Greg M. Epstein

Cousin 

Of Ruth’s many profound achievements, the most famous ones involve her greatness as a speaker – from advocating for her vision for public radio to simply reading the New York Times on air. But I will most remember Ruth as a great and loving listener.

Several times across the earliest stages of my career, often when I was most struggling to figure out who I was, I had the great fortune of getting to stay with her for a few days. We discussed Yiddish literature; the Bund and the Workmen’s (now Worker’s) Circle; and the churches her father once took her to in the city, not for theological education but to teach her about the human condition. We talked about the human condition generally. I was lonely and insecure and desperate to be heard. And she listened to me, as actively and intently as almost anyone in my life ever has.

Ruth Seymour, originally Ruth Epstein, was born in the Bronx in 1935, just a year before my father, her first cousin, the late Cyrus Epstein, originally Seymour Epstein. The cousins, both sensitive New York intellectuals at heart, became close friends and lifelong mutual admirers—it is to Ruth’s deep credit that she truly appreciated someone like my dad for his depth and soulfulness, though his external accomplishments could never compare to hers.

Though the two shared a close connection, it wasn’t my dad’s original given name, the Jewish foreignness of which he disliked enough to legally change it to the anglicized “Cy” after his 18th birthday, that Ruth eventually chose for her new surname. Apparently, he’d been named after a rabbinic sage ancestor from the Polish shtetl, who preceded them both by a few generations. The story, as Ruth told it, was that the rabbi had been such an eminent Tzaddik, such a beloved righteous man, that two different villages fought for the right to bury him when he died.

Ruth adapted Reb Simcha's name to Seymour as a tribute to that legacy, but ultimately it was she who did the great rabbi proud. Not only through her magnificent career, by which she “made a name for herself,” as they say, but because of the tremendous compassion, sensitivity, and humanity underneath her powerful personality. 

He and both his villages would have kvelled with pride to claim her as a descendant.