doubles," New York Herald Tribune (June 6, 1951).
[109]   "'Take-Off' Attire for Spring Shown," The New York Times (April 29, 1950).
[110]   Irving Spiegel, "$66,000,000 Given by Jewish Women," The New York Times (June 8, 1950), pp. ____.
[111]   "U.J.A. Drives Tops $100,00,00 for Fourth Successive Time," The New York Times (November 7, 1949).
[112]   Ibid.
[113]   Irving Spiegel, "$66,000,000 Given by Jewish Women," The New York Times (June 8, 1950).
[114]   Ruth Gruber, "They Helped Build a Nation," review of Daughters From Afar, by Geraldine Stern, The New York Times (August 19, 1958), pp. _____.
[115]   Irving Spiegel, "$66,000,000 Given by Jewish Women," The New York Times (June 8, 1950), pp. ____.
[116]   Ruth Gruber, "The Helping Hand for Europe's Jews," New York Herald Tribune (February 2, 1953), pp. _____.
[117]   Irving Spiegel, "$66,000,000 Given by Jewish Women," The New York Times (June 8, 1950), pp. ____.
[118]   Ruth Gruber, "The Helping Hand for Europe's Jews," New York Herald Tribune (February 2, 1953), pp. _____.
[119]           Ibid.
[120]   Editorial, "Grimly Familiar," New York Herald Tribune (June 5, 1951).
[121]   "New Settlers in Israel," editorial, New York Herald Tribune (February 18, 1959).
[122]   Ruth Gruber, "Israel Today: Housing Problem Eased in Year by Work Villages," New York Herald Tribune (June 5, 1951).
[123]   Ruth Gruber, "Israel Today: Village of Blind Earns Its Way in Work Program," New York Herald Tribune.
[124]   Ruth Gruber, "Israel Now 'Selects' Immigrants But Will Take 120,000 This Year," The New York Times (March 17, 1952).
[125]   Ruth Gruber, "Youth of Israel Transforming Desert Region Into Garden Spot," New York Herald Tribune, (March 18, 1952).
[126]   Ruth Gruber, "Israel Call a Key to Strength of America in the Middle East," The New York Times (March 29, 1952).
[127]   Ruth Gruber, "The Helping Hand for Europe's Jews," New York Herald Tribune (February 2, 1953), pp. _____.
[128]   "Hitler's Time Bomb," editorial, New York Herald Tribune (August 21,1947).
[129]   Ruth Gruber, "The Helping Hand for Europe's Jews," The New York Herald Tribune (February 2, 1953).
[130]   Ibid.
[131]   Ibid.
[132]   "Miracles in the Desert," editorial, New York Herald Tribune (September 26, 1955).
[133]   Ruth Gruber, "They Helped Build a Nation," review of Daughters From Afar, by Geraldine Stern, The New York Times (August 19, 1958), pp. _____.
[134]   Gertrude Samuels, "New Roots, Old Land," The New York Times Magazine (April 21, 1959).
[135]   Ibid.
[136]   "Strong Israel Held Cure for Hate Wave," The New York Times (February 16, 1960). She also was a speaker at the United HIAS dinner along with William Rosenwald, a leader for 30 years in Jewish settlement work, as reported in "Rosewald Hailed by Jewish Appeal," The New York Times (June 1, 1961).
[137]   "1.1 Million Given in U.J.A. Drive," The New York Times (February 15, 1961).
[138]           Ruth Gruber, "The Enemy Is America," The New York Times (April 2, 1964), pp. 28, 30.
[139]   Janet Harris, "Biographer's Choice," The New York Times Book Review (December 17, 1972), p. 8.
[140]   Ruth Gruber, "There are Few Independentistas in Puerto Rico, But -," The NewYork Times Magazine (May 21, 1972), pp. 32-39.
[141]   "Henry Rosner Weds Ruth Michaels," The New York Times (September 23, 1974).
[142]   Ruth Gruber, interview with author, at Central Park West, July 1996.
[143]   Betty Jean Lifton, "They Came to Stay," book review of same title, New York Times (February 29, 1976).
[144]   Ruth Gruber, interview with author, Central Park West, New York, July 1996.
[145]   Ruth Gruber, letter to the editor, The New York Times (April 30, 1978).
[146]   Ruth Gruber, interview with author, Central Park West, New York, July 1996.
[147]   Ibid.
[148]   Ruth Gruber, "Author's Preface,"  Raquela: A Woman of Israel (New York: Hadassah, The Women's Zionist Organization in America, 1979; c. by Ruth Gruber, 1978).
[149]   Ibid.
[150]   Ibid.
[151]   Deborah B. Kaplan, "Some Words From Hassah,"  Raquela: A Woman of Israel (New York: Hadassah, The Women's Zionist Organization in America, 1979; c. by Ruth Gruber, 1978).
[152]   Ruth Gruber, interview notes with author, Central Park West, New York, July 1996.
[153]   Ruth Gruber, "Author's Preface,"  Raquela: A Woman of Israel.
[154]   Ibid.
[155]   Ibid.
[156]   Ibid.
[157]   Geraldine Stern, Daughters from Afar (New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1958).
[158]   Ruth Gruber, "They Helped Build a Nation," review of Daughters from Afar, by Gerladine Stern, The New York Times (August 19, 1958).
[159]   Ruth Gruber, interview with author, Central Park West, New York, July 1996.
[160]           Ibid.
[161]   Susan Shapiro, "Nonfiction," book review of Rescue: The Exodus of Ethiopian Jews, in The New York Times (January 24, 1988).
[162]   Ruth Gruber, "Visiting the Vestiges of Jewish Poland," The New York Times, Section XX (October 21, 1990), p. 6.
[163]   Ruth Gruber, interview with author, Central Park West, July 1996.
[164]   Ibid.
[165]   Ruth Gruber, "Beijing Diary," Na'amat Woman (November-December 1995), pp. 6-8, 34-35.
[166]   Ruth Gruber, interview with author, Central Park West, New York City, 1996.
[167]   Ibid.
[168]   Ibid.
[169]   Ibid.