By Eleanor Kazdan, May 28, 2020 — This is a story about my father Aaron Kazdan, who was born in 1918 and the year never meant that much to me except it was his birth year but now the last pandemic in the world, the Spanish flu, was in 1918 so that year makes me realize that my father was born during a pandemic. And I never heard anything about that pandemic, strangely.
My father, when he was in his 20s, was in the Canadian Airforce. So, I grew up with this painting hanging in my parents’ house, my whole growing up years. My father died in 2005, very strangely he died on the very day we bought this house in Center City, so he never knew about it or got to see it. It was on the day we were closing on the house and we went ahead and closed even though my father had just died.
So about 10 or 15 years before my father died and my parents still lived in their big house, I got up the nerve to ask them if I could inherit this painting because I’ve been an art lover all of my life and I wanted to stake my claim to this beautiful painting that was done by one of his buddies in the Canadian Air Force. I don’t even know the person’s first name but I think his last name was McClellan. So, I was surprised when my parents said “Just take it now.” So, I took the painting and I hung it in my house. It hung in my suburban house for a number of years and now it’s been hanging in this house for 14 years.
It shows my father in his 20s. The other thing is that I also inherited—or I took, I guess you would say when I was cleaning up my parent’s house when they moved to another apartment out of their suburban house—I took all of my father’s letters that he had written while he was in the Air Force. A lot of them were to my mother. Somebody had fixed them up as pen pals when my father was in the Air Force and he wrote a lot of letters to my mother. He had actually never even met her at that point. But he seemed to be very taken with her and he told her a lot of details about his life in the Air Force. And I was very moved to be aware of my father’s voice when he was about 24 years old, especially now that I’m 70.
To have that view into my father when he was so young, and he was quite different from the father that I remembered growing up. My father was very quiet and didn’t interact that much. He was very introverted. But in his 20’s he seemed to be quite different, he seemed very lively. It gave me a very different perspective on my father. So, I have his letters and every once in a while I read them. I still think I should be compiling them and putting them into some kind of a book, but I haven’t done that yet. I guess the pandemic is the time when people seem to do those kinds of things, but I haven’t. And I have his painting.
