The author was born Joan Ruth Bader on March 15, 1933, and her sister, Marilyn, nicknamed her Kiki. Marilyn died of meningitis when Ruth was 14 months old. Ruth attended public school a block from her home, a rental in a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood. She loved reading and idolized fictional characters like Nancy Drew and real-life women heroes like Amelia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt. Ruth was close to her mother, Celia. Their mixed neighborhood had many multiethnic families; nevertheless, Ruth heard taunts directed at her family because they were Jewish. When she was eight years old, while riding in a car with her parents, she heard news reports of the Pearl Harbor bombing. The family’s rejoicing over Victory in Europe (VE) Day was tempered on Victory over Japan (VJ) Day by the detonation of the atomic bomb.

In 1946, 13-year-old Ruth wrote an editorial for her school newspaper, The Highway Herald. In it, she compared the 10 Commandments, the Magna Carta, the English Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence to the newly penned Charter of the United Nations, referring to it as the fifth great document in human history: “Its purpose and principles are to maintain international peace and security, to practice tolerance, and to suppress any acts of aggression or other breaches of peace” (10).