Stephen Sohmer

Stephen Sohmer, age 82 (1940-2022), passed away on November 21, 2022, in Riverdale, Bronx, New York. Mr. Sohmer enjoyed a rich life of faith, learning, friendship, and hope in New York City. He left the city for an extended time only twice: for undergraduate studies with the acclaimed faculty and Great Books program at St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland (BA, 1963), and to serve the nation proudly in the U.S. Army (1966-68, particularly in Vietnam with a combat engineer battalion). He returned to studies in the Masters and Doctoral programs of the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, at the New School for Social Research, earning his MA in Political Science and all-but-completing the PhD. During this time of intense graduate studies, the late-1960s into the '70s, he enjoyed teaching middle schoolers at a Jewish school in Manhattan, and learning about gourmet foods and practices while serving at Lüchow's and other high-end restaurants. Then, in the mid-1970s, he shifted paths. The appeal of academia faded, as he chose instead to seek a career that would allow him to chart his own course of private reading, enjoyment of the finer arts, time spent with friends, and ever-deepening devotion to God through his faith. Court reporting became his craft of choice (supplemented, for a number of years, with co-ownership and operation of a gourmet cuisine catering service). These labors demanded his characteristic energy and discipline, challenges he welcomed, but more importantly provided the freedom he sought to conduct his life deliberately, with a view to high things, and no presumption.

For over 40 years, from the mid/late-1970s, Mr. Sohmer worked tirelessly at his craft, and lived an earnest, joyful life. Away from courts and painstaking accounts of their proceedings, he pursued his readings in ancient and modern political and literary classics – Dostoyevsky, whose work he so admired all his life, and the focus of both his dissertation and his college thesis, could now be addressed more immediately and refreshingly; later in life, Balzac drew his attention and rekindled a desire to write; he passed many good days with Tolstoy and other favorites. Operas and symphonies and other choral and orchestral works at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall, always loved, and the artists who best interpreted them, whom he knew well in their variety, became ever more his companions of leisure. Of course, political-moral matters – the public and private opinions and activity foundational to sustaining the Constitution, citizens' liberty and equality, and national security, through prudent judgments cast in elections of the day – remained a staple, as befitted his enduring, thoughtful patriotism.

All such meditations and observations were most fully appreciated in discussion with exceptionally close friends Mr. Sohmer had found and cherished, and who in turn prized his company over many decades. His friends joyed in his spirit and heart and insight, his care and courage, his feeling and honesty, his genuineness. He joyed in sharing thoughts and experiences with them, working through the most difficult questions and issues to shared understanding. A special delight to friends, often at dinners, were those occasions when, like rich musical chords suddenly struck, he would break into recitations of a speech or verse – pulled variously from Shakespeare or Lincoln, or Kipling or Coleridge or Churchill, among others remote or recent, and certainly from Scripture. The recitations were precisely apt, following the conversation's flow or some evolving facet. Yet he presented these vivid images within a larger intimate caring – unlike so many who also delve into fine things large or small, Mr. Sohmer most often would listen intensively during conversation, his head cocked and senses alert to hearing his interlocutor exactly, and probing, ever graciously, as themes and nuances surfaced. Across all, Mr. Sohmer remained deeply, indeed near-peerlessly, humble of his own opinions while generous