JULIE K. REICH

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Hunter College University of Wisconsin

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JULIE REICH Obituary

REICH--Julie Kaye, of New York City and Tyringham, Massachusetts, died Friday, November 29 of ovarian cancer. Born in 1946, she was raised in Queens and Great Neck, New York. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin and spent a year in Aix-en-Provence as a Fulbright Teaching Fellow where she was an enthusiastic participant in the events of May 1968. In 1969 she married Charles Reich, and the couple moved to Paris, where she worked as an English Language teacher for many years at the University of Paris XI in Orsay. Later she earned a Masters in Public Health from Hunter College and worked at the Guttmacher Institute and then the Population Council, where she was Managing Editor of Studies in Family Planning, a peer-reviewed scientific journal on women's reproductive health. She was a beautiful, accomplished woman with a fierce moral center. An insightful editor and a writer of wit and passion, she was also a warm and generous friend, a loving parent and spouse. During a period of 31 years she endured three cancers (as well as several other illnesses) with quiet courage and humility and never let her health problems diminish her humor or her highly developed sense of the ridiculous and the absurd. She is survived by her husband, her twin brother Joel Kaye and his wife Theodora Lurie of New York City, her sister Carole of Saugerties, NY, sons Gabriel of Richmond, VA, and Benjamin of Hanoi, Vietnam, granddaughter Isabella, and grandsons Hosea and Tobias. Memorial Service: Plaza Jewish Community Chapel, 630 Amsterdam Ave., Friday, December 13, 1:00pm.

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Published by New York Times on Dec. 4, 2013.

Memories and Condolences
for JULIE REICH

Sponsored by A lifelong friend.

10 Entries

Carole kaye

November 29, 2023

My dear Julie, I miss you so, especially around this thanksgiving time! Great memories of walking to your 82nd street apartment in the chill air with our cranberries, sweet potato pie, and pecan pie, to be welcomed, as we opened your door, by the ambrosial waves of chuck´s and your culinary masterpieces! And what a wonderful meal we all would have, with Joel an thea, with our kids Benjie, Gaby, Alexi and remy, with waves of laughter, and singing our favorite rock and roll songs!

Sending you my love and blessings always, and "muchisimas gracimas" for being my dear dear Julie.

With all my love, Carole

Gaby

November 28, 2023

Has it been ten years? Mom still lives on in my head and heart. Her post-it notes left lovingly on my brain are still there to remind me to think of others and to do the right thing. What I miss is her presence. That missing is not something I think about most days, but when it comes, it comes very powerfully.

Joel

November 28, 2023

My dear, wonderful sister. It's been 10 years. It seems I think of you, and speak to you, and see you in my mind, more now than ever. Everything you built remains wonderfully strong: your boys, your grandchildren, your husband, your home -- all flourishing . I see you through them, but still, I and we, miss you like crazy.

Gabriel Reich

November 28, 2020

Paradox
I spend a lot of my time thinking about teaching. I teach, I research teaching, I teach others how to teach. So, when I sat down and tried to write something about my mom, I thought about her as a teacher. This is ironic because she never liked teaching. She wasn’t terribly patient, and her goals were too complex, and never clearly articulated. In fact, most of her lessons were paradoxes, and I was confused about them for years. Teaching Benjy and I these lessons was part of her life’s work, understanding them was ours.
Her most central lessons for me had two contradictory parts:
1)I am special and I should share my gifts with the world and fight for what I want; and
2)I am not so special, I am not entitled to anything and who do I think I am anyway?

1)She told me to practice moderation in all things, anything else was gluttonous and unseemly.
2)She also taught me that immoderation and hyperbole are what make life worth living.
She would tell us, especially me, before going to a party not to make a bee line for the food, to make sure that there is enough for everyone. In short, not to make pigs of ourselves. She also taught us that the best part of a turkey, or a lasagna, or a brisket were the greasy bits stuck to the pan that you’d dig out with your fingers after you had stuffed yourself at the meal.
Her humor was all about hyperbole
a.Food didn’t taste “bad” it was “nauseating”
b.A shirt wasn’t “unflattering” it was “hideous”
c.A person wasn’t “unintelligent,” he was a “moron”
[By the way, she did not appreciate having these contradictions pointed out to her, especially by her children.]
She taught complicated lessons because she was complicated. We tend to think that people are either cold and analytical, or warm and emotional. She was both, at the same time. She wanted her truth straight, no chaser, except when she didn’t want it that way because it was too overwhelming. She would cry at a sappy movie, but was irritated by sentimentality.
It has been hard work to make sense of these lessons. I still get confused some time. She succeeded at being the voice in my head telling me:
•Don’t get swell-headed
•Don’t be a push-over
•Look out for yourself,
•Don’t forget about everyone else,
•You are a wonderful person,
•Who do you think you are?
As a parent she was a little old-fashioned. Adults, especially her, were to be respected. Foul language kept to a minimum. Rules were to be followed.
Underneath it all was love and a vision of how she wanted my brother and I to end up as adults. Men who do the right thing, route for the underdog, put themselves in others’ shoes, and are no-one’s fool. These are not easy things to do, so it’s no wonder I wandered around pretty confused about them for much of my life. They were such a wonderful gift. I will forever be grateful for them, and do my best to confuse my daughter with those same lessons.

Joel

December 2, 2016

Julie

Considering the 9 months that twins share in the womb--their shared development, their many shared memories--there's no doubt that they have a special relationship. I have early memories of Julie sitting across from me at our dinner table, as our father was teasing her as one might tease a 3 year old; I have a memory of the first day we went to kindergarten together, or I should say, her first day: I cried so hard on the way to school that they gave me a day's reprieve.

I vividly remember the three of us kids, me and Julie, and our older sister, Carole, sharing a bedroom in our Queens apartment until we were 10 years old; and I remember with great fondness how we all played together for hours at a time on weekend mornings, inventing all kinds of games, and enacting all kinds of imaginary scenarios, some of which played out over years.

Since I know that Carole will speak to these particular memories in her talk today, I'll say no more about them here.

Julie and I shared all of first and second grade together in Mrs. Schlueger's class, or should I say, Mrs. Schlueger's reformatory. More than 50 years later, Julie could still remember the names of most of the kids in class with us and how they acted and where they sat. But with all the sharing we did, and with all our biological connections, I can't remember feeling any special connection to her as my twin in these years. For one thing, we were constantly fighting, either open battles or underground sniping. Psychologists might recognize this as part of a healthy process of differentiation. But it didn't help at all that when we started going to school together, Julie could be just as good as she was supposed to be seemingly effortlessly while I couldn't not by a long shot. And that rub was especially raw, since she was a direct witness to my failings, and, to my distress, often the recorder and reporter of them as well.

I say all this to say that in my experience the closeness of twinness is not simply a given. We had to do some hard work to win our closeness, and I give most of the credit for this to Jules.

I remember the moment when things seemed to have changed between us, as if it were a moment, although it almost certainly wasn't. I remember a time when I turned to her and saw in her eyes, for the first time, the eyes of a loving friend -- indeed, the eyes of a committed protector and defender, with no trace of doubt or hesitation. From the moment of that look, which I date to the last years of high school, we became twins. And from that moment on, we remained fully twins, fully believing in each other's love, fully believing in the desire of each to protect each, without, to my memory, a single hiccup-a single moment of loss of this precious feeling over the years that followed.

I credit Julie for this transformation because at the time, and for years to come, I was still floating. I was still too unformed to make and commit to that kind of change. I could only recognize it and recognize that I was its immense beneficiary.
In looking back, I can see a few things that may have lain behind this transformation: two great high school teachers who awakened her intellectual passion and gave her confidence in her intellectual self; great, smart, friends from high school, who saw her sterling qualities and helped her to see them as well; her summer in Colombia SA, in which she and a group of students lived and worked with Padre Herrera, a leftist priest, who believed in and lived the social gospel.

Whatever it was, in that period Julie grew into herself, and she emerged, almost fully formed as a woman of extraordinary strength and extraordinary character a character which, then, she never lost and never betrayed. From that time on, I always knew that she was there to come back to: to my eyes, so solid and so wonderfully sure of who she was and where she stood. From that point on, it was she who chose whom to please -- the undervalued, the modest, the hard-working, the kind. But watch out if you were smug, or thoughtless, or a bully, or if you couldn't feel the sufferings of others, or if you couldn't see the horrors of the Viet Nam war or the Iraq war, for that matter. Watch out if you didn't see any problem with exploitation and inequality, or if you couldn't empathize with the cause of civil rights.

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I could go on and on with the story of our twinship, but I would like, instead, to speak briefly to a few of her extraordinary qualities. It's hard to choose which, but I'll begin with, her astounding resilience. With all the sicknesses, with all the operations, with all that she suffered, as soon as the trial was over, and even before it was, when she merely sensed it would be over, she was already moving past it. She bore the physical scars all over her body, but, amazingly, no mental scars. She never blamed anyone; she never lingered in the memories of pain and sickness; she never, to my knowledge, asked why me? although she certainly had reason to wonder. Bad memories were replaced by thoughts about what flowers she would plant in the spring, or by the wonder she took in the birds at the feeder, or by thoughts of her grandchildren a flood of good memories she could call on that so filled her and so made her happy.

Julie's memory is a subject in itself. The act of reminiscence of replaying a moment from her life with her family and her friends, gave her a pleasure that was deeper and richer than I've ever witnessed in anyone else. The pleasure she took was not merely in having memories but, much more, in sharing them, in connecting through them. How often did we hear her say remember when. remember the time ..? But no bad memories: no memories of her sickness. They were forgotten. Just those moments that were strange or telling or funny. Moments that could serve as invitations to share and almost always to laugh. Julie loved to laugh! (And I loved to make her laugh.)

At one point in her last month, I was on one side of her on the bed, and Benj was on the other, and she was slowly telling a story about college that she had told a hundred times before. But she forgot the name of one of the minor characters in the story, whom I vaguely knew, and it troubled her. But I couldn't help her because I couldn't remember the name either. And then, almost without skipping a beat, Benjy spoke the name, having heard the story many, many times before-- and the story continued. He had been well schooled. We all had. Chuckie shared the food; Julie shared the memories.

December 14, 2013

Chuck, Joel, Carole, Bengie and Gabe: Over the years, Anna has often spoken of her friendship with Julie and kept me abreast of her life's milestones, both the joys and the struggles. In recent months she told me of her sadness over the pending loss of her dearest friend, her ultimate passing and reflections on a long history of sharing their most intimate thoughts and feelings. I know these treasures will endure in Anna's heart and be a source of inspiration for her. While it has been so many years since I last saw Julie, her image and spirit remain vivid in my mind. I am proud to share with her the highest ranking on my sister's list of partners in uncontrollable laughter. With my deepest sympathies, Louis Siegel

Paul Eweb

December 6, 2013

Julie was one of the sweetest people I have ever known. Knowing how important she was to my mother and father made me appreciate her even more. I will never forget her spening time with my mom as she died from cancer. I also loved the way she called my Dad Stuie. THoughts and warmth to her wonderful family.

Sheila Conneely

December 5, 2013

My sympathies to her family on their loss.

Stuart Ewen

December 4, 2013

With Julie's passing I feel a tremendous heartache. She was a great friend to me and, from the time we first met in seventh grade, her caring and brilliant self left an indelible mark on my life. Her rare ability to call things as they are, with grace and humor, offered me a model of what it means to be a good human being. Her honesty and love were without guile. She will be with me always. I will never forget our long and laugh-filled phone calls or the many dinners that Julie, Chuck, Liz and I shared over the decades, often celebrating the passage of the years. While she had to deal with illness over the years, her personhood was never defined by these ailments. Back in high school we used to laugh about "joie de vivre," which we would insert into sentences at random. But, at the end of the day, that was Julie. She loved life. She loved friendship. She loved to schmooze, and her powerful glow lit up the lives of everyone she touched.

Julie, thank you for your enduring presence in my life. You will always be with me.

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