My Dad, Ivan Rosenstrach (1936-2023)

January 2, 2024

jenny

Greetings to my dear eaters and readers. I hope you all had joyful and meaningful holidays however you celebrate. I write this first newsletter of 2024 with a deeply heavy heart — my father, Ivan Rosenstrach, died on December 25, 2023. His life was rich with family and community and friendship and we spent the last week of the year celebrating him. If you are interested, here is my father’s official obituary and below is the eulogy I read at his funeral.

One of the first things I think of when I think of my father is the Larchmont Train Station. I’m not sure if it’s still the same today, but back in the 1990s, when I would take Metro North up from New York City to visit my parents in the suburb where I grew up, there was a system for picking up people at the station. Cars had to wait in a specific lane and space was kind of tight so that pick-up line would often snake all the way up the hill, out of the parking lot, and around the corner into town. It could sometimes get hectic. But in the ten years that I lived in the city and got off that train to visit, there was never a question which car would be first in line. The driver’s side window would be rolled down and Dad’s lanky arm would be waving to help me find him, as if I didn’t know exactly where to find him, as if he’d ever been anything other than first in line, ahead of all those suckers who only allowed themselves five minutes to make the five-minute drive to the station.

My father was the most dependable person I’ve ever known. His love language was “being there.” His dependability was so much a part of who he was that, as a kid, I didn’t think to notice it or call it anything. Whose father wasn’t staying awake all night waiting for the midnight call that would inevitably come from his daughter, still too scared to make it through the sleepover? Whose dad wasn’t sitting at his midtown office ready to drop everything in order to meet his daughter at the Oyster Bar for lunch? In 1993, when my car broke down at exit 58 on the Long Island Expressway, I didn’t call triple A or a towing service. I called my dad and waited on the side of the highway until he arrived an hour later. My dad being there for us has always been like the sun rising in the morning. It was as sure a thing as I ever knew.

When I was growing up, I could count on Dad walking in the back door every night after work just before 7:00. He never missed dinner. The moment he walked in was the moment we all started gravitating to the kitchen to start tearing off pieces of the baguette he always picked up at Chatsworth bakery on his walk home from the station. His arrival, announced by the creaky swing of the back screen door, was the signal that dinner was about to be served. At least it was until I was in fourth grade. At that point, my mom decided she wanted to go to law school, a decision that was 100% supported by my father. I’m sure there was nonstop negotiating going on behind the scenes to make sure our busy little lives still ran smoothly, but the only thing I remember was the way the two of them coordinated dinner for us on the three nights a week when Mom had to attend class. To be clear: my Dad was not a cook. His only specialities, at that point, were pasta with “butter sauce” and the drive-thru at McDonalds. But my mother somehow taught him how to make chicken cutlets. Before my dad came home from work, Mom would set up dredging stations with three plates—one for the flour, one for the egg, one for the bread crumbs. Dad started taking an earlier train to accommodate her new schedule, and as soon as he walked in, he’d take off his coat and she put hers on, then kiss each other hello and goodbye. Dad would then finish what my mom had started, moving the cutlets from plate to plate, then finally into the hot skillet. From a ten-year-old’s perspective, my parents’ do-si-do routine was seamless, and their acts of sacrifice for the family expected. But from my perspective now, I feel lucky to have had a front-row seat to such an equality-minded marriage. My father was ahead of his time in that way. He was of course a provider and a protector, and he was a beloved and respected colleague at work, but his job didn’t define him. Being there for us did. It was his lifeblood and his joy.

Dad was Find My Phone before there was Find My Phone. At any given moment, he knew where all his children were and how and when they were coming home, and could never feel at ease until he had a handle on the logistics. Before I’d go on vacation, he would check in, not to say bon voyage, but to find out what airline we were flying and what the flight number was. I am 52 years old, and it was only this past year when I stopped texting him, “landed,” after my plane touched ground. When my brother, sister, and I were teenagers and started driving places on our own, it was not unusual to find him staring out our kitchen window, standing outside our house, sometimes even standing in the middle of the street, looking in the general direction of where the car might be coming from, as though his watchful presence might manifest his childrens’ safe arrival.

He had the worst handwriting, but wrote the best toasts. He knew exactly what to say at the Thanksgiving table, at the Passover seder, for an anniversary speech celebrating the love of his life, my mother. I got married 26 years ago, and to this day guests who were at my wedding still come up to me and say they remember the speech he gave, specifically a story he told about my husband, Andy. I want to read one paragraph from it so you get a sense of how well he wrote, and so you can hear his voice and humor. I will refrain from imitating his old-school Bronx accent, but please try to picture him in his tux, beaming with happiness at the mic:

“Andy earned his stripes during one snowy night in the blizzard of 1993. Andy was still at Amherst, Jenny had graduated and was living at home. She wanted to visit him but instead of driving like usual, she was going to take the train to Springfield, where Andy was scheduled to meet her. Some five hours into this trip and after listening to a lot of alarming weather reports it became apparent to Jody and myself, who tend to be alarmists by nature, that it would be near impossible for Jenny to meet Andy. I immediately sprung into action, warming up our old car…which didn’t move too well in the snow. I was all set to once again be the rescuer. In our minds, the Springfield train station was very Dickensian and we imagined that Jenny was about to arrive to find herself in the midst of all sorts of unsavory characters. We were in a panic. Then the phone rang. It was Jenny. Two words: Andy’s here…Andy’s here.”

He went on to speak about a little piece of him feeling sad that he was not the white knight that day, but he made it clear how happy he was that I had chosen well, that I had chosen someone I could count on. I mean chosen someone he could count on.

My father had so many passions and enthusiasms and I’d like to just mention a few, with the warning that an unhealthy percentage of them fall under the dessert category. He loved Russian literature, Russian history, pretty much any book about World War II. The John Keats poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Dr. Zhivago. The movie “Judgment at Nuremberg.” Corduroy pants, cashmere sweaters, turtlenecks, and those fur-lined Cossack hats that made him look like a Russian senator. Mahler’s Ninth. The opera. Simon and Garfunkel. Judy Collins singing “Send in the Clowns.” Joe Dimaggio, Clyde Frazier. The Lou Gehrig retirement speech where Gehrig famously said “today I feel like the luckiest man on earth.” A full tank of gas. A joke at his expense. Walking into town for a cup of coffee. Emptying the dishwasher. Setting the breakfast table before he went to sleep at night. Going to the US Open every year. Summer evenings on the tennis courts with mom. A hot dog and a side of potato puffs from Walter’s. Temptee cream cheese on a plain toasted bagel, Manhattan clam chowder at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central, and those green marzipan bars from Lilac in New York. Babka (as long as it was chocolate and not cinnamon; baklava (as long as it was pistachio and not walnut), a box of Mallomars, a freshly baked challah with golden raisins. Anything from Entenmman’s but especially the discontinued Sour Cream and Chocolate Chip Nut Loaf. Dove ice cream bars, Mallomars, and halvah. Dark chocolate, milk chocolate, Cadbury milk and fruit bars, chocolate truffle cake, Mallomars, my mom’s chocolate pudding pie. Mallomars. Are you sensing a theme here?

My dad had the sweetest face. He had Tourette’s syndrome, which meant that this sweet face would twitch involuntarily. When I was a kid, maybe 9 or 10, I was in the kitchen and overheard my mother and my sister talking about his facial tic. I don’t remember the specifics of what they said, but I remember being confused. Dad has a facial tic, I asked? They laughed at how clueless I was. I had no idea. I never saw any tic. I never saw anything but my dad’s kind eyes, his big warm smile, his handsome face. I realize that it’s not unusual for parents’ eyes to light up when they see their children, but the way he did this was still remarkable to me. In the 1990s, my sister and I both worked within seven blocks of his office on Third Avenue in midtown Manhattan. This was a dream come true for him since he could count on seeing us for lunch at least once a week. I bring this up here because I can remember walking towards whatever corner I was meeting him on, watching for the moment he’d see me coming, because his reaction was so predictable and so comforting. You could tell from his eyes how he felt such delight, such pride in me, in all of us. My brother and sister touched upon the story of how he felt like he “won the lottery” in life and it was as if every time he saw me – or any of his kids or grandkids – he was realizing his own good fortune for the first time all over again. I still remember the day I was running out the door to visit him in Larchmont and at the last minute grabbed a few copies of my daughters’ official school photos that were on the kitchen counter. They were the wallet-size ones with the cheesy background and I grabbed them almost as an afterthought. When I handed them to him, he didn’t just look at them. He sat down, put on his reading glasses, and studied them. “Isn’t that something?” he said, shaking his head. And he was right. It was something. It is something. His love for his family was profound and real and beautiful and I feel so lucky that I had him in my life – and that my whole family will have his love in our hearts forever. Wherever he is, I know he’s looking out the window, waiting for us.