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Cologne.
    “We hope you will come back to Cologne, Fräulein Doktor,” Mayor Adenauer said. “Until you do, I trust these books will help you remember your year among us.”
    “I promise you, I will never forget this year, nor will I forget you.”
    He placed his hand on my head as in a benediction. “Bless you, my child. May God go with you.”
    A few days after my meeting with Mayor Adenauer, I took the train to Hamburg, and there climbed aboard the St. Louis , the flagship of the Hamburg-Amerika Line. 4
    Sailing home in 1932, I spent most of my time on deck, rereading passages from some of my favorite Virginia Woolf novels. Coming down the gangway in New York, I saw a crowd of reporters and photographers on the pier. The men had press cards standing up in the ribbons of their felt hats. I looked back up the gangway to see if some movie star was coming down; a rumor had spread during the crossing that Mary Pickford was traveling in first class.
    Suddenly, the army of reporters surrounded me. One of them shouted, “How does it feel to be the youngest Ph.D. in the world?” Another called out, “Read yesterday’s New York Times. They say you’re the youngest in the whole world. How do you feel about that?”
    How could I answer these reporters? I had never been interviewed before. After Germany, the crush of men around me seemed like an invasion. I had to escape. I pushed through the crowd and found Mama and Papa and my brother Irving.
    “Get me out of here,” I panted.
    We drove swiftly. In the car, Mama told me how the phone hadn’t stopped ringing. “Reporters were asking, ‘When is your daughter coming back?’ Our neighbors, especially the German ones, aresending so many flowers, the house looks like the Botanical Garden.”
    Papa, driving the car, turned for a moment to look at me. “I guess we were wrong trying to stop you from going.”
    At home I ran up to my bedroom and threw myself onto the bed, weeping. I didn’t know why I was crying. I think I cried because the girl I had been was no more, and now I was safe in America, while a dark cloud hung over the Herzes and all the Jews of Germany.
    The phone rang for three days, and Mama bravely lied to the reporters: “She’s out of town.”
    But one day, she came up to my room and said, “There’s a reporter sitting on our doorsteps. He’s from the New York Herald Tribune. He says he’ll sit there all night if you don’t talk to him. He says he’ll lose his job if he doesn’t get the story.”
    “I can’t do it, Mom.”
    “It’s not right,” Mama said. “You can’t let the poor man sit on our stoop all night. Go outside. He won’t chop your head off.”
    I washed my face and went out to the stoop, walked down the stairs, and sat next to a middle-aged man with a battered face and a battered hat.
    “I appreciate your seeing me,” he said gently. “I guess you’re overwhelmed. I would be too.”
    His article appeared on Sunday, September 4,1932, headlined:
    GIRL PH.D., 20, BEWILDERED BY FUSS OVER FEAT
    RUTH GRUBER FEELS HUNTED, SHE SAYS: FEELS ACHIEVEMENT
    WAS NOT UNUSUAL
    HAD FUN WHILE STUDYING
    JUST WANTS SOLITUDE A WHILE TO GET HER BEARINGS
    More reporters demanded interviews; more articles appeared. The most amusing one was in the New York Evening Post , titled: “Sex and Intellect,” pointing out that a young woman had done what no young man had done, gotten a Ph.D. at 20.
    Despite the publicity, I could not get a job. The Depression was on, and if there were jobs, they went to young men, not young women. I tried freelancing and, after a stack of rejections, sold an article to the Sunday New York Times. It was on Brooklyn, which I called a microcosm of Europe. The Herald Tribune then bought several more articles, which I enjoyed writing. I had never taken a course in journalism, but I learned on the job and began to feel that maybe I was making my way in the world.
    At the same time, I found another part-time job. At Romany