Twelve years ago today, my Uncle Alan passed away.
Recently immersed in my favorite middle-aged hobby of sifting through ancient, bulging folders and spiral-bound notebooks spilling out with tattered looseleaf, I came across the remarks I prepared for the first night of shiva at our house. On the occasion of this solemn anniversary, I’m publishing them here.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: For ultimate emotional resonance, picture yourself in a wood-paneled Westchester den, a half-eaten bagel with lox spread and a couple of undercooked pigs in blankets on a paper plate in hand, as you read the following:]
I’m Scott Rogowsky. Marty’s son. Alan’s nephew. I’m 28 years old. I have a good job in an industry I love. I live in a beautiful, three-bedroom Park Slope apartment (that I share with two other people). And for the purposes of this eulogy, let’s just say I am in an committed, long-term relationship with Israeli supermodel Bar Rafaeli. By most accounts, I am a fully-formed, fully functional adult. I am one of you now.
As adults, faced with the constant anxieties and crushing responsibilities attendant with adulthood, we don’t often get the chance to stop and reflect — to take stock of who we are and how we came to be.
I got that chance early Monday morning, lying in bed, thinking about my Uncle Alan. He had gone into cardiac arrest the day before. The prognosis wasn’t good. The end was near. And that’s when it hit me: my Uncle Alan shaped the person I am today in more ways than perhaps either of us ever realized.
My dad Marty (left), Uncle Steve (middle) and Uncle Alan (right) on my first birthday
He inspired my sense of curiosity and inquisitive nature, my wanderlust, my love of language, history, and New York City. He influenced my operating system, quite literally. An “Apple Genius” twenty years before the first Apple Store opened its doors, he’s the reason why this dude never got a Dell. Alan was our personal Apple Store, always proffering the best deals from MacMall, always keeping us apprised of the latest updates and upgrades. It’s not a stretch to say he taught me what are truly the most important of life’s lessons: how to empty my cache, and how to repair disk permissions.
I’ll never forget that July day in 2007 when he surprised me at my summer job site — the Trader Joe’s on the Post Road — with what must have been one of the very first iPhones off the line, in his hand. I liked to imagined he had a secret pipeline direct to Steve Jobs’ garage.
In my insulated suburban childhood, Uncle Alan was the brave astronaut (or is it more accurate to say cosmonaut?) traveling to far flung lands by extravagant means: the Concorde, the QE2 — experiencing awesome adventure in his role as the Rogowsky ambassador to the United Nations. To Alan, Paris, Moscow, and Tel Aviv weren’t distant cosmopolitans; they were merely extended stops on his personal subway line that went from Christopher Street to Dizengoff.
He seemed to have an unrivaled facility for meeting strangers in strange places who would go on to become lifelong friends. His international network rivaled WikiLeaks. How many Rosh Hashanah dinners and Passover Seders did I sit in rapt attention as he spun his travel tales — having lunch at the Kremlin, walking The Great Wall of China, making a detour to Macau — before presenting me with coins and stamps to stoke my collections? There’s no doubt I absorbed his magpie instinct, bordering on hoarding.
Incidentally, if anyone would like a complete set of 1996 Olympics Wheaties boxes — cereal still sealed inside! — talk to me after the service.
Alan in Russia “when it was cool”
But his home base was the most magical of any global destination. My Uncle Alan lived in THE CITY! The Big Apple! Greenwich Village! Washington Square Park was his front lawn, the World Trade Center was his backyard. He was the only person I knew who didn’t have a driveway — he had a doorman! He loved New York — its people, its history, its bagels, its museums.
Of all my memories of Uncle Alan, the most indelible — the one that has come to define him in my mind as the quintessential totem of our relationship — is the day he took me to the American Museum of Natural History. I was at the height of my dinosaur obsession, maybe 6 or 7 years old, and I’m sure I was captivated by the imposing skeletons of brontosaurus and T. Rex, the Hall of Biodiversity with all its catalogued creepy crawlies, the dioramas of indigenous tribes and transcontinental ecosystems. But while some might put the squid and whale front and center in their childhood memories of this monumental museum visit (here’s lookin at you, Noah Baumbach), what stands out in my mind from that day, with the starkest relief and sharpest clarity, is what happened before we even set foot into the exhibits.
At the ticket counter, as we watched the group of tourists ahead of us unflinchingly pay the full freight admission fee of $15 per person, Uncle Alan drew my attention to a word on the entry sign, hardly noticeable in print so fine: “suggested.” I’ll never forget the ear-to-ear smile of self-satisfaction on my uncle’s face, the look of consternation on the clerk’s, and the gleam in Thomas Jefferson’s eye as Alan produced two nickels from his pocket and placed them on the counter with the boldest of declarations: “One for me, one for my nephew.”
The Brothers Rogowsky, and Alan’s partner Didier on their wedding day at New York Presbyterian, two months before he died.
Uncle Alan was the family archivist and genealogist. He could rattle off every bough and branch on the Rogowsky tree, be it Tunick, Issow, Bisbee, or Zuckerbraun. Every so often a breaking news item would flash across the Rogowsky wire — the discovery of a new audio recording of my Grandma Rita (Alan and my dad’s long-deceased mom) playing the piano; the unearthing of a “lost photograph” of the family dog, Willie. From his overstuffed closets he gifted me his old t-shirts when I developed my taste for vintage in high school. From his balcony he would show me his majestic view of the Twin Towers — the same balcony from which, one bright September morning, he watched them go down.
He was fiercely proud of all his nieces and nephews, of his entire Rogowsky family, of his ancestral family in Israel and his Jewish people in diaspora, of his alma maters and community of classmates from Brandeis and Horace Mann, of his many friends at home and abroad.
With no children of his own, I was his first-born by proxy, his “Neph,” and he kvelled and cared about me as if I were his son. I certainly loved him like one.
The promotional hat from his old import/export firm that I wear proudly to this day.
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This was really sweet, Scott. Thank you for sharing!