The Fay Gillis Wells Award was established in 2009 in honor of Wells, who was a founding member of the OPC in 1939. The winner of this year’s award is Ruth Gruber, foreign correspondent, author and photojournalist.
The late Elliseva Sayers left a bequest to honor accomplished women journalists. The winner of this year’s award is Ruth Gruber, foreign correspondent, author and photojournalist. Dava Sobel, Gruber’s niece, Is the author of several books, including Longitude and Gallileo’s Daughter.
On visits to her home when I was a child, I didn’t realize the glamorous Aunt Ruth in floor-length, feather-trimmed housecoat was a war veteran with the honorary rank of General. Her Manhattan apartment resembled a small museum. One long corridor was lined, even down to my eye level, with plaques, tributes, and photos of Ruth posed alongside leaders the likes of David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, President Harry S Truman, and Eleanor Roosevelt.
Other framed photos had been shot by her — images, for example, from the deck of the American troop transport Henry Gibbins, aboard which she shepherded one thousand Holocaust survivors from Europe to the States in 1944. There was also her 1947 Life Magazine “Picture of the Week,” (above right) taken while she covered the voyage of Exodus 1947, showing Jewish refugees, barred by the British from entering Palestine, hoisting a Union Jack with a painted-on swastika after they had been transferred to the prison ship Runnymede Park.
At the back of an old filing cabinet, where even she had forgotten they existed, lay letters written to Ruth by Virginia Woolf, the subject of her doctoral dissertation (which earned her, in 1932, at age twenty, the distinction of being the world’s youngest Ph.D.).
A large glass-enclosed case by the dining room exhibited artifacts of her career in statesmanship and journalism, including Eskimo carved ivory figurines she acquired as special assistant to Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, and gold nuggets she panned in the Soviet Arctic.
Books, including her own (on the status of women under various forms of government, stories of Israel, biographies) filled shelves in several rooms. In later years, her couch bloomed with colorful pillows embroidered by Ethiopian Jews she watched being airlifted to Israel during Operation Moses.
By postponing motherhood until she was forty-one, Ruth pioneered without realizing that she was spearheading a movement. She made traveling around the world and being an author and a mother seem an acceptable, accessible pursuit. Her writing life was an inspiration to me, and no doubt to legions of other young women.
Now in her ninth decade, Ruth, still glamorous, continues to write, lecture, and appear in documentary films, leaving retirement to others.