Marlene Wagman-Geller

Dec 10, 2024 by Marlene Wagman-Geller

 

 

   Chutzpah is the Yiddish word for guts-the equivalent of the Spanish cajones and the English balls. Whatever the vernacular, it is what an octogenarian with a thick accent possesses in spades.

     The therapist who is credited with taking sex out of the closet and into the world’s living-rooms is the diminutive Dr. Ruth, (the honorific comes courtesy of her Ph.D. in education.) Despite her short stature-she is four feet seven inches and wears Cinderella size four shoes-she casts a giant shadow.

    Dr. Westheimer has achieved a great deal in her eighty plus years, and one of her greatest accomplishments was surviving the nightmare landscape of her youth. In her case, chutzpah is another word for courage. Karola Ruth Siegel was an only child, raised in a stable and loving home, first in Wiesenfeld, then in Frankfurt.  Her father, Julius, was a prosperous notions wholesaler and her mother, Irma, had met her husband when she worked as a maid in his family’s home. Julius’ mother also lived with them and grandmother and granddaughter were such nonstop talkers the reticent Irma could hardly get a word in edgewise. In an Orthodox Jewish home usually only sons attend Friday night services, but Julius always brought his daughter along and sent her to prestigious Jewish schools.

   When not in the synagogue or in cheder, Karola was always curious-or nosey-depending on one’s perspective- and managed to locate the key to a cabinet where her parents locked forbidden books. Her favorite pastime was reading and she was frustrated that some were out of bounds. The volume that engrossed her most was The Ideal Marriage, by Theodor Hendrik van de Veldeone, that had pictures of people engaged in sex.

      In 1938 her world was shattered by Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass) which began the net of doom that descended on Europe’s Jews. Seven days later the Gestapo awakened the Siegels and wrenched Julius from his family. Ruth recalled they wore shiny, black leather boots and her grandmother gave the Nazis money with the words, “Take good care of my son.” Karola watched from the window as her father boarded a covered truck and when he turned around he smiled and waved.

    Although Irma and her mother-in-law were desperate to keep their remaining family intact they were frantic to ensure Karola’s survival. They put the ten-year-old child’s name on a list of the kindertransport, a program designed to help Jewish children wait out the madness of World War II in a safe zone. The ‘orphans’ in exile hoped for a happy ending that for most of them would never come. 

    The child took her last glimpse of her mother while her grandmother ran down the platform to keep Karola in view till the last moment.  Her destination was a children’s home in Switzerland; had her name been on a transport for Holland, Belgium or France, in all likelihood she would have become a statistic of the one and a half million Jewish children who perished in the Holocaust. Karola suffered greatly as she missed her family, especially when their letters stopped arriving in 1941. In addition, the Swiss caregivers looked down on their female charges and felt with their refugee, orphan status their best chance in life was to prepare for livelihoods as maids. They took a special dislike to Karola who talked too much, especially about taboo subjects such as menstruation and what she had seen in the off limits books.

    The only comfort she derived was from the other children who were in the same precarious boat and they bonded into a makeshift family. They sang the songs from their lost world and poured their earts out onto diaries. Karola endured those miserable years with the memory of her family and the knowledge they would have wanted her happiness.

          As Germany had been the architect of her sorrows, and as her Swiss teachers were consigning her to a role of domestic, Karola, along with other kindertransport teens, made her way to the British Mandate of Palestine. She was a committed Zionist, and believed a Jewish homeland would ward off another Holocaust. When she arrived, she divested herself of both her family’s Orthodox faith, and the name Karola. She replaced it with the more Hebrew sounding Ruth, but kept the initial ‘K’ in the hope it would help her parents find her had they survived. Although she never discovered their fate, in all likelihood they perished in Auschwitz. She still retains the K to maintain ties to the past.

      Ruth worked in a kibbutz (as a tomato and olive picker) until she decided she wanted a more active role in the fight for Israeli independence. She joined the Haganah, the Jewish underground movement, where she trained as a sniper. She recalled of those days, “As a four-foot-seven woman, I would have been turned away by any self-respecting army anywhere else in the world. But I had other qualities that made me a valuable guerrilla. For some strange reason I can put five bullets into that red thing in the middle of the target. And I knew how to assemble a Sten gun with my eyes closed.” 

     Ironically, it was Ruth’s love of books that almost proved fatal. On her 20^th birthday the kibbutz’s attack siren sounded, but she refused to go into the bomb shelter without something to read. A high explosive shell almost took off both her feet at the ankles. “I would’ve been even shorter,” was her response. She credits Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem for saving her from amputation which enabled her to become a lifelong skier, (she only stopped at age 80) and to embrace her passion for dancing.

    There was a third thing Ruth shucked off in Israel. Because of her diminutive stature she believed that she would never marry, lamenting in her diary, “Nobody is ever going to want me because I’m short and ugly.” Despite her fears she had a boyfriend, nicknamed Putz, and lost her virginity on a pile of hay in the kibbutz (not to Putz.) In her recovery at the hospital she found solace with a sexy, male nurse with whom she began a “brief but intense love affair.” In 1950 she wed the first guy who offered to marry her, fearing she would never get another chance. She described David as “handsome, well-educated and short-” in here books a plus.

    When Palestine became Israel, Ruth felt it was once again time to move on; after the Nazis she did not want to live under the threat of the Arabs. Ruth and first guy set off for Paris-he to train in medicine, she to study psychology at the Sorbonne. The couple were very poor and lived in a three-flight walk-up with a toilet three flights down. They went to cafes and had one cup of coffee all day long. The marriage had an expiration date of five years and he returned to Israel. A good-looking Frenchman helped ease the breakup and Ruth had unprotected sex because she wanted a baby. Upon receiving a restitution check from the German government for 5,000 marks, (approximately $1,500) Ruth and her boyfriend left Paris and sailed to her fifth country of residence, the United States. She was thrilled when she became pregnant and the couple wed to give their child legitimacy. A year after Miriam’s birth, Ruth bid adieu to her French spouse. “Intellectually it was just not tenable,” was how she summed up her split. Intelligence for her is the most erogenous of zones, “Sex is not between the waist and the knees. Sex is between the ears. In the divorce settlement she stated, “He got the car and I got the child.”

       At this point Ruth could have thrown herself a huge pity party and indulged in her litany of woes: orphaned by the Nazis, twice divorced, single mother. As a bitter topping, she was now in a country where she had no money and did not speak its language. However, Ruth Westheimer is a survivor. She compares herself to a German doll that has lead in its base. When you put it flat down, it stands right back up again. She vowed as someone who made it through Hitler’s genocide she had to “repair the world;” to make a dent to be worthy of her miraculous survival. It was the fuel which made her still rise.

     Ruth worked as a maid at a dollar an hour but refused to let any grass grow under her size four shoes. At night she studied at Queens and LaGuardia colleges and ultimately received her master’s degree through a scholarship for victims of the Holocaust. Ruth recalls although she was poor she always had friends, as well as a boyfriend, Hans, who took her on a 1961 ski trip in the Catskills. However, as he was six foot she felt their heights were not compatible. At the top of the ski slope she met Manfred Westheimer and told Hans that she would be skiing with the short guy. She liked his height, that they were both German-Jewish refugees, and his reticence. The latter was important as she is never quiet for long, perhaps because talking seems to be her second favorite form of intercourse. She knew right away she was going to be his wife, something he was not aware of at the time. To achieve that end she employed her best ‘feminine wiles.’ They were married nine months later and she finally hit the marital jackpot. Fred often said of Ruth, “She was my one serious ski accident.” He adopted Miriam and together they had son, Joel. An adoring mother, she frequently kvells, “I have children like nobody’s children.”

          Dr. Ruth entered the lexicon of North America in 1980 with the syndicated phone-in sex talk show Sexually Speaking. On it those in need of chicken soup for the sexual soul could call for advice or information, dispensed with a thick German accent. The host describes herself, “I’m like a Jewish mother. A Jewish mother who talks explicitly.” She speaks about venereal disease with ease and says “an orgasm is just a reflex, like a sneeze.” Ah, gesundheit. People Magazine said of her, “She arouses only respect, the kind Golda Meir would’ve gotten had she been a gynecologist.” As she approached her 90^th decade she realized that she may have to one day step out of the limelight, but she feels she has already had far more than her allotted 15 minutes, and had found herself in more pleasurable positions that the Kama Sutra.

       After losing her childhood home, she never had a place of her own, she was thrilled when they purchased a three-bedroom apartment in Washington Heights, a neighborhood with a sizable community of German, Jewish refugees. Their apartment has accents of pink that Ruth considers the hue of foreplay and every square inch is a shrine to tchotchkes, as her greatest decorating fear is an empty space. One of her touches are miniature oil lamps etched with sexual positions, and innumerable photos: Bill Clinton hugging Dr. Ruth, President Obama hugging Dr. Ruth that leads to her comment, “Everyone is hugging me. It is good to be Dr. Ruth.” Other photos are of her family-including four grandchildren. Of these she says, “Hitler lost and I won.”

       On the train to Switzerland, Karola had left with her only toy- a doll- that she gave to a crying little girl. Ms. Westheimer seems to have spent her lifetime making up for her early lack of possessions. Vying in space with the dolls are Dr. Ruth’s vast collection of turtles crafted of clay, metal, wood, stone-and one even inlaid with diamonds. They are a metaphor for their owner. “The turtle can stay in its shell and be safe. But if it wants to move forward it has to stick its neck out. That’s me. If I have to mention one characteristic I have, it’s chutzpah.” One thing she has yet to do is visit the Galapagos “to see how the turtles make love. Then I can arrange my turtles in the right way. I don’t want them to be lonely.”

      What stopped Ruth from being lonely for thirty-four years was her Freddy who shared with her a commonality of background, home and $10,000,000 fortune. (Indeed, it is good to be Dr. Ruth.) Although he did not share her loquacious nature, his humor was of a similar vein. In 1997 Diane Sawyer came to the Westheimer home to conduct an interview with the world’s sexologist and asked Fred about his sex life; his response? “The shoemaker’s children don’t have shoes.” Ruth will always mourn his 1997 passing but is still open to a fourth trip down the aisle if she could, “Find an interesting older gentleman who can still walk and talk-and who can dance all night.”

 

 

 

 

Prev Next