· CHAPTER 1 ·
Celia’s Daughter
June 27, 1950, should have been a day of triumph for an ambitious young girl just turned seventeen—the culmination of four years of outstanding academic achievement. It was graduation day at Brooklyn’s James Madison High School. Ruth Bader had been chosen as just one of four students to speak for her eight hundred classmates. Instead, it was a day of wrenching grief.
Two days before, Ruth’s mother, Celia, had succumbed to cancer after a four-year struggle. Ruth knew her mother had been waging a losing battle. Watching the physical deterioration of the parent who represented nurture and security, along with her father’s silent grief, had been anguishing for the sensitive adolescent. Yet with Celia’s encouragement, she won prestigious college scholarships, played in the school orchestra, and cheered on the football team as a baton twirler—never once revealing to her schoolmates the illness that shadowed the Bader household in Flatbush. By the end of summer, the ground floor of the modest gray stucco house at 1584 East Ninth Street stood vacant, a symbol of loss and abandonment following her mother’s death and her father’s emotional and economic collapse.
Celia Bader gave birth to her second daughter, Joan Ruth, on March 15, 1933, at Beth Moses Hospital in the borough of Brooklyn in New York City. (Ruth’s first name was dropped in kindergarten when there proved to be too many other children who answered to Joan.) The Baders brought the infant back to their apartment in Belle Harbor, a town near the ocean in the borough of Queens, just as they had her older sister, Marilyn. The new baby, energetic from the start, kicked so much that Marilyn promptly dubbed her “Kiki.” The name stuck.
The boroughs, like the rest of the country in 1933, faced an unprecedented economic depression. Factories lay idle. Construction had come to a standstill. The banking system had crumbled, wiping out the hard-earned savings of millions. One wage earner in four was laid off, and according to the U.S. Children’s Bureau one out of five children was not getting enough to eat. As tax revenues dried up, teachers went unpaid. In other parts of the country, schools simply closed their doors. In the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, jobless men put up makeshift shacks of junked Fords and old barrels at the city dump dubbed “Hoovervilles” in derisive reference to President Herbert Hoover’s economic policies.
Nathan Bader, Ruth’s father, was no stranger to hard times. He had begun his own struggle to earn a living shortly after his arrival in New York as a shy thirteen-year-old Russian Jew from a town near Odessa. Denied admission to schools in the Old World because of anti-Semitism, he had attended only Hebrew school. His mother tongue was Yiddish until he learned English at night school in his new homeland. Nathan worked in his father’s business, Samuel Bader and Sons, which specialized in inexpensive furs. By the 1920s, he felt financially secure enough to marry Celia Amster.
Celia, who arrived in New York City while still in her mother’s womb, had been conceived in a little town near what is now Cracow, Poland. Growing up in a Yiddish-speaking household in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, the primal homeland for immigrant Jews, she developed a passion for reading. Indeed, she so often walked down the bustling, crowded streets with her head buried in a book that on one occasion she tripped and broke her nose. Her father, recognizing that she was the most intelligent of his three daughters, had enlisted her help with his bills, which she wrote out in a mixture of English and Yiddish: for example, “one cabinet, gefixed” (repaired).
Though eager to continue her education, Celia had to settle for a commercial emphasis in her course work at Julia Richman High School, a massive brick building on East Sixty-Seventh Street. At least the training would spare her the fate of her older sister, Sadie, who worked in a sweatshop until marriage. Upon graduating at the age of fifteen, Celia found a job as a bookkeeper and secretary for a fur maker in the bustling, densely packed garment district, a roughly rectangular area of Manhattan ringed by West Thirty-Fifth and Forty-Second Streets and Seventh and Ninth Avenues, where a largely Eastern European workforce fueled the trade. The position allowed her to develop a familiarity with the industry, capitalizing on her innate business instincts and her ability to shrewdly assess people.
The personable and highly intelligent young woman had just the qualities that the shy, sentimental Nathan instinctively sought in a wife. Celia, according to her daughter, would always be the stronger partner in their new household, advising her husband on his business as well as other matters. After marriage, the couple joined the Belle Harbor synagogue. In 1927, two years before the stock market crash, Celia gave birth to their first child, Marilyn Elsa.
The downward economic spiral after Black Thursday in October 1929 prompted many young couples like the Baders to delay having more children. But in the fall of 1932, a new baby was on the way. Three years later, economic recovery remained elusive. Despite the Roosevelt administration’s many initiatives, the country remained mired in poverty and despair. The Baders were spared the worst hardships; however, in 1934, they faced a different kind of loss. Six-year-old Marilyn was fatally stricken with spinal meningitis. Though Kiki was too young to remember her sister, she later recalled how deeply her parents mourned Marilyn’s death. Every month, in the cold of winter or the heat of summer, they trudged to the cemetery. On the anniversary of Marilyn’s death, they went to the synagogue to recite the Kaddish, the traditional Jewish prayer of mourning. Marilyn’s picture continued to hang over the headboard of the Baders’ bed, making her a looming presence throughout Kiki’s childhood. There is no way to measure the impact of parental grief on their surviving daughter or to know whether it contributed to her preternatural seriousness. Ruth herself, however, later remarked that she grew up with the very “smell of death,” alluding to the cloud her sister’s passing cast over the Bader household.
Hoping to ease the pain with new surroundings, Nathan and Celia moved to Brooklyn, though the neighborhood was less desirable than the one left behind in Belle Harbor. They soon discovered that sustaining a separate apartment even in Flatbush was economically impossible. Because Nathan’s brother Benjamin had married Celia’s younger sister, Bernice (Buddy), the Bader brothers and their wives decided to share the downstairs of a two-family house in Flatbush until they could afford to live in separate houses on East Ninth Street.
Though the move to Flatbush was primarily initiated as a response to grief, it eventually turned out to be fortuitous. Flatbush was one of Brooklyn’s six original colonial towns. Over the years, it had been transformed into a semi-urban area with a Jewish population that by 1930 was rapidly approaching the million mark, the largest concentration of urban Jews in the world. Yet the Jewish community was anything but homogeneous. Groups differed in culture, wealth, and religious affiliation as well as in origin—Western European, Eastern European, and Middle Eastern. Brooklyn’s Syrian Sephardic Jews—a minority within a minority—maintained their traditional ways and food preferences as well as their Arabic language. In contrast, the many Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews tried hard to assimilate. After achieving some modest economic success, most moved out from the Lower East Side and from more crowded Brooklyn neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Brownsville to escape the congestion and shabbiness along with the weight of old-world strictures. If not quite the suburbs, the move brought more grass and open space.
As a sign of their newfound freedom, Jews of Nathan and Celia’s generation often strayed from Orthodox Judaism with all its rules and rituals. Many chose to forgo Sabbath services, leaving Brooklyn’s houses of worship half-empty on Saturday mornings. Sloughing off vestiges of their cultural and ethnic distinctiveness, they took pride in their “Americanness”—their ability to speak English, to wear American clothes, to have an education beyond the Talmud, and to escape the historical cycle that had locked even the most ambitious sons into the ghetto.
Yet at the same time, even those who were secular clung to cherished parts of their tradition—lighting candles for Friday dinner, keeping kosher kitchens while their children were young or eating only kosher meat and poultry, and observing the more important religious holidays, notably the high holy days from Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur. Those needing a synagogue for the holy days had plenty of choices; more than half of all the synagogues in New York City had a Brooklyn address. Some in the community relished the sense of belonging that came from hearing a Yiddish radio station playing popular dramas such as Bei tate-mames tish (Round the family table) or musical programs like Yiddish Melodies in Swing—though not Celia, who saw Yiddish as the language of the Old World. Instead, the Bader family listened to The Goldbergs, a weekly comedy-drama created by the talented writer and actress Gertrude Berg. Playing the warmhearted Bronx matriarch Molly Goldberg, Berg guided her radio family and neighbors through the challenges of assimilating and simultaneously maintaining their roots as Jews while coping with the travails of the Great Depression and World War II. Mrs. Goldberg was an “amalgam of Jewish aunts, [mothers], and grandmothers,” Kiki later recalled. However, she hastened to point out that her own mother “did not yell out of the window” in their working-class neighborhood, as did Molly Goldberg.
Flatbush in the 1930s and 1940s was home not only to Jews but also to Italians, Irish, and a smattering of Poles who lived on the same tree-lined streets, abutting busy Coney Island Avenue and Kings Highway. Each ethnic group was secure in its own identity, but that did not negate tensions among them. Anti-Semitism in the immediate neighborhood of East Ninth Street was not a major problem, although it certainly existed. Two elderly Catholic women living on the same block as the Baders clung to the belief that if a Jew came into the house, especially for lunch, it would bring bad luck—a superstition they transmitted to the boys for whom they served as foster parents. Other children on the street repeated stories that matzo was made from the blood of Christian boys and called Kiki and her Jewish friends “kikes.” Nonetheless, a measure of tolerance prevailed in the neighborhood of modest homes and apartments.
Both homes and streets served as children’s playgrounds for games of “red light, green light,” giant steps, jump rope, jacks, and marbles. Before and after games, youngsters and especially their teenage siblings, gathered in nearby candy stores and soda shops to spend their twenty-five-cent weekly allowances on Cokes, egg creams, comic books, movie magazines, and an occasional newspaper.
What bound the citizens of Flatbush together was a sense of neighborhood solidarity and an intense yearning to be solidly middle class. Even if the Great Depression had thwarted their own youthful dreams, they could transfer hopes and aspirations to their children. Weathering the strains of the worst economic crisis the country had ever experienced, they nurtured a disproportionate share of the twentieth century’s most distinguished citizens—many of them Jews. George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Alfred Kazin, Norman Mailer, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Beverly Sills, Barbra Streisand, Milton Friedman, and Sandy Koufax would become household names. So would that of Nathan and Celia Bader’s daughter.
Nathan, a quiet, gentle man, was an attentive and loving father but no disciplinarian. Celia had a far greater impact as a parent, in part because of her strong personality, keen intelligence, and high expectations. Perhaps, too, because those were the qualities her daughter chose to honor, characterizing her mother as “strict and loving.” Celia had cut short her own formal education, not just because of a lack of money, but also because of conventional assumptions about the place of women. At that time, Jewish families commonly sacrificed the futures of their daughters to ensure that a son might attend a prestigious school and enter a high-status profession as his birthright in the New World, benefiting other members of the family with his upward mobility. Celia, therefore, had gone to work to support herself and help enable her older brother Sol to attend Cornell University.
Ruth insists that her mother accepted her fate, content with the many friends she so easily made. Yet Celia’s extraordinary efforts to secure for her own daughter an education equivalent to Sol’s suggest understandable ambivalence. College, Celia believed, would help Kiki achieve the independence and autonomy that came with being able to support herself economically until she made a “suitable marriage” or, in a worst-case scenario, if “anything happened” to a spouse. With only one daughter left, Celia determined that this lively little girl with intelligent eyes and dark blond hair should learn to “love learning, care about people, and work hard” at whatever she wanted to accomplish. As a good baleboosta (housekeeper and manager), Celia always pulled all the furniture into the middle of the room to make sure that the cleaning woman scoured every corner. She would now apply that same boundless zeal and perfectionism to Kiki.
Keeping her surviving child healthy was her first concern. The galoshes came out if storm clouds threatened. Heavy stockings were a part of Kiki’s winter wardrobe. At the first sign of sniffles, the little girl was kept home from school. Though Kiki regarded her parents’ cautionary measures as excessive and burdensome, she did not resist. Aunt Buddy had explained how her parents blamed themselves for Marilyn’s fatal illness. Celia, especially, was convinced she might have done more to keep her older daughter healthy. Kiki claimed that she was never made to feel that she had to make up for her parents’ loss. But she likely internalized the feeling nonetheless. Keenly aware of their grief, she patiently tolerated Celia’s anxieties, complaining only if she felt her mother was excessively strict. Celia, in turn, often urged Kiki to shower special affection upon Nathan in an effort to dispel his lingering sadness.
Sharing her own love of literature and the performing arts was, for Celia, essential. Kiki’s most pleasurable memories were of curling up in her mother’s lap while Celia sang to her or read aloud from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses or A. A. Milne’s poems about Winnie-the-Pooh and his assorted animal friends who inhabited the Wood. There was something magical about listening to a story unfold in which the characters coexisted harmoniously in a peaceful haven while being enveloped in the comfort and security of maternal devotion. The world of Pooh was a reassuring one where happy outcomes were the rule. Moreover, Kiki adored Milne’s ingenuous use of rhyme and meter. Sound and sense were perfectly matched in the rollicking rhyme of “James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree,” where parental control is comically inverted and James Morrison leads his mother home on a leash. Another favorite was Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem “Jabberwocky.” The sounds intrigued even if Kiki had to struggle for the meaning.
Ruth Bader at age three, 1936, taken at her aunt Sadie (Sarah) Bessen’s house in Neponsit, New York. Neponsit is next to Jacob Riis Park; Bessen’s house was a block from the beach and the Atlantic Ocean.
As Kiki grew older, mother and daughter embarked on their “Friday afternoon adventure”—a trip to the neighborhood library. As soon as Celia felt comfortable leaving her child alone, the avid young reader picked out her three books for the week while her mother had her hair done. Kiki also created her own stories, providing dramatic readings to her younger cousins. A youngster with a voracious literary appetite, she was soon drawn to fictional role models whose achievements provided inspiration. Fascinated by the French classics Nobody’s Girl and Nobody’s Boy, she reveled in the mysteries of The Secret Garden and the adventures of Mary Poppins. Little Women elicited instant identification with Jo—Louisa May Alcott’s feisty tomboy heroine. Jo’s quest for autonomy and success in the larger world beyond family made her a model for generations of young girls eager for some endorsement of independence and ambition.
In contrast, Kiki found the Nancy Drew detective series less engaging, although she liked the fact that Nancy herself was brave, resourceful, and “smarter than her boyfriend.” But even if Nancy Drew was allowed to “do something” in the world—a possibility that appealed mightily to her young Flatbush reader—accounts of sleuthing could not compete with the myths, preferably Greek, that Kiki began to devour around the age of eight. Sagas of gods and goddesses of the ancient world enthralled her.
The urgency with which she read was not unusual. For girls who had few high-achieving female figures in their immediate circle to emulate, childhood reading opened up imaginative space, providing role models with whom they could identify passionately—an “envisioning of their own destiny.” Undoubtedly, Kiki caught glimpses of her future self in her beloved Greek deities, especially Pallas Athena, the goddess of reason and justice who ended the cycle of violence that began when Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia. It was Athena who created a court of justice to try Orestes, ushering in the rule of law.
Ruth’s mother, Celia Amster Bader, age forty-four, 1946.
But what she treasured most about her pantheon was what admirable substitutes Greek gods and goddesses made for all the saints worshipped by her closest friend, Marilyn De Lutio. The daughter of an Italian family living two doors down from the Baders, Marilyn regularly invited Kiki to dinners of spaghetti and meatballs and to Mass at St. Brendan’s on East Twelfth Street. Despite her friend’s frequent attendance, Marilyn worried that Kiki might not get into heaven because she did not believe in Christ. Ruth dismissed such worries, yet she mightily envied her Catholic neighbors having all those saints when she only had one invisible God.
Kiki’s pantheon also included Anne Frank. Reading one of the diary entries, she was deeply impressed by the following passage:
One of the many questions that have often bothered me is why women have been, and still are, thought to be so inferior to men. It’s easy to say it’s unfair, but that’s not enough for me; I’d really like to know the reason for this great injustice!
Men presumably dominated women from the very beginning because of their greater physical strength; it’s men who earn a living, beget children, [and] do as they please….Until recently, women silently went along with this, which was stupid, since the longer it’s kept up, the more deeply entrenched it becomes. Fortunately, education, work and progress have opened women’s eyes. In many countries they’ve been granted equal rights; many people, mainly women, but also men, now realize how wrong it was to tolerate this state of affairs for so long.
Celia seldom missed Eleanor Roosevelt’s column, “My Day,” in the Brooklyn Eagle and shared with her daughter the respect and admiration she felt for the First Lady, who used her position to champion the poor and the disenfranchised. Amelia Earhart became another of Kiki’s heroines. A pilot, adventurer, and proto-feminist, Earhart impressed Kiki mightily with her bravery in flying her plane solo across the Atlantic.
Celia also introduced her daughter to women who demonstrated what it meant to be Jewish, American, and female. These were women of valor, Celia explained, by virtue of their courage and humanity. Emma Lazarus, whose words were etched on a plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty, not only celebrated the United States as a beacon of freedom but also illuminated the importance of the Zionist struggle, advocating the return of oppressed Jews to their ancient homeland.
And there was Henrietta Szold, the founder of Hadassah, the largest women’s Jewish organization in the United States. Kiki’s esteem for this beloved woman would later intensify when she learned Szold’s views on who should say the Kaddish—the mourner’s prayer that in Orthodox Judaism could only be recited by men.
Celia talked in especially glowing terms about Lillian Wald, the influential founder of the Henry Street Settlement on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, who roamed filthy, overcrowded tenements to provide medical care to the sick and the poor. These were all women whose actions embodied the Jewish imperative of tikkun olam (repairing the world), pursuing justice and compassion and helping others.
Celia also taught by example, using a Jewish orphanage in Brooklyn, the Pride of Judea, to impress upon Kiki that even her own very modest economic advantages obliged her to share with those less privileged. Every year on March 15, Celia and her sister Bernice would buy huge containers of ice cream—“bricks” with strips of vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry—and hold Kiki’s birthday party at the orphanage so the other children could take part. Although the birthday girl longed for a regular party like her school chums, she never complained, recognizing how much the children enjoyed the treat. A capacity for empathy as well as an appetite for achievement was becoming ingrained in the young girl.
Jewish parents saw summer camp as a haven from diseases like polio, as well as a place to reinforce ethnic identity, social contacts, and middle-class status. The easily accessible Adirondacks contained clusters of children’s camps in an area where visiting parents could find accommodations—a feat not always possible in other parts of the Northeast in hotels and resorts where Jews were unwelcome. (Kiki would always remember a sign she had spotted on the lawn of an inn in Pennsylvania: “No Dogs or Jews allowed.”)
Celia’s brother Sol Amster and his wife, Cornelia, a public school teacher, owned and directed Camp Che-Na-Wah for girls and Camp Baco for boys on Lake Balfour near Minerva, New York. Kiki knew that Che-Na-Wah bore the name of a Native American “princess.” She had no idea that the designation represented a conscious attempt to connect campers to a preindustrial landscape, promoting a cross-race identification with a more “primitive” culture. Nor was she aware that Che-Na-Wah was one of the more prestigious camps for Brooklyn girls. What she did know was that new friends, sports, and campfires awaited.
Kiki was an avid camper from the age of four until she “retired” as a counselor at eighteen, with summer in the Adirondacks being an annual ritual from 1937 through 1951. The sight of rustic buildings, the smell of the country air, the sparkle of the small lake, and especially the serenity of the high mountains and forests were experiences to be savored. At Che-Na-Wah, she discovered a love of horses and the water. Riding and, much later, waterskiing would become her favorite sports as an adult. Camps like Che-Na-Wah emphasized more than sports and the usual arts and crafts, using activities for campers to develop relationships with each other and, more important, with their Jewish heritage. Seated around the campfire, the girls were exposed to national and international news as well as the importance of tzedakah (charitable giving). Sharing with less fortunate Jewish children was reinforced by an annual camp bazaar that raised funds for various charities.
As conditions worsened in prewar Europe, the focus of charity shifted from hunger among American Jews to the plight of oppressed Jewish communities abroad. Among the suffering were relatives in Europe, desperate to escape the lengthening reach of Hitler and find a friendly haven—in the United States, in British-controlled Palestine, or increasingly in any country that would provide them with refuge from the abyss of Nazi fury. When Kiki was a young camper in the late 1930s, some of the campers themselves were refugees. But the empathy that Che-Na-Wah directors wanted for these new arrivals and their families was not always forthcoming. The German Jewish newcomers seemed a bit convinced of their own superiority, Kiki and her U.S.-born counterparts concluded. Parents, no doubt, saw it as a replay of the traditional disdain that German Jews had long held for their Eastern European counterparts—the Ostjuden.
Many of the campers—Kiki included—remained indifferent to news flashes from Europe, where national borders changed with surprising frequency. But by 1947 indifference gave way to avid attention—at least on details involving Britain’s royal nuptials. Che-Na-Wah’s young teens lapped up news that the bride-to-be had saved ration cards in order to purchase the white satin for her wedding gown. If events such as Princess Elizabeth’s impending marriage to Prince Philip earned higher audience ratings from Kiki and her peers than had the shattering glass of Berlin’s Kristallnacht, it did not mean that the camp’s mission had failed. Owners and staff, like parents, had wanted to spare children knowledge of the Final Solution. Campers were told to leave radios at home, and staff burned newspapers after reading them. At meals and in the cabins, counselors were told to “studiously avoid all war talk.” Even parents were instructed not to mention the war on visiting day. At the time, many adults thought that the camps that held relatives were forced labor camps, not death camps. That Hitler planned to exterminate all European Jewry seemed incomprehensible, even to journalists who had received confirmation as early as 1942.
Despite their own apprehensions during the war years and the challenges of dealing with food and transportation in wartime, the owners and staff at Che-Na-Wah, as at Camp Baco, adhered to their mission: to impart to campers a combination of tzedakah with Jewish identity in a relatively secular setting. It was a formula that Sol Amster and his sister Celia, like many in their community, believed would allow youngsters to negotiate the currents of life in the United States, affirming their identity as both good Jews and patriotic Americans.
When the tanned camper returned home at the end of each summer, other activities beckoned. Family outings to Neponsit meant a swim at the beach because Aunt Sadie’s house sat on the ocean block. Frequent trips to the Brooklyn Academy offered a series of children’s plays to which the Baders subscribed for Saturday matinees. There were occasional operas for children, which the youngster adored. Celia even organized a trip into Manhattan to attend the ballet at City Center. And, of course, there was school.
Kiki attended Brooklyn Public School 238, a square brick building a little over a block away from home. For such an avid reader, first grade offered no challenge. But second grade, in which the children were taught to write, was a different matter. Her teachers insisted that she use her right hand—an ordeal for Kiki, who, like her mother, was left-handed. When she received a D in penmanship for her effort, she resolved never again to write with her right hand. Nor was she enthralled reading about Tom and Jane or Dick and Jane in grade school. “[T]he boy was out there climbing trees, riding bicycles, and the little girl was sitting there in a pink party dress,” she recalled. “And I was thinking to myself, I would rather be climbing trees than sitting in the pink party dress.” There were no pink dresses at P.S. 238 on Fridays. For school assembly on Fridays, Kiki, like the other girls, wore her white shirt, blue skirt, and red tie, while the boys were decked out in white shirts and blue pants topped off with the requisite red tie.
After school, piano practice and homework were top priorities. Beginning with a local teacher for basics, Celia later engaged the music director from camp, who had once been a close associate of George Gershwin’s. The studio in which he gave lessons was in Manhattan on West Ninety-Fifth Street near the Thalia Theater. If Kiki’s talent was not all that she and her teacher might have wished, her dedication to three hours of practice a day as a young girl in an effort to master her technique was impressive. Moreover, early training primed the youngster for a lifelong appreciation of opera and the arts, as well as providing a musical outlet through which she could express her emotions.
Nathan and Celia, though not devoutly observant, were also intent on instilling in their daughter a profound sense of her heritage. Jewish celebrations and rituals punctuated the year. On Friday nights, Celia lit Shabbat candles and recited the brief prayer and each spring changed the dishes for Passover. Seder was celebrated at the home of Nathan’s parents—a long, noisy meal with the extended Bader family that combined prolonged reading from the Haggadah with gay songs and much laughter. Kiki loved the time when, as the youngest child, she got to ask the traditional question: “Why is this night different from all other nights?” The rest of the ceremony was spent answering her question. During Hanukkah, all the grandchildren returned to Grandfather Bader’s home to receive Hanukkah gelt—$1 each. Such rituals, which centered on the home, were as much an observance of ethnic identity and continuity as they were of religion. The exception was Kiki’s aunt Sadie, who, Celia explained, had been born in the Old World of Yiddishkeit. For Sadie, observance of kashruth (Jewish dietary rules) and adherence to Orthodox tradition and practice, with its patriarchal underpinning, were all consuming.
Wherever the Amsters and Baders stood on the Orthodox-secular continuum, they agreed that the escalation of anti-Semitism in Europe and the United States demanded that American Jews reinforce a positive sense of Jewish identity and community. Nathan and Celia enrolled their daughter in Hebrew school. Here she could receive systematic training in religious texts, absorbing ideals of justice and equality grounded in religious principles as well as the Hebrew language and Jewish history and culture. Over the years, Kiki attended a variety of schools, ranging from Reform to Orthodox, before ending up at the East Midwood Jewish Center, an imposing Renaissance-style Conservative synagogue and community center on Ocean Avenue.
Kiki knew that at this critical juncture in history, being a Jew and an American citizen had never been more important. The whole family participated in Grandmother Bader’s effort to learn to write her name and master the answers to questions that would be on her citizenship exam. Growing up in a shtetl, she had never attended school. Yet she deeply impressed her granddaughter by how diligently she studied and how intensely proud she was when she could answer the questions on the exam in her broken English.
Even with Hebrew school and piano lessons, there was always ample time and energy for play. Kiki had grown up with her cousin Richard; the two families moved into different houses on the same block in 1939, when the children were in first grade. These constant playmates considered themselves more like twins than cousins. They went roller-skating together, rode their bicycles, and joined in the neighborhood games that were interrupted only by their mothers’ admonitions to come inside for piano practice, homework, supper, or bed.
As the two grew older and joined the Ninth Street “gang,” “play” became more dangerous, particularly after the youngsters and their Eighth Street rivals began hurling rocks at each other. When Celia found out about the intensity of the rivalry, she declared with unmistakable finality that there would be no more rock throwing. Her sternness had its desired effect on a daughter who vividly recalled her mother’s response when she, as a small child, had continued tossing a tomato back and forth to Richard, despite orders to stop. The inevitable splat on the kitchen floor occurred. Richard had escaped punishment from his mother. Celia had not been so forgiving.
Ruth at age ten with her cousin and playmate Richard Bader, 1943.
Kiki also remembered the time she came home with her first and only B on her report card. She had just been skipped to a higher grade at school, and the math test involved long division, a subject her former teacher had not yet covered. But Celia would accept no excuses. As another Brooklyn child recalled, if there were Bs, “the whole house went into mourning.” Kiki had promised herself that she would never again bring home anything less than straight As. English, history, and social studies classes she breezed through, but math was never a favorite. Studying, however, absorbed only a fraction of her energy. Climbing garage roofs became her next caper.
Recognizing how quickly this budding adolescent was growing up, Celia made quite explicit her goals—education and independence. For Kiki, this meant more than getting top grades. Nourished by her reading of achieving women, she knew she wanted to “do something” with her life. What she would do, she had no idea; however, as she matured, she was sufficiently self-aware to know that she had an ambitious and competitive streak and that college was part of her future. Celia, who determined that her daughter would not be a subway scholar who commuted daily to a less prestigious public college, had been saving money for tuition at an elite private institution.
As the economy began to improve in the early 1940s, she made small deposits into five local savings banks for Kiki’s education. Having lived through the crash, when banks closed their doors and customers’ deposits vanished, she was unwilling to entrust all her savings to a single institution. Nor, apparently, did she count on Nathan to come up with the tuition.
In the meantime, conditions abroad had quickly deteriorated as Hitler pursued the Third Reich’s brutal quest for dominance. Then came news of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. War came when Kiki was only eight years old.
She was too young to appreciate how much wartime production would revitalize the Brooklyn naval yard, which eventually employed seventy thousand workers toiling around the clock. Nor did she recognize how strongly defense work would breathe new life into the ailing local economy, securing Brooklyn’s rank as the fourth-largest industrial city in the country. But as hostilities persisted, she became keenly aware of the well-being of a “dear elder cousin,” Seymour, who had been inducted into the army after Pearl Harbor. Stationed in the Pacific, he had become a constant source of anxiety to family members. She was also old enough to understand the distressing news on the radio and to be frightened by film clips of the war. Like many youngsters during those years, she remembered evening air-raid drills, war bonds, and the ration stamps that were required at gas stations and butcher shops.
Along with her classmates, Kiki tended a “victory garden” at school, knit squares that would be incorporated into afghan blankets for the troops, and collected tinfoil from chewing gum wrappers so the aluminum could be used in the manufacturing of armaments. On “stamp day,” students used part of their allowance money to purchase twenty-five-cent stamps to paste into a savings bond book that could be used to purchase bonds supporting the war effort. While the boys became instant experts on various warplanes, spending hours drawing aircraft like the B-17, Kiki admired posters of “Rosie the Riveter” and the strong, active women who had moved into factories to make the United States the “arsenal of democracy.” Like other youngsters, she used Victory Mail purchased at the local post office to write to Seymour, no doubt unaware that the letters, once mailed, were microfilmed and sent overseas, where they would be reproduced and censored for sensitive information, before finally being handed on to the men to whom they were addressed.
At the war’s end in 1945, Kiki, now twelve, had vivid memories of momentous events. FDR, the only president she had ever known, suddenly died in April at his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia. The news plunged Brooklyn into mourning. For many in the borough, the grief could not have been more intense had a member of the immediate family died. The Bader home was an exception. Celia’s admiration for the First Lady was not matched on her husband’s part by reverence for FDR. As a small-business man, Nathan disliked the extensive government regulations associated with the New Deal. Although Celia’s political leanings were toward the Democratic Party and Nathan’s toward the GOP, neither wife nor husband was highly partisan. Believing that two terms were enough for any president, they had voted for Wendell Willkie in 1940, knowing he, too, was an internationalist.
In May, Nazi Germany surrendered, inspiring total jubilation in massive V-E Day celebrations across the country. The Baders, like many parents, spared their daughter Life magazine’s horrific photographs of the emaciated survivors of Auschwitz and other death camps. But there was no escaping newsreels of mushroom-shaped clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August. Awe gave way to horror as Kiki grasped what human suffering the bombs inflicted on the Japanese, casting a pall over forthcoming V-J Day celebrations. Then she breathed a sigh of relief when news arrived that Seymour would be coming home.
After six years of war, death marches, and the Holocaust, the late president’s hope for a new world organization dedicated to the preservation of peace and human rights was a part of the Roosevelt legacy to which Kiki and her parents fully subscribed. Realization of world governance might actually occur with the founding of a new international organization to promote peace and security. The Baders’ universalist sentiments were shared by over 80 percent of Americans who supported U.S. membership in the United Nations. Celia and her daughter closely followed Eleanor Roosevelt’s efforts on behalf of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the former First Lady lauded as “the International Magna Carta for all men everywhere.” Two months after Mrs. Roosevelt had been chosen to head the UN Commission on Human Rights, Kiki, now a thirteen-year-old eighth grader and editor of her school’s newspaper, the Highway Herald, wrote her own editorial:
Since the beginning of time, the world has known four great documents, great because of all the benefits to humanity which came about as a result of their fine ideals and principles.
The first was The Ten Commandments, which was given to Moses while he was leading the Israelites through the wilderness of the land of Canaan. Today people of almost every religion respect and accept them as a code of ethics and a standard of behavior.
Up until the thirteenth century, conditions under the kings of Europe were unbearable for the commoners. Taxation was high, living conditions poor and justice unknown. It was then, in 1215 A.D., that the barons and peers of England met and drew up a charter called The Magna Carta. After forcing King John to sign it, the document was declared the governing law of the land. This gave the English peasants the first rights ever granted to them.
When William of Orange, a Dutchman, was offered the English throne, his chief ambition was to use the military powers of Britain to aid his beloved Holland in its war with Spain. In accepting this offer, he had to grant certain concessions to the English people. So, in 1689, he signed The Bill of Rights. This limited the King’s powers and gave much of the government control to Parliament, another important stride in the history of the world.
The Declaration of Independence of our own U.S. may well be considered one of the most important steps in the shaping of the world. It marked the birth of a new nation, a nation that has so grown in strength as to take its place at the top of the list of the world’s great powers.
And now we have a fifth great document, The Charter of the United Nations. Its purpose and principles are to maintain international peace and security, to practice tolerance and to suppress any acts of aggression or other breaches of peace.
It is vital that these be assured, for now we have a weapon that can destroy the world. We children of public school age can do much to aid in the promotion of peace. We must try to train ourselves and those about us to live together with one another as good neighbors for this idea is embodied in the great new Charter of the United Nations. It is the only way to secure the world against future wars and maintain an everlasting peace.
Endorsing the formation of the United Nations and its Universal Declaration as the latest development in the evolution of human rights beginning with the Ten Commandments and the Magna Carta, the precocious author signaled her enduring attention to history and support for human rights.
Ruth, aged thirteen, at her Hebrew school confirmation at the East Midwood Jewish Center. She is seated to the left of Rabbi Harry Halpern, and her friend and future college roommate Joan Bruder is on the right, 1946.
Parallel experiences were also occurring at her Hebrew school. Levi Soshuk, a Jewish educator and Zionist who worked with young people, taught at the East Midwood Jewish Center as well as at Abraham Lincoln High School. A master at capturing the idealism of teenagers with his vision of a progressive new land of Israel where Jews and Arabs could peacefully coexist, he told stories of the first aliyah, or immigration, of Jews to Palestine. It was an intellectually inspiring cocktail for a young teenager developing her own view of postwar possibilities at a time when “Americans suddenly seemed to stand beholding a new heaven and a new earth.” Graduating in her white robe on confirmation day in 1946, Kiki Bader carried home her prize for “best” in Hebrew school.
Moving on to academically oriented James Madison High School meant traveling to Bedford Avenue. With eight hundred students in attendance, two different shifts cycled through classes each day. The student body was about 60 percent Jewish, because many of the elementary school Catholic students were siphoned off by parochial schools. Among the faculty, an unusually high percentage of instructors had Ph.D. degrees. Unable to find jobs in colleges and universities as enrollments shrank during the Depression—and because of anti-Semitism—they had taken positions at James Madison, which they intended to hold until retirement. Generations of young high school graduates became the beneficiaries.
Kiki quickly proved that she was smart enough to be selected for the elite honor society, musically talented enough to be awarded a cello position in the school orchestra, and popular enough to be elected to the twirling squad and booster society. As one of the “go-getters,” she wore her black satin jacket with its gold lettering while selling tickets to football games. Smart, pretty, and popular—she dated frequently—she seemed a model American teenager. Only later did she acknowledge that she studied the cello merely to qualify for the back row of the orchestra and that the baton twirling and booster society were de rigueur for anyone aspiring to be “in.” If truth were told, she had no interest whatsoever in high school football, although as a dutiful twirler she attended every game, despite chipping her front tooth on a baton. Dodgers games, which the entire high school attended on “Dodgers Day” every spring, were no less “boring.” Even in those unformed teen years, when adolescents routinely try on and discard diverse identities, she had recognized an ill fit.
Ruth leading religious services at Camp Che-Na-Wah, in the Adirondacks, New York, which she attended each summer from 1937 to 1951. The camp was owned by her uncle Sol and his wife, Cornelia Amster. Ca. 1948–50.
More enduring aspects of her personality emerged elsewhere. At camp, she volunteered to serve as the rabbi for Friday night services. She relished speaking in public and found the singing of Hebrew chants with their Eastern European melodies “inspirational.” More important, she actually enjoyed the responsibility of conducting the camp service. Such opportunities for Jewish girls were infrequent in an age before bat mitzvahs became commonplace.
Her obsession with intellectual achievement also stood out at James Madison, which had more than its share of bright, college-bound students. Her scores, her guidance counselor advised, might earn her admission to Swarthmore, Wellesley, or Barnard. And of course, she would apply to Uncle Sol’s alma mater, Cornell University. Classmates who knew her best found the teenager “modest” about her academic accomplishments, although some students thought her to be “annoyingly competitive, too aggressive by half.” “Pushy” even, said one. But her old friend and fan the former D.C. Superior Court judge Richard Salzman firmly disagreed, insisting that his childhood neighbor and schoolmate was “popular, personable, and serious.” She belonged to “all the right groups,” he recalled, and excelled academically “without giving the impression of studying”—a prerequisite for any teenage girl who valued peer group acceptance in those prefeminist years.
What other students, including Salzman, did not know was that Kiki Bader’s mother was waging a losing battle against cervical cancer. Their classmate’s silence and rigid compartmentalization of her life were hardly surprising. A mother’s prolonged illness marked the family as abnormal in the eyes of other teenagers in the postwar years; “cancer” was an unspoken word and death a taboo subject. Celia’s cancer, diagnosed in 1946 during her daughter’s freshman year at high school, required surgeries and weeks of hospitalization. Kiki managed her time carefully because every minute counted; trips to and from Beth Moses Hospital took an hour each way.
Soon the days settled into a dreary routine: school, the subway trip to the hospital, where she met her father, a visit with her mother, dinner at the cafeteria near the hospital. Then it was back home, to rise again in the morning and return to classes. Illness so dominated the Baders’ lives that neither father nor daughter had much inclination to discuss anything else, especially their shared pain.
The glum routine and depressing reality of her mother’s illness propelled the guarded teenager to look for ways to escape temporarily. The Brooklyn Academy provided a place to release tears “without coming away feeling sad.” She could suspend grief when absorbed in concerts or engrossed in films like Laurence Olivier’s Henry V. Long walks in Central Park on the way to her piano lessons helped, especially when combined with visits to museums. Music also provided relief. She would plunge into Chopin’s preludes, a series of twenty-four short pieces that cover a vast range of expression, from the opening homage to Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” to the gaiety of a Polish mazurka, to the apocalyptic D minor. Playing allowed her to immerse herself for hours in music from melancholy to wildest anguish to peaceful serenity. Grief, no doubt, also contributed to Kiki’s conviction that she could not give up smoking. She had smoked her first cigarette at thirteen when a school chum dared her to inhale without coughing. She took the dare and became hooked, to the great dismay of her mother, who dared not fuss too much about the unfortunate habit that father and daughter shared.
Celia, too, knew her days were dwindling, yet she never insisted on her daughter’s company. Rather, she encouraged Kiki to keep up with friends and high school activities in the hope that they would help blunt the impending loss at home. Nonetheless, Kiki stoically clung to Celia’s bedside as much as a busy teenager could, acutely aware that the disease was taking its inexorable toll. She knew it pleased her mother to see her studying. And her mother had many things she wanted to share.
One of Celia’s most frequent exhortations was “Be a lady.” Kiki knew that for her mother, the term “lady” was a “most honorable one,” implying much more than the usual upper-middle-class admonition to observe good manners, behave properly in the company of young men, and refrain from sex before marriage. Being a lady meant holding fast to one’s “convictions and self-respect.” It implied self-control—restraining not only erotic desire but also anger. Such admonitions, often uttered to children of those who have been targets of discrimination, weighed heavily upon the consciousness of a daughter already well schooled in self-discipline.
Although Celia lived to see the much-anticipated letter of acceptance from Cornell—she had asked her brother Sol to write on Kiki’s behalf—cancer overtook her in the spring of 1950. An aggressive round of radiation treatment that her doctors had prescribed did nothing to relieve her suffering and made her violently ill. Having learned only the week before that her daughter had been chosen as one of a select few graduates to be on the “Roundtable Forum of Honor” that would present commencement remarks, she died at the age of forty-seven on Sunday, June 25. The burial took place on Monday, and on Tuesday, graduation day, Kiki stayed home with her father. Her teachers later delivered her medals to her home.
Celia had managed to hold on long enough to provide the essential guidance and role model that her daughter needed at a critical phase in her development. Unlike most adults at the time who “protected” children from knowledge of a parent’s fatal illness, she spoke openly about the impact of her death. She especially urged Kiki to look out for her father. Celia’s strength and candor thus spared her daughter the worst aspects of “mother loss”—the adult depression and anxiety disorder that psychologists believe disproportionately afflicts children, particularly daughters, who lose their mothers before age seventeen. Yet no amount of preparation could blunt the devastating pain and waves of inconsolable grief that engulfed father and daughter.
Sitting shivah, the customary seven days of mourning when family and friends gather to recite the Mourner’s Prayer, might have functioned to ease the family’s feelings of desolation by reaffirming the belief of the mourners. Instead, tradition only intensified Kiki’s despair. Ten men were required to form a quorum, or minyan, to say prayers for the dead. The fact that women did not count in this patriarchally inspired Orthodox practice incensed the incipient feminist in Kiki. As the daughter of a woman who never underestimated what women could accomplish, she found it appalling that Celia’s own sisters would countenance what their niece could only regard as an insult to her mother. Yet she felt she had to acquiesce. Sadie, she knew, was rigorous in adhering to the rituals of Orthodox Judaism, and Bernice, the youngest and prettiest of the three sisters, was no rebel.
As the somber, sorrowful sounds of the Kaddish surrounded the mourners, Kiki’s deeper grief at her mother’s death took over. Yet the emotions inspired by the incident lingered, becoming a turning point in Kiki’s decision to become a secular Jew. Many years later, she would quote from Henrietta Szold’s response, written in 1916, to a caring offer made from a man in the community to say the Kaddish for her mother:
It is impossible for me to find words in which to tell you how deeply I was touched by your offer to act as “Kaddish” for my dear mother….[I] appreciate what you say about the Jewish custom [that only male children recite the prayer, and if there are no male survivors, a male stranger may act as substitute]; and Jewish custom is very dear and sacred to me. [Y]et I cannot ask you to say Kaddish after my mother. The Kaddish means to me that the survivor publicly…manifests his…intention to assume the relation to the Jewish community that his parent had, [so that] the chain of tradition remains unbroken from generation to generation….You can do that for…your family, I must do that [for mine].
Reflecting on her own mother, Kiki declared, “She was the strongest and bravest person I have ever known.”
On one matter, however, Kiki was deeply torn: what to do about her father. Celia had suggested that Kiki carefully consider Barnard, where she had been accepted, which was only a subway ride away. Relatives, concerned about Nathan, lobbied for the prestigious women’s college, hoping she would come home every weekend. But Celia had always talked about Cornell. And Sol, as an alumnus, had hired Cornell students as waitresses at the guest lodge at his camps in the Adirondacks—coeds who told his niece “great things” about the university. Kiki managed to convince herself that it was Cornell that her mother had really wanted her to attend. She and her father had already been through so much pain together; living with such consuming grief was suffocating. Yet she felt a keen sense of guilt for putting her own needs first.
At least she could help her father financially. The tuition money Celia had so laboriously saved in her five accounts totaled $8,000—a remarkable sum given the time and circumstances and worth many times more in contemporary purchasing power. Kiki reckoned that with New York State Regents and Cornell scholarships to cover tuition, she could make almost enough money from various jobs to cover her room, board, and other necessities. Taking out the small portion of Celia’s savings that she calculated she would need to make up the difference, she turned over the rest of the nest egg to her father. Despite a burgeoning consumer-driven economy, she realized that the small retail business Nathan and his brother Isidore had carried on after their father died was struggling as larger, more fashionable department stores took over and families moved to the suburbs. Nathan’s grief and depression, compounded by the loss of his wife’s astute counsel, proved overwhelming. It was only a matter of months before Nathan Bader Inc. closed its doors, leaving its owner, no longer a provider, with an overwhelming sense of failure.
His daughter, on the other hand, had the future. Before she departed for her summer job as camp counselor, she and a Flatbush friend, Joan Bruder—also on her way to Cornell—met by chance on the train station platform. The giddy anticipation with which they talked about college made their meeting too memorable for time to erase. “Kiki asked me to be her roommate,” Joan recalled. “We had known each other from Hebrew school, having gone to different high schools. I was so flattered and excited that she would ask me. It was a wonderful moment.”
While Kiki was at camp, a letter arrived from Aunt Buddy relating her efforts to find a place for Nathan to live. She had found a small apartment in a house farther out on Long Island in Lynbrook. Apart from its minimal cost, the apartment had just one advantage—proximity to her own family in Rockville Centre. Once they had removed his few belongings, the apartment in the house on East Ninth Street was rented to another family. Even Nathan’s ties to the Belle Harbor synagogue were severed. Unable to pay his dues, he was denied his customary seat for the high holy days.
For Kiki, this last affront to her father’s pride hit hard, reinforcing not only her growing alienation from religious practice but also a new steeliness in her resolve. The synagogue’s action, she believed, went against the spirit of justice and compassion that was supposed to be at the core of Judaism. She would honor her heritage and its ethical teachings and values in which she had been immersed since childhood—but that was it.
The rupture with the past now complete, Kiki’s world had vanished—and with it, the last vestiges of childhood. Yet Celia would remain a guiding presence throughout her daughter’s life. As an accomplished adult at the absolute pinnacle of her profession, she would look at her mother’s photograph as she left her office each day and say to herself, “She would have been proud of me.”