Obituary

Ruth Greenfield Bolotin
June 10, 1917 – March 15, 2011

Ruth’s mother, Yocheved Haifetz, was born in Vityebsk, Belarus, in 1885. At the age of 12, she was apprenticed to a knitting factory, where she learned to knit on a knitting machine. In those days, knitting machines were hand-operated. The operator swung a handle from one side to the other, and a whole row of stitches was knitted to whatever width and pattern were set. This skill enabled Yocheved to earn a living just about anywhere.

Ruth’s father, Ari Greenfield, was born in Khotimsk, also in Belarus. Shortly after Ruth’s parents married (around 1915), her father deserted from the Tsar’s army. To avoid his being recaptured, her parents fled from European Russia to Siberia, where he lived under an assumed name (via a dead man’s passport, which Ruth’s mother somehow managed to procure for him).

Ruth was born on June 10, 1917, in Siberia, on the Barguzin River, near Lake Baikal. The family lived in a four-room log house (kitchen, parlor, two bedrooms), in a village with a single street. They earned a living by farming, growing rye and vegetables. They also had a cow and chickens; raised bees; and made pretty much everything they needed themselves—from candles, soap, and wine to clothes that Yocheved knitted and shoes that Ari made for them. Ari also served as the village clerk, in charge of birth and death certificates, because he was the only one in the village who could read and write.
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Ruth’s parents spoke fluent Hebrew and raised the family speaking Hebrew as their first language—an amazing feat, given that Israel did not yet exist and Hebrew was still a dead language.

The village was owned by a lord, who also owned the field where Ari raised rye, the plow used to plow the field, the old mare that pulled the plow, the seeds that the villagers planted in the fields, the flails used to thresh the seeds in the fall, and the mill where the seeds were ground into flour. The lord also owned the house that Ruth and her family lived in, built out of pine logs from trees that grew in the nearby forest.

The only heat in the house was from a wood-burning stove in the kitchen. On the back of the stove, beyond the hot area where pots could be set for cooking, was an area that was warm, including a metal shelf that was always warm. Ruth’s mother kept an old iron under the shelf. If she needed to iron something, she moved it to the area over the fire box—the area that was used for cooking—because whenever there was wood burning in the firebox, that area was hot. There was no electricity: the family used candles once the sun went down.

In that area of the world, the winters lasted about six months, and spring, summer and fall were about two months each. Ruth recalls that her father always made a snowman for the children during the winter, with a carrot nose and chunks of coal for eyes.

Periodically, when the Tzar’s army came through the village to try to conscript all able-bodied men, the family had to go hide in the woods—even in the middle of a Siberian winter. Ruth remembered at such times being snuggled inside her father’s parka and seeing the icicles form in his beard.

When Ruth was 5, the family—which included Ruth, her parents, and her brother, Maccabi—left the farm because the Communists had taken everything. Since the lord who owned the land had provided Ruth’s family with everything they needed to farm, once the Communists took over, the family no longer was able to farm. There was a food shortage, and people in the cities were starving. On farms, however, there was still some leftover food. Ruth recalls that the rye grain was not threshed that year, to make it go farther, and flour was ground from grain that included the husks. Ruth remembers hearing her mother say that eating the bread made from that flour was like eating wood.

No longer able to farm, the family moved to Chita, a town also in Siberia. Some of Ruth’s memories of Chita include:

• The wonder and magic of electricity: In the family’s house, a glass bulb hung from the ceiling on a thin cord; if the family wanted light, all they had to do was to pull on a string attached to the base of the bulb. In an instant, the bulb would glow brightly, filling the whole room with more light than many candles—more even than several kerosene lamps. Five-year-old Ruth found this a wonder to behold.

• The furnishings: The whole family slept in one set of bunk beds—the two children in the top bunk, the parents in the lower bunk. There was a small table in the room, with a small electric plate heating a kettle of water for tea—different from the samovar that the family had in Barguzin. Ruth remembers that she was trying to see how it worked and managed to spill the kettle’s contents—boiling water—on herself. Her father had to go to a drugstore and get ointment for the burns.

• A shared kitchen: There were other families in that house, each in their own room, and each was given a scheduled time to use the kitchen for cooking. Accordingly, there was no time to cook anything time-consuming—just time to heat food or fry it.

• Their cow, Zorka: Zorka had to be taken to the pasture each day. Ruth’s mother would wake her and her brother early, before six a.m., and have them rock the babies’ cradles (there were now two more children—twins—in the family) while she took the cow to the pasture.

Life in Chita was tough. The Communist regime did not allow Ruth’s father to teach Hebrew, equating that with religion. There was a period when he tried one thing after another to earn enough to live on. She recalls him grating bricks, mixing the powder with some black color, putting the mixture in tubes, and going door to door selling it as stove polish—returning home each day discouraged and depressed.

Ruth also remembers a time when they had nothing to eat but rye bread that her mother had baked with the last of the flour. For supper that day, they each had a slice of rye bread, sprinkled with a few coarse crystals of ungranulated sugar. Their mother wondered what they’d do when that loaf was gone.

What finally brought them some funds was her mother’s “profession” as a stocking knitter. She still had her knitting machine and began knitting socks and stockings, in different sizes. The thread came only in white, so she would dye them in big boiling pots on the stove—black, brown, and navy blue. Ari then sold the socks and stockings door to door, earning enough to pay his passage to Harbin, in Manchuria.

Harbin had an active Jewish community, and Ari was able to use his knowledge of Hebrew and the Bible to become ordained as a Rabbi and teach Hebrew. Soon he was able to send train tickets for the family—which then included 8-year-old Ruth, her 6-1/2 -year-old brother Maccabi, and the 18-month-old twins—to come and join him in Harbin. There, Ruth managed to contract amoebic dysentery, which almost killed her. She remembers that the abdominal pains were so bad that she tried to climb the wall to escape them.

Later, Ari moved to Tientsin, where he started a Hebrew parochial school for the city’s large Jewish population. There, he served both as headmaster and as a Hebrew teacher. Initially, the rest of the family stayed in Harbin, but when Ruth was 9, they moved to an apartment in Tientsin. Their mother knitted them all matching blue and orange outfits for the trip, and passengers on the train thought they were a circus troupe.

When Ruth was 11, the family’s US visa finally came through, and they took a boat down the river to Japan, where they boarded the Arizona Maru, the ship that took them to Seattle. They had originally planned to go to San Francisco, but a war had broken out and soldiers were shooting at the boat as it moved down the river to Japan. They made it through safely, but ended up missing the boat to San Francisco, so they got on the next one—which took them to Seattle.

Arriving in Seattle in 1928, the Greenfields were met by members of the Seattle chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women. To the family’s surprise, the organization had a furnished apartment ready for them—even stocked with food! Throughout the rest of her life, Ruth felt a strong debt of gratitude to that organization for the help they provided the newly arrived immigrants.

Ruth’s father soon got a job teaching Hebrew at the Talmud Torah. The family also bought a grocery store at the corner of 23rd and Cherry and moved into an apartment behind the store. Ruth initially went to Washington grammar school, then to Garfield high school, and then to the University of Washington.

Ruth’s family were friends with the Bolotins, who lived in the same neighborhood. The Bolotins had four boys, of which George and his twin brother, Sam, were the oldest. The Bolotin boys initially became friends with Ruth’s brothers, but eventually George and Ruth began dating (much to the consternation of her brothers, who tried to discourage George by telling him unflattering things about their sister). Still, the romance between the two continued, and in 1938, while they were both students at the UW, they decided to elope. They thought that by driving down to Tacoma to get married, they would prevent their families from finding out, so they could continue to save money by living at home—but they didn’t realize that the notice would be published in the Seattle papers. So they ended up moving into a rented room, where they cooked meals on a single-burner camp stove (unbeknownst to the landlady, who would have prohibited it had she known).

Ruth dropped out of the UW before graduating so she could help support the two of them. After graduating from the UW with a degree in architecture, George worked in the shipyards during World War II; then went to work for an architectural firm; and still later started his own firm.

Ruth was active in Civil Defense during the war, undertaking training as a gas sergeant, so she could provide community assistance in the event of a gas attack.

One of Ruth’s key interests was photography. She took copious photos with her old-time, bellows-style, glass-plate camera (the kind where photographer sees the image upside down) and developed and enlarged the prints herself. In some cases, she even colored black-and-white photos—because this was before the advent of color film.

Ruth was also a prolific writer—whether writing lengthy letters to friends and family decades ago on her old manual Underwood typewriter, which she dearly loved; or more recently, writing letters, articles, and stories of her life on the computer. She was particularly proud of having won first prize in 1972 in a Pacific Northwest Writers’ Conference competition for an article she wrote. The prize-winning article was later published in the Saturday Evening Post. She continued to write throughout her life, and at age 91, wrote an article on old-time farming that PCC published on its website (and for which they awarded her $100 in free groceries!).

Over her lifetime, Ruth learned several languages. Having grown up speaking Hebrew as her native language, she learned Yiddish from listening to her parents, learned Russian playing with the other kids in Siberia, learned some Chinese (including a few choice swear words she was very proud of!) while in China, and then learned English at age 11, when the family came to the US.

While Ruth’s multi-lingual upbringing was the source of her life-long love of languages, her father’s scholarly background was the source of her life-long love of learning. Her bookshelves were filled with dictionaries in different languages—Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, Polish—and with reference books, ranging from an old Encyclopedia Britannica to medical books like the Physician’s Desk Reference and Merck Manual. She also loved literature and poetry, and while other parents were reading Goldilocks and the Three Bears to their toddlers, she read to her children from the Oxford Book of English Verse.

Ruth was a strong supporter of Israel throughout her life. Other interests and activities included teaching Hebrew at Temple Beth Am; being an active member of the League of Women Voters (Ruth was proud of the fact that, over her entire life, she never missed voting in an election); and participating, along with George, in the founding of Group Health Co-op.

Ruth was devoted to her family—to her two children, to her granddaughter Tammy, and to her great-grandson, Nate. She had very much hoped to live to meet her second great-grandson, Jake, who was born in June 2011. However, in March 2011, Ruth suffered a stroke, and she died on March 15—less than three months short of what would have been her 94th birthday.

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Ruth Greenfield Bolotin, age 93, died March 15, 2011. Born in 1917 in the Siberian village of Barguzin, Ruth moved with her family to Chita, a larger Siberian town, when she was five, and to China when she was eight (first Harbin, then Tianjin). When Ruth was eleven, the family’s U.S. visa finally came through and they came to Seattle.

Ruth graduated from Garfield high school in 1935 and then went to the University of Washington. While there, she married fellow Garfield graduate and University student George Bolotin. Although she focused most of her efforts on raising her two children, she was also was a talented amateur photographer who developed her own pictures and a prolific writer who won first prize in a writing contest for an article that was later published in the Saturday Evening Post—an accomplishment that meant a lot to her. But the accomplishment of which she was most proud was the active role that she and her husband played in the founding of Group Health, as representatives of the West Seattle district.

Ruth was an active supporter of many Jewish, social, and environmental causes, and a great supporter of Israel. In recent years, what gave her the most joy was visiting with her granddaughter Tammy and her great-grandson, Nate, who was the delight of her life.

Ruth is survived by her two children; her granddaughter, Tammy; and her great-grandson, Nate.

Ruth was much loved by all who knew her, and will be sorely missed.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that remembrances be sent to one of Ruth’s favorite charities: the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, Doctors Without Borders USA, or Northwest Harvest.