by Eleanor J. Bader
The career of a 95-year-old ex-war-correspondent
In his introduction to Ruth Gruber’s Witness: One of the Great Correspondents of the Twentieth Century Tells her Story (Schocken Books, $27.50), former U.S. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke describes Gruber’s life as rich and fulfilling. “Ruth became the chronicler of every major Jewish emigration to Israel — from North Africa, Yemen, Iraq, Romania, Russia and Ukraine, and finally from Ethiopia, where, in her mid-seventies, she scrambled up and down muddy fields to find Jews living in dangerous and terrible conditions in the highlands. Ruth,” he continues, has lived “a life that has made a difference.” The 95-year-old New York-based photographer and journalist would heartily agree.