The Color of Water

Throughout Ruth’s childhood, Tateh works as a traveling rabbi, moving from town to town until the local synagogue tires of him. Ruth forgets most of these towns except Springfield, Massachusetts, where her younger sister Gladys—nicknamed Dee-Dee—is born in 1924.

In 1929, when Ruth is eight, her family finally settles in the segregated town of Suffolk, Virginia. Knowing that it would only be a matter of time before the synagogue runs him out of town, Tateh opens a grocery store serving the town’s Black neighborhoods. Though he is deeply racist, Tateh is happy to take the Black residents’ money, charging them exorbitant prices. Ruth, meanwhile, faces antisemitism at school, where white Christian students call her “Christ killer” and other bigoted epithets (40).

For Tateh, the store is everything. He puts his three children to work there during every waking hour they aren’t at school. Otherwise, he has no interest in Mameh or the kids. The only attention Ruth receives from Tateh is at night when he enters her bedroom and sexually abuses her. If not for discovering Jesus Christ through Dennis, Ruth says, she would have ended up a sex worker or dead.