Ruth Prawer was born to a Jewish family in Cologne, Germany, on May 7, 1927.
Ruth Prawer was born on May 7, 1927, in Cologne, Germany, to Marcus and Eleanora Prawer, a Polish-Jewish family. Her father was a lawyer, and the family lived a comfortable middle-class life until the rise of the Nazi regime made life increasingly dangerous for German Jews.
As antisemitic persecution intensified through the 1930s, the Prawer family faced escalating discrimination, loss of livelihood, and mounting danger. In 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II, the family fled Nazi Germany and emigrated to England, settling in London. This early displacement and experience of exile profoundly shaped Ruth's sense of identity as a perpetual outsider, a theme that would recur throughout her literary career.
Tragically, many relatives who remained in Europe were murdered in the Holocaust, including her paternal grandparents. Her father, tormented by survivor's guilt over relatives lost in concentration camps, took his own life in 1948. This early exposure to displacement, loss, and cultural rupture became a defining undercurrent in Jhabvala's later fiction and screenwriting, which frequently explored themes of cultural dislocation, colonialism, and the clash between Western and Eastern sensibilities.