Joe and Jerry were not meant to be. I was. My mother , Bernice Rudnick (nee Brown) one or more times related that my Dad was engaged to be married to someone (Jerry?)but under pressure from his fiancée’s family, it was called off. My Dad had been disqualified from military service on psychological grounds. That makes sense. I can’t imagine him aiming a rifle at anything other than a target for target practice. But I don’t think of him particularly as a pacifist any more than I think of my grandfather on my Mom’s side as a militarist even though he had joined the army lying about his age and made a career in the police force.

What my Dad thought about war and peace I never got to find out because he hung himself on  March 3, 1971 53 years ago, nearly to the hour, 51 years old. I had turned 17 years old two months earlier. Depression has been my family’s dirty secret.

On a rainy Wednesday, after keeping his appointment with his psychiatrist, Joseph Rudnick, Joseph Rudnick, my Dad, drove to his art studio in a large garage in Fox Chase and brought his life to an end with some of the brown twine used at his fabric business and one of those long flat trapezoidal nails he would use in his metal sculptures (Yes, doctor and patient curiously shared a name) My Mom and I drove over there suspecting the worst, when he hadn’t come home for dinner, and encountered the worst.  For some years I kept the rope fragment I untied from the nail on a subsequent trip to clean out the studio. But I set it afire ceremoniously some years later to be  free from the gruesome memento.

For a year or two before he had struggled. He had been preparing to retire early, and I, the only business-minded one among us children,  brother Larry and sister Eileen,  who was expected to go into the business had quietly spurned the prospect of taking over an already successful enterprise. Furniture fabric is lovely but never stirred a passion in me. (That passion and entrepreneurial spirit saw fruition in a used and remainder bookstore. And its heartbreaking demise nearly resulted in mine) My Dad had developed great anxiety that the business was on the verge of failing and I have never learned that story. The Vietnam war and the protest at my brother's college graduation in 1967 clearly distressed him as did family friends taking up with Scientology and trying to recruit him and my Mom. The cause of his suicide had been blandly attributed to "male menopause" but male decline is much different from female menopause and that explanation is too pat. Did anyone ever find a note?

But in my young life I got to know my father and I flourished through his love. I knew him for the wordless bristly kisses on the forehead when he came home from work and I was at the dining room table doing homework. I knew making art with him in our home garage and then, later, in his studio. There he crafted tzedakah plates he gifted to our synagogue to pass around at services for charity. I knew him for the affection I received from the office workers, garrulous salesmen who passed through, fabric cutters when I worked at his 3rd and Chestnut workplace. I knew him on the other side of a tennis court or ping pong table net. I knew him smiling, acceding to our insistent cries in the car to play the a-goo-ga or moo horn to surprise other cars at an intersection stop on the way to our super delicious Sunday afternoon meals out after Sunday School. I knew him through his close friends, the hilarious Jesse and Gabby LeCoff, Bill and Esther Rifkin and more.

And I knew him as a reader. I continue to gain insights into his thinking through books he loved, perhaps none more than The Prophet by Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran

And  in the spirit of life and love early this Sunday morning, I contemplate the day- house tidying,  preparing for the work week, perhaps going Israeli folk dancing, perhaps ukulele playing, video chatting with our Columbus family, attending the first rehearsal of the next play I’m working on at the Stagecrafters, puttering in the garden and posting my sign… “To stand with Israel, sit down with Palestinians”

Had my Dad been fit for military service he would have married his fiancee and I wouldn’t have been born. I owe my very existence to his sensitive nature and his military unworthiness and am both plagued and blessed by this inherited trait.

Thanks, Dad, Love Always!

From the Prophet by Khalil Gibran

Good and Evil

And one of the elders of the city said, Speak to us of Good and Evil.

And he answered:

Of the good in you I can speak, but not of the evil.

For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?

Verily when good is hungry it seeks food even in dark caves, and when it thirsts it drinks even of dead waters.

You are good when you are one with yourself.

Yet when you are not one with yourself you are not evil.

For a divided house is not a den of thieves; it is only a divided house.

And a ship without rudder may wander aimlessly among perilous isles yet sink not to the bottom.

You are good when you strive to give of yourself.

Yet you are not evil when you seek gain for yourself.

For when you strive for gain you are but a root that clings to the earth and
sucks at her breast.

Surely the fruit cannot say to the root, “Be like me, ripe and full and ever
giving of your abundance.”

For to the fruit giving is a need, as receiving is a need to the root.

You are good when you are fully awake in your speech,

Yet you are not evil when you sleep while your tongue staggers without
purpose.

And even stumbling speech may strengthen a weak tongue.

You are good when you walk to your goal firmly and with bold steps.

Yet you are not evil when you go thither limping. Even those who limp go not backward.

But you who are strong and swift, see that you do not limp before the lame,
deeming it kindness.

You are good in countless ways, and you are not evil when you are not good,

You are only loitering and sluggard.

Pity that the stags cannot teach swiftness to the turtles.

In your longing for your giant self lies your goodness: and that longing is in
all of you.

But in some of you, that longing is a torrent rushing with might to the sea,
carrying the secrets of the hillsides and the songs of the forest.

And in others, it is a flat stream that loses itself in angles and bends and
lingers before it reaches the shore.

But let not him who longs much say to him who longs little, “Wherefore are
you slow and halting?”

For the truly good ask not the naked, “Where is your garment?” nor the
houseless, “What has befallen your house?”