For Dr. Ruth, attachment to dolls dates to childhood
NEW YORK — Ruth Westheimer was 10 years old when, in 1939, she boarded a train leaving Germany with 300 other Jewish children.
She took along one doll, a favorite named Matilda. But a younger child was crying inconsolably, so Westheimer gave the little girl her doll — because, she says today, “she needed it more.”
These days, Dr. Ruth, America’s favorite sex therapist, is 88. She lives in a New York apartment teeming with books and photos and honorary degrees.
And dollhouses. They give her joy and comfort and slivers of the innocence she lost so long ago, she said.
Westheimer was in her late 60s and already a celebrity when a friend began making dollhouses. Westheimer asked whether she could have one. Now she has two, plus several more square “rooms” on bookshelves and a collection of other boxes and tissue holders that double as dollhouses.
She is exacting about their contents. They are Jewish homes, with menorahs and other religious symbols. The dolls and furniture are from England and made in the years between World War I and World War II — “the good years,” she called them.
“This one is good luck,” said Westheimer, proudly holding up a tiny chimneysweep figurine in a dollhouse near the apartment entrance. “You can touch him!”
The faces on her dolls are expressive and wise. “Not like the Barbie doll,” she said. “Because to a Barbie doll you cannot tell your troubles. These people you can tell your problems.”
Westheimer has four grandchildren, but the dollhouses weren’t meant for them. They’re hers.
“I did not have control over my life,” she said. “But I have
control over this.”
Karola Ruth Siegel was an only child. Her parents were lower-middle-class Orthodox Jews in Frankfurt, but her childhood was charmed. She remembers having roller skates, 13 dolls and the undivided attention of her paternal grandmother.
Each Friday, her father, a salesman, took her out for ice cream and then to temple. Again and again, he would impress on her the value of education.
“The most important thing for my father was learning,” she said, “because nobody can take that away from you.”
She recalled hearing a neighbor warn in the fall of 1938 that they needed to leave Germany. Her parents tried to shield her from worry, but “I just knew that terrible things were happening.”
After the November 1938 “night of broken glass” — she doesn’t use the word “Kristallnacht,” because it sounds too beautiful and rarefied — Nazis came to the door of their first-floor apartment. Westheimer watched from the window as the men marched her father toward a covered truck. Before climbing into it, he turned around to look at his daughter. She waved, and he waved back. Then he smiled.
“Because he didn’t want me to cry,” she said.
Weeks later, a postcard arrived from her father, who was in a labor camp. It said that she should board a Kindertransport — a train rescuing Jewish children from the Nazis.
Frightened and sad, she hugged her mother and was loaded onto the train in January 1939, less than a year before the outbreak of World War II. She knew that she needed to distract other children from their tears, she said, “because I remembered how my father turned around and smiled.”
Most Kindertransport passengers were headed for Britain, but she was bound for Switzerland, where she and 50 others wound up in a children’s home that became an orphanage.
For almost two years, she exchanged letters with her parents. She knew that they both had ended up in a ghetto in Poland. But then the letters stopped. Not for several years did she learn with certainty that her father had died in Auschwitz. Her mother was listed as “verschollen.” Disappeared.
After the war, she trained to become a kindergarten teacher, helped Israel in its fight for independence and moved to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. She had married, but when her husband wanted to return to Israel, they divorced; they remain good friends.
In 1956, she moved to the United States, in part to seek out an uncle who had survived the war and relocated to San Francisco.
“I wanted to check out if he was as short as me,” she said with a laugh.
She settled in the Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights, which became an enclave for many German Jewish refugees. She married again, had a daughter and divorced when her second husband moved back to Europe.
After a couple of years as a single mother, she met Fred Westheimer, a telecommunications engineer to whom she would be married for almost 38 years. He adopted her daughter, and together they had a son.
Westheimer received a doctorate in education from Columbia University, concentrating on sexual education and studying under Helen Singer Kaplan, a pioneer in the field of sex therapy.
In 1980, local radio producers in New York tapped her to do a short weekly segment answering listeners’ most private questions. Her show — controversial at the time — grew to two hours as audiences responded to her blunt talk of erections and orgasms. Her thick German accent and irreverent humor made her an icon of the era.
She has published 40 books, still teaches at Columbia and speaks worldwide. Almost every night, she’s out, at the theater, the opera or a nonprofit event. She has a Twitter account, a YouTube channel and plans for new projects in the works.
Dr. Ruth, who visited Columbus in September for the Gallery Players production of “Becoming Dr. Ruth,” has been a widow for almost 20 years. During that time, her apartment — the same one she has lived in for five decades — has grown crowded with dolls and figurines.
Her parents and grandmother, she said, “would have been very happy to see what happened to me.”