Judith Van Kleef
November 2, 1926—March 10, 2022
[DISCLAIMER: When I delivered the eulogy at my mother’s memorial, I extemporized, cut and elaborated on the fly from a partially written draft, so what appears below is a little different from the videoed partial version posted on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l27avb74RiE ]
I echo Susan’s welcome. We’re so happy to see you all.
My Mom told us repeatedly that she didn’t want a funeral, but she said nothing about a memorial… so here we are.
At my mother-in-law’s funeral, her pastor offered a useful guideline: An event like this should be long enough to be meaningful and short enough to be bearable—so that’s what we’re aiming for today.
Judith was born Tuesday, November 2, 1926—and yes, it was Election Day. She was the third and youngest daughter of Pinye and Alte Passikoff, Jewish immigrants from present-day Belarus. She grew up in the Bronx in a close-knit extended family. Her mother had six siblings; Judith had seven first cousins, several of them right around her age. Her father’s younger brother had immigrated in the early 1920’s and lived with the family for a time. Judith was very close to her father, and recalled that, as they walked together through the streets of the Bronx, he would teach her history by telling her about the people after whom those streets were named.
Yiddishkeit—conveyed through literature, theater, humor and song—was a major influence on the family. Judith and her sisters grew up bilingual in Yiddish and English. Equally important in their universe was politics of trade unionism and socialism. Alte was an early advocate for birth control and became vegetarian after reading Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. When we interviewed my mother’s uncle Ben (her mother’s brother) about his politics, he said that, in 1919, “I went with the left.” He was alluding to the split in the Socialist Party, leading to the formation of the Communist Party USA (CP). Judith’s parents and all of her aunts and uncles were either in or close to the CP.
Despite the centrality of Yiddishkeit in their own childhoods, my mother and her sisters did not speak Yiddish to their children or make any effort to have us learn it. My cousin Penney once said, however, that they had passed along the other two family traditions: political activism and anxiety.
I think that the family’s life during Judith’s childhood was culturally rich, financially poor and politically/socially both interesting and insular. Other than at school, she spent her time within CP-connected organizations and social circles. She attended Camp Kinderland, a left-wing summer camp, which still exists. When she wasn’t at camp, she spent most of her summers at Green Mansions, an Adirondacks resort owned by her aunt Lena, which attracted a largely left-wing Jewish clientele. Lena was an accomplished businesswoman, and during the depression provided summer employment for much of her extended family, who annually migrated upstate with kids in tow for the season.
To entertain her guests, Lena would assemble a company of emerging playwrights, composers, directors, actors and dancers, which at various times included Charles Strouse, Harold Rome, Sheldon Harnick, Clifford Odets, Lee Strasburg, Elia Kazan, Stella Adler, Jack Gilford, Lloyd Bridges, Carol Burnett and members of the Group Theater. The kids were not merely exposed to the work of these artists, they interacted with them daily. Judith and her cousin Natalie in particular, seem to have received a lot of attention—they were diminutive, cute and probably precocious. My mother recalled sitting on Harold Rome’s lap as he composed at the piano. I like to imagine he was writing my favorite song from Pins and Needles, “Sing Me a Song with Social Significance.”
At Green Mansions my mother learned to play tennis, probably to swim, and eventually worked as a waitress, a skill that served her well as a college student and even later in life.
Judith attended the New York public schools and Brooklyn College, and ultimately received a degree in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin, which she attended on an athletic scholarship—not because she was an athlete, but because, with so many men fighting in World War II, much of that assistance was going unclaimed. Returning to New York in 1927, she put her degree to use testing products in a paint factory.
On March 12, 1949, she married Howard Van Kleef. When I asked her how they met, she answered “at a party,” which could have been true—but it would have been equally accurate to say they met “in the Party.” My dad, a young veteran working in the textile industry, was attracted by her lively manner and rosy cheeks. Some months after marrying they moved to Cleveland. It was always a little unclear why they moved. Work opportunities for Howard was the official reason, but they were at least strongly encouraged, if not directed outright by the CP to relocate there.
My sister and I were born in 1953 and 1955, and for the next decade or so Judith was mostly a stay-at-home mom. The exception to this was when my dad was “laid off” or “on strike.” I didn’t know exactly what those terms meant, just that at those times my mom would take a waitressing job until my dad was back at work.
My mother made sure our lives were enriched by books, the arts, theater, music, swimming lessons, day camp and frequent visits to museums and Metroparks. She taught us to cook and sew, skills at which she was adept and creative.
While she was not generally a strict parent, she disdained pop, junk food and popular culture—in fact, we didn’t get a TV until the mid-sixties, when Susan and I started going to other people’s houses to watch “The Monkees.” Later in the decade we spent many Sunday evenings as a family watching the Smothers Brothers.
While my father was gifted with a mellow singing voice and a golden ear, my mother struggled with pitch and rhythm, and was not allowed to sing during music class at school, a humiliating and painful experience. Still, she loved music, and one of her greatest pleasures, as a teenager in New York, was hearing musicians such as Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Josh White, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and Cisco Houston at rallies, fundraisers and hootenannies. From the time I was two she made sure I was provided with a little record player and a collection of 78 rpm children’s records by her favorite folksingers. And we all know where that led.
My parents spoke very little about their experiences in the CP. By the mid-fifties they had become disillusioned, and at some point dropped their membership. They had, however, been under surveillance by the FBI, and in 1956, Howard was summoned to testify before HUAC at a hearing in Youngstown. On the advice of his lawyer, Jack Day, he invoked the Fifth Amendment, and no doubt hoped the matter was over. A short time later, however, he was fired from his job at Republic Steel. Eventually his union, United Steelworkers of America, went to bat for him, and he was reinstated. Nevertheless, he and my mother carried the trauma of that period for the rest of their lives.
In January 1964, we moved from 2503 Searsdale Ave. in the neighborhood now known as Old Brooklyn to 3090 East Overlook Road in Cleveland Heights. Susan and I attended the old Coventry Elementary School (on this very site), while our parents took on the endless toil and expense of owning a house built in 1916.
It must have been around this time that my mother began looking for a job in which she could use her education as a chemist, because by the following year she was training to work in a hospital lab as a chemistry technologist (slightly different from a medical technologist). In 1966 she went back to work fulltime, first at Huron Road Hospital, and later at University Hospitals.
Devoted as she was to raising us, she chafed at the limitations of her mainly domestic activities and role. She had read The Feminine Mystique when it came out in 1963, and it resonated.
It was evident that her work engaged her, not only from a technical standpoint, but also from a human one. She would follow the progress of the patients whose tests she performed, rooting for them to get better and worrying if one took a turn for the worse. Huron Road established a school for medical technologists, and she relished the chance to pass along her skills. She also made long-term friendships with many of her co-workers, two of whom wanted to be here today. (One is celebrating a grandchild’s birthday. The other is at home with Covid.)
At the time of our move to Cleveland Heights a struggle was already underway. Black and white residents, who wanted to live in what we would now call a “diverse” community took on the real estate companies, whose agents sought to exploit the changing demographic to generate sales. Susan and I remember our father taking a call from a blockbuster and hanging up in anger. We didn’t realize that the first block party on East Overlook between Cottage Grove and Lee had an unstated political purpose, or that our mother was probably instrumental in organizing it.
Our parents became devoted to the cause of fair housing, and worked tirelessly through their block club, Boulevard Neighbors and Heights Community Congress, which in 1985 chose them to receive the second annual Bernice E. Lott Memorial Award for the Outstanding Citizen of Cleveland Heights-University Heights (the first having gone to Bernice Lott the previous year).
At some point during this period our parents went from being transplanted New Yorkers to devoted Clevelanders and especially Cleveland Heights boosters. Many years later, in 2014, when they realized they needed to move out of their house, my mother insisted on remaining in Cleveland Heights. For one thing, at 87 she was chair of the city’s Commission on Aging, and was not going to resign that post before she had served her full term.
As Susan and I grew older, our mother had more time for volunteer activities. In the early seventies she volunteered at Free Clinic, which had recently opened in University Circle. By the time we both moved back in 1977 (Susan for a brief few years), she was involved in more activities than either of us could remember then or now. Having finally quit smoking, she worked hard to stay fit and healthy, thinking nothing, a on day off from work, of walking two miles to the JCC, swimming a mile, walking two miles home and then putting in a full day of errands and volunteer work, culminating in an evening meeting—after she and Howard had enjoyed a well-cooked healthy dinner. Her activities only increased once she had retired.
As the daughter who remained in Cleveland, at some point in the nineties I began to notice some curious phenomena. I would meet a woman around my age, and she would say, “I know your mom. She’s amazing. She’s my role model.” Or Jim and I would go to a potluck or party put on by friends of ours, and there would be my parents. It seemed like they were at practically every political and cultural event we attended, and a lot that we didn’t attend. Acquaintances would say, “It’s nice to see you. Of course, I see your parents everywhere.”
A sampling of Judith’s activities between her fifties and late eighties includes: volunteering with Women Speak Out for Peace and Justice (WILPF), HCC, Greater Cleveland Community Shares, the children’s museum, the Cleveland public schools, Western Reserve Historical Society, the Women’s Community Foundation, Heights Democrats and the Cleveland Heights Commission on Aging; serving as precinct committee chair, ushering at Severance Hall and Cain Park, and calling and canvassing for innumerable candidates and school levies. She was a regular at the Senior Center and when she and my dad moved to the Victorian in 2014, she helped initiate potlucks to welcome new residents, along with a recycling committee. By the time she entered hospice care last January, she had had to give up most of her activities, but was still participating in two book clubs, one at the Senior Center and the other at the Victorian.
Like many retirees, she was an avid traveler, with my Dad, her older sisters while they were able and members of Women Speak Out. Destinations included the Grand Canyon (where they rafted down the Colorado), Glacier National Park, Nova Scotia, Scandinavia, the Soviet Union (where my mother met cousins on her father’s side of the family), Puerto Rico, Mexico, Budapest, Vienna and Prague, Alaska, Italy, and the Galapagos Islands.
In 1995 she attended the Women’s NGO Forum in Beijing, in conjunction with the UN 4th World Conference on Women—a particular high point for her.
Two great losses were the deaths of her older sisters, however, she remained close to their children, her three nieces and one nephew and other members of her extended family. She also reconnected with her cousin Natalie, whose daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren are here.
My mom had a rare ability to connect with people, whether she’d known them for decades or somewhat briefer periods. One time my father fell off a ladder and had to go to the ER in an ambulance. My mother rode along with him, while I drove down and met them. When I arrived, I found that my mother had managed to learn the entire life story of the EMT attending to my father during the ride.
Many of the people who helped her during her last years became attached and devoted to her. Several of her caregivers visited her in hospice. Both her housecleaner and hairdresser would have been here today if they could.
She did have her quirks, for example, she could be irritable, and flexibility did not come easily to her. I once tried to convince her that cleanliness was a relative concept. (OK, maybe this was a little self-serving.) She wasn’t having it. “Clean is clean,” she said.
She also had a tendency to do things the hard way. When she had to go on oxygen, she could no longer use her gas stove; however, she hated electric stoves. Her solution was to disconnect the gas line to the stove, and painstakingly modify her cooking techniques to accommodate several countertop appliances—all of them electric. Her kitchen was furnished with a microwave, convection oven/toaster oven, kettle, rice cooker and even a wok. At the condo, where she imposed this regime on her caregiversl, the circuits would overload to the point where we had to post notes cautioning them not to use two kitchen appliances at once.
Recently, while getting ready to sell the condo, I thought we might have to disclose this as a problem with the electrical panel. When I called our electrician, she said, “There’s nothing wrong with that panel—for normal use. It was your mom and all her appliances!
While my mom might appear to be a low-key, dogged worker bee, she had her dramatic side. One day in the seventies, when Susan and I were home from college on Spring break, the four of us went down to the Art Museum to see the May Show. When we left the building a couple of hours later, ominously dark clouds were gathering. By the time we reached the top of Cedar Hill, the sky had turned a peculiar shade of green. As my father turned the car off Euclid Heights Blvd. and onto East Overlook, a violent wind came seemingly out of nowhere. Looking back, I would guess this was a microburst. In any case, we saw first one, then several giant oak trees crash to the ground, blocking the road ahead. My father put the car in reverse, and we all turned, only to see another tree across the road behind us, along with a live wire sparking and sputtering. In that instant, each of us reacted our almost certain doom in a characteristic way. My father and I were both stunned into silence. Susan, ever practical, was cautioning the rest of us not to panic. And my mother was declaiming, [in undiluted Yiddish-tinged New York-ese] “Oy, that this should happen, with my husband and my children in the caw!”
Judith Passikoff Van Kleef was a remarkable example of someone who strove the leave the world a better place than she found it—and that’s what she did. She showed us how to remain fully engaged in life for as long as humanly possible. We know many of you have stories, memories and observations to share, and we can’t wait to hear them.
Deborah Van Kleef
July 16, 2022