Ruti Ben Shoushan
Quick Facts
- Role: Overlooked daughter of a pious scribe who becomes the guardian of her family’s future and the haggadah
- First appearance: “Saltwater: Tarragona, 1492” in Saltwater: Tarragona, 1492
- Family: Daughter of David Ben Shoushan; sister to Reuben; sister-in-law to Rosa; aunt and adoptive mother to Reuben’s son
- Allies and key figures: Micha (bookbinder and illicit conduit to forbidden texts)
- Defining object: The haggadah she carries into exile
Who They Are
At first glance, Ruti is a timid “Sparrow”—a plain, dutiful girl content to remain invisible in her father’s shadow. Beneath that smallness lives a fierce mind and a soul hungry for knowledge, which she risks everything to feed. When persecution and loss strike, she quietly steps into moral leadership, preserving both bloodline and book. Her choices embody Courage and Moral Choice: when institutions fail, she acts—intelligently, unflinchingly—to create a future.
Personality & Traits
Ruti’s modest exterior disguises a radical inner life. Her humility keeps her safe, but it is her pragmatism and empathy that allow her to resist, to save, and to redefine who counts as a “protector” in her world.
- Boldly inquisitive: Studies Kabbalah in secret; her “forbidden” scholarship shows that intellectual yearning, not public stature, is the engine of change.
- Transgressive and pragmatic: Trades sex with Micha for access to books—an ethically fraught choice that reveals ruthless honesty about the costs of knowledge and the limits of piety.
- Loyal and empathetic: Alone among her family, she keeps faith with Reuben after his conversion, reading love—and fear—behind his choices.
- Resourceful under pressure: Turns a cave into a birthing room, a shore into a mikveh, and exile into a plan.
- Quietly courageous: Action, not rhetoric, defines her—she moves through terror to do what must be done.
Physical self-presentation serves her strategy: a “dull brown” sparrow with work-roughened hands can pass unnoticed, making secrecy and survival possible.
Character Journey
Ruti begins as the family’s least regarded member, her meekness a mask for dangerous curiosity. The arrest of Reuben exposes the brutality around her; her father’s death and her own accusation tear away her protective shell. In the cave with Rosa, fear cedes to competence as she delivers a baby and becomes its mother in all but name. On the beach, she transforms defiance into ritual, converting the child and re-rooting her family in faith—an act that binds identity to action and fulfills the arc of Identity and Belonging. Her escape with the infant and the haggadah completes the metamorphosis: from overlooked daughter to custodian of a lineage and a text.
Key Relationships
- David Ben Shoushan: Ruti reveres her father yet sees the limits of his stern idealism. He misreads her as only a “Sparrow,” but her hidden study both honors his devotion to the book and subverts his gatekeeping, showing that piety without mercy is incomplete.
- Reuben Ben Shoushan: Ruti reads Reuben’s conversion as a desperate love for Rosa rather than betrayal. Her gift of the phylacteries—meant as a lifeline to their shared past—becomes tragically incriminating, fueling her later resolve to save his child and redeem that unintended harm.
- Micha: What begins as transactional evolves into uneasy tenderness and practical alliance. Micha’s access enables Ruti’s secret education; later, his aid in her escape affirms a mutual recognition that knowledge—and survival—are worth complicating the rules.
- Rosa del Salvador: In the cave, religious and social boundaries collapse before the urgency of birth. Ruti’s willingness to help, despite fear and prejudice, reframes holiness as care in extremis and binds the women through shared danger.
- The Baby (Reuben’s son): He becomes Ruti’s purpose. By naming and immersing him, she turns catastrophe into continuity, creating a future carrier of memory when Spain decrees erasure.
Defining Moments
Ruti’s story turns on choices that fuse intellect, love, and audacity.
- Secret studies: Risks body and reputation to read the Zohar. Why it matters: Charts her refusal to accept the spiritual poverty assigned to women, preparing her for later acts of moral daring.
- The phylacteries: Gives Reuben their father’s tefillin as a gesture of kinship. Why it matters: Love misfires into danger, teaching Ruti that intention is not enough—she must become strategic as well as kind.
- Birth in the cave: Delivers Rosa’s child with no midwife, no tools, only resolve. Why it matters: Initiates Ruti into leadership; fear becomes skill, compassion becomes command.
- Ritual immersion at the sea: Converts the newborn under the stars, reciting the Shema over the waves. Why it matters: A radical reclamation of identity in the face of expulsion—Ruti creates a Jew when Spain is unmaking Jews.
- The escape with the haggadah: Flees Tarragona carrying both infant and book. Why it matters: Conjoins family and text; survival becomes cultural preservation and the seed of future belonging.
Symbolism
Ruti embodies the unseen strength of women erased by patriarchal piety and public history. Her arc—from “small” and brown as a sparrow to a maker of futures—mirrors collective Jewish endurance. As scribe’s daughter, clandestine scholar, and bearer of the haggadah, she threads Love, Loss, and Family through an ethic of action: the book survives because a woman no one watched refused to be small.
Essential Quotes
Sparrow, David called her, for she reminded him of a nervous little bird. Like a sparrow, she was a dull brown thing, with dun-colored eyes and a muddy complexion...
Analysis: The “sparrow” metaphor compresses appearance, status, and strategy: small, drab, overlooked—perfect camouflage. The irony is that this very smallness becomes tactical strength, allowing Ruti to move, learn, and ultimately save without attracting scrutiny.
She came to think of it as right, somehow, that these two forbidden ecstasies should be linked: that her femaleness, which should have barred her from this study, actually made it possible for her; the yielding up of her now-willing flesh providing the means to acquire delight of the soul.
Analysis: Ruti reframes transgression as coherence. The body rejected by male gatekeepers becomes the instrument of access to sacred knowledge, collapsing false boundaries between flesh and spirit and revealing the cost—and power—of women’s learning.
As she lifted him from the sea, water sluiced off his bare, shining skin in a shower of brightness. She held him up to the stars. The roar in her head was louder now than the surf. She cried out, into the wind, speaking the words for the infant in her hands. "Shema Yisrael, Adonai eloheinu, Adonai echad."
Analysis: The natural world staging—sea, stars, wind—elevates a desperate act into a covenantal scene. By voicing the Shema for the child, Ruti lends him a people, a God, and a future; language itself becomes inheritance.
Ruti, exultant, defiant, had made a Gentile into a Jew.
Analysis: The terse cadence underscores audacity. In a time defined by forced conversions and erasure, Ruti reverses the current—asserting agency over identity and transforming exile into origin.
In the morning, Ruti would begin to look for a ship. She would pay the passage for herself and the baby with the silver medallion that she had pried off the leather binding, and where they made landfall—if they made landfall—would rest in the hand of God.
Analysis: The pried medallion literalizes the conversion of text into survival—book into bread, ornament into passage. The conditional “if” acknowledges peril, while the final surrender to providence reveals Ruti’s theology: faith braided tightly to action.