Ruth eventually left her family and moved to New York City, where she met and married her first husband, Dennis. She never felt loved or cared for, and didn’t feel like she belonged anywhere. Ruth faced abuse within her family, but also anti-Semitism from the predominantly white protestant community in her Southern town. Her family life was tumultuous, as her father was abusive and her mother Mameh, disabled by polio as a younger woman, was unable to defend her three children.
Ruth grew up in Suffolk, Virginia, where her father Tateh was a business owner and rabbi. Her name was Americanized to Rachel Deborah Shilsky, and for the first twenty years of her life she was known as Rachel, only changing her name to the less Jewish sounding Ruth when she left home for the last time. She was born as Ruchel Dwajra Zylska in Poland in 1921, and immigrated to the United States with her mother, father, and older brother in 1923. Ruth has dealt with significant trauma over the course of her life, and deals with painful emotions by locking them away in her mind and doing her best to forget about them.
A white woman who married two black men and gave birth to twelve mixed-race children, Ruth dislikes discussing race, but nevertheless values open-mindedness and condemns bigotry. More than anything else in her life, Ruth values her children and her relationship to God. She had twelve children born to two husbands, Andrew Dennis McBride Sr.
One of the narrators of The Color of Water and James McBride’s mother.
0 kommentar(er)
