Recalling faith and family and its impact on one’s life.
My grandmother passed away recently at the age of 94.
I write about it here because lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Rose Rudin Adams, the life she led, the choices she made, and the impact it had on my life.
In 1939, Rose, then a registered nurse at Wyckoff Heights Hospital in Brooklyn, met Dr. Vincent Adams, a young cardiologist fresh out of Georgetown Medical School and an intern at Wyckoff. Actually, as the story goes, Vincent spied Rose at a candy store around the corner from the hospital and remarked to a colleague that he was going to ask her out. Easier said than done. Rose ignored Vincent that afternoon—nurses didn’t fraternize with doctors in those days—and continued to do so for several weeks. However, Vincent was persistent, and romance eventually blossomed, but still their courtship was conducted in secret. Professional mores may have had something to do with the secrecy, but so too did religious strictures of the time. Vincent was Roman Catholic; Rose was Jewish.
In the summer of 1940, they got married, though many in Rose’s family did not attend the wedding. Rose and Vincent raised a family—two boys and a girl (my mother)—in Forest Hills, Queens, and while Rose attended temple without Vincent, and Vincent attended Mass without Rose, they taught their children to learn about and appreciate both faiths, Judaism and Catholicism.
Growing up in Virginia, I benefited from this religious pluralism. My sister and
I were baptized and confirmed in the Episcopal Church (my father’s church). We also
celebrated Passover each spring, unpacked a menorah along with our Christmas ornaments in December, and wished one another a happy New Year each fall.
I never talked to my grandmother about her faith, though I always received a card at Rosh Hashanah—along with a card at the start of Hanukkah, followed by Christmas presents a few weeks later. I’d like to think she enjoyed the fact that my family attended Passover Seders as well as Easter church services, but more than anything, I’d guess that she thought this was, well, normal. (My mom used to put dreidels and chocolate Hanukkah geld in our stockings each Christmas, which makes me laugh now, but seemed perfectly normal at the time.)
When my grandfather died 12 years ago, Rose remarked to the priest after the funeral: “That’s the loveliest homily I’ve ever heard, though I haven’t heard many.”
(As far as I know, it was the first and only time she attended a Catholic service.) It was an intensely sad day, but this made me smile, not just because the moment was the perfect illustration of my grandmother’s acute sense of humor, but because, in one sentence, Rose spoke to the spiritual DNA I had inherited.
I haven’t attended a Passover Seder in many years; nor, for that matter, have I been a regular churchgoer. Yet as I researched this issue’s cover story, I found myself thinking more and more about this spiritual DNA. This past Christmas I was visiting my parents in Virginia, and one morning I began rummaging through the desk in my old room. I came across a stack of greeting cards I had accumulated over the years—“Happy 17th birthday!”—and was quickly flipping through them, when one gave me pause. It was more than 15 years old (September 1990), and the inscribed greeting wished me a happy New Year. It was a Rosh Hashanah card from Rose.
— Matt Jennings