Gary Schoichet
On June 23, 1933, my Aunt Ruth, then 26-years-old and single, sailed on the USS Olympia, a ship of the White Star Line, for a two-month tour of Europe and the Middle East. She kept a diary in her round, sometimes illegible, handwriting, with entries almost every day.
The book has a faux leather cover that is slowly, after ninety years, self-shredding even when not being handled. Inside are glossy pages of charts that cover every eventuality at sea – weather, latitude and longitude, telling time at sea, mail time to land, currency rate exchanges, night signals, flags of all nations, endless charts. I wonder if Ruth looked at them.
After the larger section for her entries are an address book, and on the inside back cover a map of the world that unfolds so that you can chart the voyage.
Ruth was a traveler. I remember as a child her many trips to Central America and how she always brought back presents. Sometimes she went alone and other times with her friend Anne, who smoked constantly and had the raspy voice to prove it. I like to think Ruth had affairs but, liberated as she was, I don’t think so.
She might have stayed single but a close friend, Bessie, fell down concrete stairs in Stuyvesant Town, was not discovered for hours, and died. Morris, Bessie’s husband, was left with two daughters aged ten and seven and didn’t have a clue about raising them.
Neither did Ruth at 47, but they married so the girls would have a mother figure. It was not a marriage made in heaven for any of them. It ended with Morris’ death 40 years later.
Ruth worked as a bookkeeper, as did so many Jewish women of that time She was a Communist Party member but also listened to her bosses and bought the stocks they recommended. Maybe a contradiction, but the Soviet Union played the market, too, and Ruth was always financially comfortable.
Somewhere around her 95th year she stopped traveling. Her last plane trip was to California. I had given her my miles so she could fly business class. As short as she was, the seats were too big and her feet didn’t reach the floor.
At 103 she was in home hospice. She had a tendency to bleed internally, slowly. When she lost enough blood, she’d start saying outrageously funny things and we knew it was time for a transfusion. Ruth hated them and wanted to know what would happen if she didn’t get one. I told her she would die. “Will it hurt,” I said no, that she would go to sleep and not wake up.
We celebrated her 104th birthday on a Saturday with all of the family in New York. On Tuesday, her actual birthday, I was with her, both of us falling asleep, Ruth died three days later on 11/11/11.
I found the diary when I was cleaning out her apartment.