Ruth Gruber

It was a volatile, uncertain and anxious world in which Ruth Gruber came of age in the late 1920s and early ‘30s. But it was also surprisingly open to exploration for a woman with uncommon brains, drive, daring and backbone.

Dreaming of a life as a writer, Gruber succeeded in landing a job as a youthful foreign correspondent. She was not just an observer, however, but a resourceful and emotionally engaged participant in many of the events she witnessed — especially if they involved fellow Jews.

In the course of her peripatetic travels, Gruber heard Hitler speak in Germany in 1932, met Virginia Woolf in London in 1935, guided a shipload of European Jews to the U.S. in 1944, attended the first war crimes trial in Nuremberg and photographed the conditions aboard the Exodus in a French port in 1947.

Still a pistol at the age of 99, Gruber recalls this vibrant period of personal and world history in Bob Richman’s engaging Ahead of Time.

Turned on to German culture at NYU, Gruber decided to pursue her graduate studies in Germany.

You can imagine how her Conservative Jewish parents reacted to her trekking so far from Brooklyn in 1931-32, even if she did return as a 20-year-old Ph.D.

Her gifts as an interviewer, observer and writer were recognized by not only her longtime editor (and friend) at the International Herald Tribune but by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, who hired and sent Gruber to Alaska in 1942 to report for the Roosevelt Administration on the territory’s economic and security prospects.

But Gruber is proudest of and most closely identified with her contributions to European Jews and the fledgling state of Israel. Her gift for languages, and knowledge of German and Yiddish, proved essential in consoling, comforting and counseling the Jews she accompanied on a ship from Italy to New York. She told the tale in detail in her 1983 book, Haven: The Dramatic Story of 1,000 World War II Refugees and How They Came to America.

The U.N.’s establishment of the state of Israel was a high point in Gruber’s life, as it was for practically every living Jew at the time. But she also remembers the difficult final stages before that victory, when the British blocked — literally, in the case of the Exodus — Jewish efforts to found a homeland.

It is difficult, 60 years on, to grasp the effect that her blunt reporting and visceral photographs had on world opinion.

We get a sense from the reunion between Gruber and Ike Aronowitz, the captain of the Exodus, at his home in Israel a couple of years before his death in December 2009.

Ruth Gruber with her Leica camera

Aronowitz’s respect and affection are manifest, attesting to Gruber’s role at that key moment in his life and the struggle. But he can’t resist giving her a jibe, for (we can only deduce) her left-of-center view of Israeli treatment of the Palestinians.

It’s one of the more candid and effective sequences in the film, from which we can infer the level of esteem that Gruber’s combination of intellect, diligence, independence and morality commanded in a range of settings and conditions.

Ahead of Time is unexpectedly short (73 minutes) and focused. Gruber’s life since 1950 goes practically unmentioned, although she penned numerous books. It is enormously enriched by a trove of photographs she took in various locations all those decades ago, and stored, organized and preserved.

Ultimately, the documentary’s greatest value is historical. Gruber certainly emerges as a bona fide, modern-day role model, just not as dramatically and powerfully as one might wish.

The Dayton Jewish International Film Fest partnering with Hadassah will present Ahead of Time on Tuesday, March 29 at 9:30 a.m. at the Neon Movies, 130 E. Fifth St. Tickets are $9 each. To purchase in advance, go to www.daytonjewishcommunitycenter.org or call 853-0372.