Reverence for Life
1960 was a turning point for the most famous dynasty in Israel. Ruth and Moshe were living separate lives, joined by a common roof and not much else. Twenty-one-year-old Yael moved in with the Greek-Cyprian director Michael Cacoyannis. She did the public relations for his film Electra, suitably based on the ancient Greek myth of matricide. In many circles, her book made her more famous than her father. “I dress up—it can be Pucci or Gucci or Ricci; I give an interview to Elle or Vogue . . . I answer fan mail and phone calls. I go out, dinner or a club, or theater . . . with writers, artists, publishers, film people, or just rich people who like to be surrounded by artists.”
Ruth and Assi took a ship to Athens to visit Yael, and the three drove her sleek-bodied Citroën DS to Delphi. It was there that Assi decided to embark on an acting career. The oracle came from friends of Yael’s who had him act out a sex scene, and he did it so well that they declared him to be the future Brando.
Not long afterward, Ruth set off on an adventure. After years of putting on a brave face, enduring humiliations with fatalistic dignity, she needed to fly the coop. To escape, Ruth’s South African friend Clara Urquhart, a staunch opponent of apartheid, took her into what most people considered the heart of darkness to meet the Nobel Prize laureate for peace, Albert Schweitzer.
As a world-famous doctor, scholar, organist, and humanitarian, with his fifty years of working in the jungle along with his campaign against nuclear bombs, Schweitzer had a number of zealous disciples; and of these, few were more zealous than Clara, who journeyed to the shores of the Ogowe River each year to volunteer.
The regulars of Cafe California predicted Ruth would get to Schweitzer’s humanistic redoubt and stay for good. If she couldn’t do much to change Moshe or get back to Gaza to help the refugees, she could give her empathetic love to the Africans.
Ruth and Clara took a rattletrap prop plane—a “flying sardine can”—to the capital of Gabon, and from the landing strip it was by dugout canoe. A handful of half-naked oarsmen loaded them and their luggage into the canoe, and with accompanying songs began to paddle upstream through steaming jungle. The exotic sounds from the jungle and the oppressive stickiness in the air made Ruth imagine herself as Katherine Hepburn’s character in the African Queen.
As they approached Lambaréné, she noticed a huddle of people dressed in white waiting for them at the landing. “Welcome,” said Dr. Schweitzer, who had a shock of white hair and a jackdaw perched on his shoulder. “We have been waiting for you and I am glad you are here.” Frail, tiny Clara disappeared into the old man’s embraces while Ruth got a polite handshake and a gentlemanly bow.
Among the first things she noticed about Schweitzer’s compound was the rotting stench that pervaded everything, and the cultic behavior of some of his followers. With the stultifying heat and afternoon downpours, the living, dying, decomposing vegetation, and the merciless struggle for existence—part of the compound was a leper colony—she realized that only the hardiest and most idealistic of followers, or the looniest, could hack it. One doctor walked around with a monkey in his pocket, and a nurse shared her shack with a wildcat. Outside Ruth’s hut, and next to the TB ward, sat a witch doctor casting evil spells against Schweitzer and his team for taking away his business. A highlight of the trip for Ruth was a Nativity play put on by the denizens of the Leper Village. The Grand Docteur built the village with the money he got from his Nobel Prize.
Ruth spent most of her time working in the orphanage with abandoned babies. (According to the local beliefs at the time, identical twins brought bad luck and were pitched into the forest.) Her bed was a narrow army cot, she read at night with a kerosene lamp, and the shower—it was in back of the dining hall and hung from a rope—was a big bucket with nail holes on the bottom. She went to sleep accompanied by cicadas and bullfrogs, and sometimes tom-toms.
She also did her best not to be lured in by the doctor—she had learned her lesson about being sucked into the orbit of a strong man’s charisma. The weeks she spent in the primeval wilderness gave Ruth ample time to observe Schweitzer from up close, quirks and all. She likened the nightly dinner scene around the table to the tea party the mad-hatter gave in Alice in Wonderland, with Schweitzer in the role of the mad-hatter. While he went native in some things—his opposition to flush toilets, for instance—when he sat down for a plate of crocodile fillets prepared in the German sauerbraten tradition, he spread a freshly laundered linen napkin on his lap, and carved the fillet on Alsatian china. Following the meal, everyone gathered in a room decorated with a cuckoo clock to sing Lutheran hymns. He played Bach toccatas on a warped, out-of-tune organ.
Another of his quirks was a pantheistic nature worship he called “reverence for life.” Ruth saw him nearly swat a new arrival, Maria Preminger, for killing a mosquito as it was sucking her blood. (Her husband Otto had just come out with the movie The Exodus.) “There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life,” he announced. “Music and cats.” His greatest spiritual breakthrough in life wasn’t healing people or playing Bach’s fugues. It was watching hippos in the Ogowe River, caring for their young.
Odd though he undoubtedly was—with amazement she watched him tiptoeing to avoid stepping on bugs—he was immensely kind. Schweitzer racked up a wall full of degrees in philosophy, theology, and medicine and nevertheless decided to give up the good life of a professor in Wilhelmine, Germany, and headed to the rainforest to serve people that self-defined civilized Europeans dismissed as poor savages, the precise opposite approach to life of Moshe’s ego-driven will-to-power and worship of money. The secular saint was a counter figure to Moshe. Here was a charismatic genius using his powers to preserve life, at all cost.
The leftist bohemians at California Café weren’t far off the mark with their prediction that Ruth would stay. She thought about it mostly because the human closeness and Spartan dedication brought back memories of her days on the farm, and it reinforced her aversion to materialism, and the mad scramble for wealth that was already then making inroads into Israeli society. An additional factor that tempted her into staying was the reigning pacifism of the hospital. No one there, and especially not Schweitzer, deferred to her as the wife of the general.
Shortly after Ruth’s return to Israel, she received a letter from a woman she had met at Schweitzer’s hospital camp. The woman told her about a deadly epidemic racing through the orphanage, and she expressed her gratitude to her new friend for her “gentleness of spirit, purity of heart, modesty of soul.” Ruth was able to care for the children because she too understood “suffering.”23