Page 20 of A Well-Read Woman
So it wasn’t just a “practical” decision after all; Ruth clearly had a sense of idealism when it came to her decision to pursue librarianship. She was willing to reveal her childhood in Nazi Germany to the faculty of Berkeley’s library school and use it to boost her chances of admission when her transcript consisted of mostly Bs and Cs. Ruth wanted to emphasize that she was not just another library school applicant who wanted to enter the profession because she liked to read or because she had failed at another career. Books and libraries held a deep meaning for her, and she had the foresight to know that being a librarian didn’t mean that you read books all day, a common misperception of the profession. She recognized that it meant interacting with people who sought information and were beholden to its gatekeepers. Ruth knew that the organization of libraries was the key to their success. Her battles in Israel over the sloppiness of the photograph archive were ample training to prepare her for work as a librarian.
In the same folder as this admissions essay (an original folder that Ruth had labeled “Graduate School Records”) was a handwritten draft list of books and a typed final version titled “Books Read over Last Six-Month Period.” Perhaps another part of her library school application or part of an assignment in one of her library school classes, it is a list of sixty-four titles:
Anthology of Japanese Literature by Donald Keene
The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki
The Story Bag: A Collection of Korean Folktales by Kim So-un
The Wall by John Hersey
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Selected Stories of Franz Kafka
Dirty Hands by Jean-Paul Sartre
The Respectable Prostitute by Jean-Paul Sartre
Abel Sanchez by Miguel de Unamuno
Mondo Piccolo: Don Camillo by Giovannino Guareschi
The Colors of the Day by Romain Gary
A Literary Chronicle, 1920–1950 by Edmund Wilson
The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
Lafcadio’s Adventures by André Gide
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Across the River and into the Trees by Ernest Hemingway
Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan
Ten North Frederick by John O’Hara
Farmers Hotel by John O’Hara
Bread and Wine by Ignazio Silone
The Man Who Died by D. H. Lawrence
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
The Short Reign of Pippin IV by John Steinbeck
Disappearance by Philip Wylie
Devils of Loudun by Aldous Huxley
The Bad Seed by William March
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
