Joe Morgenstern
Pulitzer Prize winning film critic for Wall Street Journal and KCRW
How to convey Ruth’s quicksilver spirit—her vivacity, courage, humor, hospitality to new ideas, plus her plain old hospitality and domesticity—and do it in a few hundred words? One story comes to mind from the pre-digital past, on a Saturday night before Christmas.
Ruth & Joe
Ruth was living near the beach in Santa Monica, on Fraser Avenue, in a modest frame house with a glassed-in terrace, a little front lawn and a white picket fence. As with every house she rented (leadership at KCRW and NPR not being synonymous with personal wealth), she had turned this one into a paragon of coziness with colorful style. On this night she’d invited a group of friends and colleagues for what looked and certainly smelled like a Christmas dinner—the main course, a goose, was in the oven—even though Ruth was Jewish to her secular core and had recently run a Hannukah radio documentary about the Holocaust that provoked fierce controversy, and antisemitic hate mail to the station.
The prelude to the goose was convivial. Wine and stories flowed. Suddenly, though, everything was brought to a halt by the sound of shattering glass. Someone had hurled something onto the porch through the plate glass window. The sound was more than chilling. Within the context of Kristallnacht, the Nazis’ “night of broken glass” that had recently been revisited on the Holocaust documentary, the shattering of this glass was terrifying.
For a moment everyone sat frozen in place. Then someone—I don’t remember who, but it was definitely not me—went to the front door, while the rest of us followed. What we saw was not a welcome sight. A tall young man of high school age stood on the other side of the picket fence, contemplating the damage he had done. We looked at him, not knowing what to say. He stared at us in silence. Then he shook his head and said quietly, “I cannot believe what I just did.”
He was a home-delivery person for the New York Times, the paper that promised to give the news without fear or favor. He’d meant to throw the huge and weighty Sunday edition onto the front doorstep, but missed his target by a country yard. As soon as he spoke, Ruth sprang into action, giving him a hug, telling him it was okay and urging him to join us for wine and goose. He declined, with regret. He had the rest of his route to cover, he explained, clearly startled by Ruth’s response. He had no way of knowing that she was just doing what she always did—embracing the surprise, the strangeness, the real or imagined dangers and the occasionally beautiful craziness of the world without fear, favor or the slightest hesitation.
