When I used to think of Hadassah, I imagined my mother in her purple suit with a matching purse and her chic cohorts. In our big white house in the suburbs in the 1970s, there were always Hadassah ladies in impeccably coordinated outfits sharing the latest news and brainstorming ideas for fund-raisers over perfectly arranged tea sandwiches.
In a sense, it was a perfect Mother’s Day image. But I fancied myself a rebel with black clothes, no makeup and jewelry, and felt very different from the Jewish community I grew up in. Although these women were raising money and consciousness about women’s issues and projects in Israel, I just couldn’t see past the perfect hair, perfect clothes, perfect houses. Somehow I confused the meaning of being part of the Jewish community with my vision of suburban materialism.
When I was 20, I escaped to a tiny Greenwich Village studio, where I ordered in Chinese food and listened to Motown as I passed the hours alone at my typewriter. I felt I had finally escaped my background, though over the years, images of matzah ball soup, my wacky Jewish relatives and Yiddish words kept creeping into my poems. Surprisingly, I felt emotional when I wrote about my parents’ childhood on the Lower East Side, which my editors would later say was my best work.
One day my old friend Andrea told me she had joined Hadassah in Michigan. I couldn’t believe it. In high school, Andrea and I smoked cigarettes, chased boys and listened to Bob Dylan together. Now 38, she was a public defender and very progressive. Could she really have become a Hadassah lady? She told me that through Hadassah she became a reproductive rights activist and learned how to lobby to stop domestic violence. Is that Hadassah?
I called my friend Lori, also a writer, to talk about how strange I was feeling. It turned out she had just written an article for the local Jewish newspaper about young professionals at Hadassah involved in social action and advocacy. It seemed that everyone was in on this secret but me.
It occurred to me that I unfailingly gravitated toward the Jewish community, whereas I had tried to stay away. Even my editors started to think of me as a Jewish writer, while I had never thought of myself as a Jewish woman, although, of course, I know I am.
Last year, the New York Times Book Review section asked me to review “The Journey Home: Jewish Women and the American Century” by Joyce Antler. I found myself absolutely enthralled with the 50 biographies of brave Jewish female rebels and anarchists. And there in the bios, I found myself once again up close with two Hadassah ladies — Henrietta Szold, Hadassah’s founder, and Ruth Gruber, a frequent writer for Hadassah magazine and life member of the organization.
To my surprise, I completely identified with the very human struggles of Szold, the great Zionist hero born 101 years before me. The first child and only daughter of a large family, she inherited her father’s passion for the academic and her mother’s generosity and benevolence. Her parents, like mine, allowed her to think for herself and choose her own path. She became a teacher and a freelance writer, and so did I. Even Szold’s first love-gone-sour reminded me of my bad experience with my college sweetheart David. And both of us fled our hometowns for Israel before settling in New York to throw ourselves into our work. Yet Szold, who died in 1945, never married or had children. In essence, she gave birth to Hadassah instead.
I guess I was always looking for a role model, and to my surprise, this Hadassah lady came close. Only I was longing for a more modern female role model who could have independence and career and a family. I continued reading and found Gruber, the role model I was seeking.
I first met Gruber in 1986 when I raved about her book “Rescue” in the New York Times Book Review. Eleven years later I was thrilled to find her included in the Antler collection. Today, author of 14 books at age 86, Gruber is the essence of the Hadassah woman (a concept I have come to completely revise) — committed to work, while caring and making a difference in the United States and in Israel.
“The Journey Home” recounts a mission Gruber flew as a pilot for President Roosevelt in World War II, bringing 1,000 European refugees to safe haven in Oswego, N.Y. Over the years, Gruber wrote many essays for Hadassah magazine, plus crafted the wonderfully readable “Raquela,” the true-life story of Raquela Priywes, a Hadassah nurse-midwife whose life mirrors the history of Israel and pre-state Palestine. When I met her, she showed me her “Diary of an American Housewife” column — a funny, brave, anti-housewife collection of essays about her travels to Israel and Puerto Rico with her husband and children.
I really admired this woman, and she helped me to reconnect my feelings of Jewish identity. Almost as a symbol of this reconciliation, Ruth ended up becoming friends with my mother. After hearing how impressed I was with her, my mother went to one of Ruth’s book signings at the Jewish Community Center in Baltimore and ended up inviting her home for lunch. I was surprised and happy to receive a call from both of them on the same line.
Ruth helped me see my mother and her friends in a different light. She guided me to understand my resistance and cynicism. Mom had grown up a poor orphan, so Ruth explained that for her having four children was a special mitzvah. Though my mother and her friends urged me to hurry up and have children — to me a sign that they were not feminists — Ruth reminded me of how supportive my mother was of my work, and how very proud. Ruth encouraged me to do things on my own schedule. Her daughters were born when she was 41 and 43. Her daughter Celia, also a lifetime Hadassah member, works as a television producer and married late, having children when she was 39 and 41.
“So you have plenty of time,” Ruth said. “You can have it all, you just juggle it with a little Jewish guilt.” Through Ruth, I have met a new generation of Jewish women of all ages, open-minded, proud active women who seek personal satisfaction while being politically engaged.
Recently I saw a picture of Ruth in Ms. magazine. I smiled when I read her goals: “To be adventurous, to be an activist, to be a rebel, to be compassionate, and most of all, to be a mensch.” And finally I realized that this could be the creed of all the Hadassah women, in the old and new world, not being afraid to lead the way.
Nearly two years ago, Ruth danced the hora with my parents at my wedding in Soho. I was dressed all in black and we all danced in a traditional circle round and round. And we were all connected.