About Joan Elkin 1932-2022: From a Eulogy Delivered by Her Daughter, Molly Elkin

How does one marshall the highlights from a 90-year life fully lived? In thinking about it, I realized my brothers and I were not even there for what were probably the happiest and most carefree of times: growing up on the West Side, then South Side of Chicago with her parents, beloved brothers, gaggles of cousins and dozens of aunts and uncles. Sundays were for picnics at the Lake. Joan and her cousins running around. The adults playing cards, commenting on every hand dealt, “Herman, did you wash the cards? I got the same cards as last time.” “Oy Bella, I got a hand like a foot.” Scolding the wilding kids in Yiddish between shuffling, calling them meshuga, pinching young Joan Jacobson’s pretty cheek, kvelling over what a shana punim she had, what a shana madelah she was, what a mensch --- all true, and all words she would use with her kids some 30 years later.

Even though she was a Depression era baby, it was the happiest of childhoods. Those Depression Era years, her formative years, formed her. They made her the no nonsense, genuine, not-a-single-fake-bone-in-her-body-badass-queen that she was to become.

Joan was never one to waste anything. It wasn’t that she was cheap or ungenerous. Waste to her was anathema, immoral, a character flaw. She used everything up. The tooth paste tubes would be cut in half and every bit used before a new tube opened. The bottles of lotion heroically cut in half (she must have kept a small saw in the linen closet) and every ounce scooped out before a new bottle could be breached.

She never wasted a drop of coffee- oh that coffee of hers, the pour over kind. It took her two hours to make the pots of coffee she would store in the fridge for the week. Boiling the water in one pot, pouring it over the filter in another, grinding her own recipe of beans, one part dark roast, three parts medium and two tablespoons of vanilla.

Or the last sip of wine. Perhaps it’s too late to warn her friends, but beware of an open bottle of wine in Joan’s house. It could very well contain the remnants of the drops she couldn’t manage to finish the night before.

She ate all the leftovers.

Her lipsticks – fourteen plastic Revlon tubes of varying shades of pink lined up on the bathroom windowsill like toy soldiers on the front lines. As she used one, she would move it to the end of the line so the next day she would use the next one up. She would keep scooching each one up the line for the next day’s make-up routine. And use them she did. Until the end of her life, she’d “put on her face” even if the only other face she would see during the day was her own in the mirror. Each lipstick the same level of use. And when she got down to the end, she would use one of her paint brushes to get it all out.

As a Depression era baby, she never wasted anything. She never wasted a day, never wasted a minute of a day. She was always doing something, making something, being useful. Waste for her was the deadliest of sins. And at the end of her life, as she literally wasted away, she couldn’t stand it. She saw it as a character flaw. It broke the moral compass.

But I get ahead of myself.

Joan Marion Jacobson was Born August 15, 1932, on the South side of Chicago to immigrants from Minsk and Lithuania, Dorothy and Ted. Dorothy, Mrs. Ted, who some 50 years later would be forever memorialized as the inspiration and the muse for the protagonist of the Award-winning novel, Mrs. Ted Bliss, which would be written by the man who would become Joan Marion Jacobson’s one and only love, Stanley Elkin.

Joan’s childhood highlights I know only through her stories. Full disclosure: what I am doing here is all hearsay, everything here is hearsay, but it is all we have, so it will be heard and remembered.

She lived on the West side of Chicago at 3846 West 18 th Street. It was there that Joan and her beloved older brother Bernie, played football in the tiny living room with their baby brother Butch. And what I mean by that, is Butch, my Uncle Marshall, some ten years younger than mom, was the football. He was called Butch because he was the son of a butcher, Ted.

Joan was a Tomboy. She followed her older brother Bernie around and had to keep up. She adored him. She was a tough kid, no nonsense, genuine to the core from the beginning. Not a fake bone in her body. If she loved you, you knew it; if she didn’t, you knew it. She had guts of steel. Literally: Her after-school snack was a stick of butter that she ate on the front stoop like a popsicle.

Joan Elkin never suffered fools. Ever. Sometimes she took it a bit too far, like how she used to beat up her neighbor, poor Joyce Shapiro, for peeing in the bed. When I asked mom about this, and asked how she could be such a bully, she told me matter of factly, Joyce needed to learn a lesson.

Dorothy and Ted moved the family to the South side when Joan was 10 years old. It was there that she figured out how to take multiple busses and trolleys downtown to visit her pop at his store and watch him work. Ted introduced her to his customers, who he was always flirting with, as his younger sister, which she thought was hilarious. It was on the South Side, at 346 E. 52 nd Street, where she met her first boyfriend, who lived across the hall from her in the building -- Bob Winters – who was absolutely gorgeous. But sadly for Bob Winters, the boring-est man alive.

It was on the South side where she met her Girlfriends for Life, Marilyn, Anita and Genevieve. They would all hang out at the Jacobson’s’, play double solitaire, listen to Vaughn Monroe on the radio and laugh for hours. The girls went to grammar school, junior high, and high school together, and upon graduation, went off to University of Illinois in Champagne Urbana where they lived together in the Keeler House for Girls.

Which is where, on one fateful day, Stanley Elkin called the Keeler House telephone. Genevieve, who had dated Stanley’s pal, Billy Guggenheim, answered the phone. Stanley told Genevieve that Billy said he should call the Keeler House and ask Joan Jacobson out on a date. Stanley said that Billy said that Joan and Stan would make a swell couple (triple, quadruple hearsay; but that’s the story). Billy was a smart man. Joan and Stanley were inseparable from that point on. Unlike Bob Winters, Stanley was the most interesting man on the planet.

They were married between terms in downtown Chicago on February 1, 1953. The Keeler House girls stood up in each other’s weddings that year. They all got their MRS but my mom was the only one who returned to the U of I. to earn her B.S. in education. After college, Joan taught 5 th grade to support Stanley who was earning his PhD in Literature at Illinois. She absolutely hated teaching; She absolutely hated 5 th Graders.

But Joan and Stanley loved their lives. They got to live on a Big Ten college campus for some eight years while Stanley read Faulkner, Joan taught the horrible 5 th graders, but also, in her spare time, started taking drawing classes.

They had no money. They could barely make their rent but the instant one of them found a couple of nickels between the sofa cushions, off to the movies they went. They loved going to the movies. It would later become one of our family’s traditions: Sunday night in St. Louis was always dinner and a movie.

I remember those Sundays like they were yesterday. Stanley would sink into his seat at the theater, the lights would go down, the screen would light up, he’d squeeze my mom’s hand and say “What could be better?” and she would squeeze his hand right back and answer: “Nothing Stanley, nothing.”

I did not know it at the time, but every one of those Sunday nights, at the movies and dinner, Stanley was high as a kite. He was also fairly crippled (or as he called it – handi-capped and footi-capped) from his M.S. at that point, and could not score his own weed, so it was mom, who was, as the kids say, his plug. It was mom who rolled his joints for him (although she never, herself, partook).

Joan, Stanley, and Philip, my big brother who became part of the picture in 1958 left the U of I. to come to St. Louis in the early 1960s when Stanley landed a job in the English Department at Washington University. Although he loved teaching, what he really wanted to do was write. But they needed his income, and Joan was never going back into the 5 th Grade classroom. She had found her calling: her brushes, and her colors, and her paints and tinctures.

Stanley complained to his mother, my Grandma Tootsie that he did not have time to write. She told him to take a sabbatical. He explained that he would not earn the right to a sabbatical for years. Grandma Tootsie asked what he made at Washington University. He told her. She said, “Done, I’ll pay you your $5000 a year salary. Call it the ‘Tootsie Grant.’ You take the year off; stop whining; go write your book.” And they took their Tootsie Grant and off to Rome they went.

This would be the first of many stints of living in Europe for Joan and Stanley. Joan loved living Rome. She painted. She had lots of help around the house so had time to take care of Phil and see the sights. She loved to tell two stories about the Rome year: Philip, who was 4 or 5 years old at the time, came home from school very upset. He said he had no friends, that no one would talk to him. He asked the other kids to play and they would just start at him blankly. Mom explained to him that it wasn’t that no one liked him. It’s that they speak Italian, and they probably didn’t understand him. Philip challenged her, “What? You said we’re in Italy!” “We are, Philip” she replied, patiently. “So, if we’re in Italy, when I’m speaking, I’m speaking Italian!” She thought that was the funniest thing.

The other story she would tell was about the time she was in the villa’s courtyard kicking a soccer ball with Phil when a loud motorcycle roared down the alley. Phil looked at mom and told her he would be right back. He ran into the villa, and Joan waited, and waited for him to return to their game. About ten minutes later, he finally came back and she asked him where he went. He told her that he thought that the loud noise was a lion. To which she retorted, “And you were just going to leave me out her to get eaten by a lion!”

Mom had a saying about the stories that she told or the ones that others told that she would adopt and retell. She’d say “I went out to dinner on that story 100 times.” Meaning, she would entertain various dinner guests with her well-told stories.

Good stories were currency in our household. In a way, her paintings tell stories. The stories of her past. The stories of her husband, the writer. The stories of her parents, her youth, weddings, the characters who make up the University’s English Department, her children, long-lost relatives, paintings inspired by her husband’s writing, paintings about regeneration, and birth and death. All told in color and light and painstaking detail, and in her own strange, made-up perspective.

Joan had such an exciting life with my dad: They lived in Rome in the 1960s. All of us lived in London in the 1970s when Stanley was on a legit sabbatical. They did a stint in Bellagio at Lake Como in the 1980s, where he was a visiting scholar for several months and Joan had her own art studio. You can see how the Italian countryside, the Cyprus trees, rocky landscapes, and stone villas inspired a new found freedom to her art: wild and lush landscapes.

At Bellagio, everyone visiting there was on a Rockefeller Grant. Each was a genius of some ilk. They would put on plays in the drawing room after the white-gloved served dinner each night, sing opera, stay up to all hours. Joan kept a wonderful journal of her time there. She says in it, “I was meant for this life.”

For Bernie and Philip and me, growing up in the house at 225 Westgate, across the street from the University was always vibrant and exciting. We sat and listened to the grown-ups! Joan and Stanley constantly entertained. The Lebowitzes, the Teitelbaum’s, the Krones. So many writers and poets and philosophers came through that living room from Howard Nemerov to John Irving, to William Gass, Gaddis, and Coover, Cynthia Ozick, Francine Prose, Susan Shreve, Benjamin Taylor, Helen Vendler, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oats, Ann Patchett, Susan Minot, Hilma and Meg Wolitzer. And as interesting as they all were, everyone, I mean everyone, hung on every word Stanley said. He was the life of the party, and his Joan was the loudest one laughing by his side. She loved the glow of his limelight.

A friend recently asked me how is it that my mom and I were always so close, what was the secret sauce. And, I think the answer is that it was the two of them. Joan and Stanley as a pair. They complimented each other. And more importantly, they compensated for each other; Because of who Stanley was, we needed Joan. She was never the helicopter parent. She did not fawn but she was our rock.

You see, Stanley never treated us like kids. He never let us win a game. He never humored us with lies about what great athletes, artists, writers, fill-in- the-blank we were. Dad would ask my friends, “So, what are you doing with your life?” And the response would be “Mr. Elkin, I’m eight years old.”

My mom made up for his gruffness. She pampered us in her own way and always made sure we knew we were loved. She would ask Stanley to watch us for five minutes in the pool so we did not drown while she cooked dinner. “Dad look at this!” we would shout as we did our fifteenth cannon ball. “Dad look at this!” as we did dive after dive. Within 30 seconds, he would have enough. “Molly come here. Look at this,” he would say. I would get out of the pool and go to him. And he would slowly, painfully slowly, raise his hand as he said, “This is how interesting you are.”

He was right of course. And years later it gave me license to be completely bored by my own children. But these life lessons would inevitably end in tears. And Joan would fix things. She would put dinner on hold, and come and take over lifeguard duties, judge all of our dives and jumps never scoring anything below an 8.5.

I was a figure skater when I was a tween. Joan drove me to all the early morning practices. My dad thought it was the dumbest sport and he joked that I had to be the only Jewish figure skater in all of St. Louis county. Joan finally got him to come to a competition. I was in the part of the program doing a sit spin into a lay back, and I hear Stanley’s big, booming voice as I’m spinning faster and faster: “My Daughter, she’s assimilated!” It broke my concentration. I was embarrassed. I cried because I came in 7 th place. Of course, Joan was there to say the judges were all idiots, I was Dorothy Hamill, Daddy was the funniest man on the planet, and I should get over myself.

Joan always picked up the pieces. She always made things ok. She balanced out Stanley’s hard edges. I would not have traded him for anything. He was the best daddy in the whole wide world, but he was tough. And she was always there to soften the edges and catch us as we fell.

After Stanley died in 1995, Joan really came into her own. After he died, she had this new freedom and so much time to fill. And fill it she did. She had so much more time to paint.

Although travelling stressed her out, she got over the fears and nerves and off she went. We went to London together for a week and took in the plays at the National, the musicals in the West End, hit the museums and did high tea. We met each other in NYC every year for 20 plus years for a mommy and me weekend where I got to be the me. She travelled to Spain with her childhood friend, Genevieve - the one who handed the phone to Joan in Keeler House 50 years earlier. She traveled to the Cotswolds’ for a walking tour with her brother Marshall and sister in law Beverly.

And in St. Louis, where she lived in the same house for more than 55 years, Joan was a regular at readings at the University and in bookstores in the Central West End. She went to parties. She had season tickets to the opera and to the symphony.

Joan lived alone, happily, for some 28 years in the four story house at 225 Westgate after Stanley died. She had her art studio in the basement where she painted watercolors in the Spring and Summer. And an art studio on the third floor where she broke out the oils in the Fall and Winter. Not having to take care of Stanley left her lots of time to color.

She was the gardener until she was 85; the pool boy until she was 86.

She was such a creature of routine.

She had her Monday, Wednesday, Friday exercises: push-ups and planks, sit-ups and leg lifts. She had her Tuesday and Thursday exercises with weights and resistance bands. She had her weekend exercise routine. Up until her late 70s she would do hand stands every day. Up until her early 80s, she would ride her bike every afternoon through the neighborhood. No helmet, her fabulous trademark white head of hair blowing in the wind. The bike ride was always followed by laps in the pool.

She was fit as a fiddle. She was a cute dresser and loved to show off her fabulous toned muscular arms. She could do this thing where she put her hand on her head and could make her biceps pump up and down like a magician of a body builder.

Everyday even up through to her 89 th year and chemotherapy, in addition to the exercise, she was a runner. The only time she would give herself permission not to get out there is if the temperature dropped below 10 degrees.

Her adherence to routine freed her up for the big stuff. It allowed her to spend her time thinking about more important things than how to fill her day. She was a voracious reader of fiction. For decades, she kept a running list of the books she read (or listened to while she painted) with commentary (e.g., “My Struggle, Book One” by Karl Ove Knausgaard “Very detailed - if he had food caught between his teeth, he would tell you about it - good book. I liked it. Norwegian.” Or “Art: The Critic’s Choice 150 Masterpieces” edited by Marina Vaizey “Sort of interesting (a little superficial). I was surprised at how many paintings I was able to visualize while he jabbered on about them.”).

She read the New York Times from cover to cover every day. In the end, she started her day with Wordle each morning.

Even what she ate for breakfast was a routine, so much so, that the first of every month on her University City Calendar hanging on the fridge, she would write in the box for each day of the week a “C” (cereal day), followed by an “M” for muffin day (she made her own fiber-filled-healthy-as-hell muffins that weighed about 47 pounds a-piece for 30 years) followed by an “E” for egg day. Wednesdays and Sundays were always oatmeal, so she did not need to write any letter on those days. She liked not having to think about what to make for breakfast. It gave her more time to do the stuff she wanted to do. She lived her entire life like this.

Last year, she had to undergo a small procedure as part of her treatment. It was outpatient, but she could not eat anything beforehand and she was not released from hospital until 2:00 p.m. As we were driving home, she said “I’m starving. I sure hope it’s Egg day.” “Mom, every day can be egg day,” I replied. She looked at me like I was crazy.

In the end, the routines fell away. Wordle fell away. The New York Times went unread. Breakfast was whatever I made for her. Dying became its own and only routine. Weakness took over. Foggy head did. Everything eventually fell away, and a fall in the bathroom on June 14, 2022, was what ultimately felled the unshakeable, disciplined Joan Elkin.

The end was not easy, but she handled it with grace, dignity, strength and humor like she did everything else in her life. Joan Elkin lived a long, beautiful, full life. Her paintings are her legacy. They shaped her just as much as she shaped them. They are the product of her intense discipline, her dogged determination, her quirky vision, and her ability to render the world as she saw it in her own Joan Elkinesque, playful but serious, unforgiving way. May she rest. May her life’s work endure.