Ask dr. Ruth (2019)

Directed by: Ryan White | 100 minutes | biography, documentary

That a woman of Jewish descent, whose parents perished in the Holocaust, is still able to tell her story today is a great gift. There are several such stories, and many survivors had wonderful lives. Like dr. Ruth Westheimer, born in Germany as Karola Ruth Siegel in 1928. After her father was arrested during the Kristallnacht, she ended up in a Jewish children’s home in Switzerland, and only after the war did she learn that both parents had not survived the Nazi regime.

With a light tone and impressive one-liners (“German Jews don’t cry in public”), the sad history is barely overpowering in “Ask Dr. Ruth’, a documentary named after a character in an American radio show (‘Sexually Speaking’) with which this Annie MG Schmidt of the USA caused a furore. dr. Ruth says she is a conservative lady and certainly not a feminist, despite a strong preference for women’s right to self-determination in the context of pregnancy and sexual orientation.

Like our Annie, she has a strong preference for liberalism, while her personal life is more conventional. In the first half of ‘Ask Dr. Ruth’ that works very well. A woman with a heavy past shows an optimistic attitude towards others and the future, and grimness seems distant. This whirlwind, which not only reminds of Schmidt but also of the grandmothers of ‘Golden Girls’, cannot be broken, although in the film she is confronted with the past more than she would like.

Ruth doesn’t mind meeting a childhood sweetheart who cheated on her. In light of what happened to her as a child, such an event is an anecdote that the person in question can chuckle at heartily. Ruth won’t give you a chance to cry, she’s going too fast for that. We are happy to take for granted that this documentary has a triumphant National Geographic level in terms of style and structure. After all, that this lady was allowed to talk about sex like no one had ever done in America is a graceful twist of fate.