Death has been
termed "the last enemy" and every year
in the spring we celebrate Christ's victory over death, and His
resurrection from the dead. Death is swallowed up in victory.
So how can I
write sadly of the death of Helen Iswolsky, who lived with us in Tivoli for eight years.
Helen was my most dear friend ever since she came from France in 1941. She was a writer, an historian, a scholar, a translator and teacher. We were most privileged to have her with us for many years at Tivoli. She kept an apartment in New York, and two years ago she moved all her extensive library and papers from NYC and Tivoli to the little Russian center she founded at Cold Spring, N.Y. There, meetings of THE THIRD HOUR, an ecumenical group, were held. We hope to have a brief account of this in a future issue of the CW, if we can persuade one of Helen's Russian associates to write it for us. Perhaps Dr. Basil Yanovsky, author and physician (like Chekhov) will write it.
In Helen's great heart there was room for many loves, and she considered herself a member of the Catholic Worker community as well as a leader of the THIRD HOUR group, which worked for peace between the Churches: Russian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, and, indeed, all Protestant groups.
Meetings were held at least annually in various churches, also in the Union Theological Seminary, and our Catholic Workers were much interested in them all. Concordances, one of John XXIII's favorite emphases, was basic.
Helen's life would make a great biography. Daughter of a Russian diplomat, Helen and her family were in Japan, where Alexander Iswolsky was ambassador, when the Japanese-Russian war broke out. Her father was the last ambassador to France under the Tsar when WWI began, and, vacationing in Russia that summer of 1914, she caught the last train which pulled out of Moscow on the way to Berlin where her mother was visiting friends.
Again they were on the last train from Berlin, arriving in Paris from Berlin when World War I was declared in 1914. She nursed the wounded in Paris during that war.
World War II meant her departure from France in 1941, when the Germans occupied Paris, and she arrived in this country some time later with her mother and brother, to stay temporarily at Countess Tolstoy's farm for Russian refugees.
Our friendship began early. Her friends, Jacques Maritain and Emmantiel Mounier, were the leaders in the personalist and communitarian movement in Paris which had inspired Peter Maurin to start the CW movement here.
My own love for Russian literature—Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov—drew me to Helen at once. (She gave a course on Dostoevsky at Vassar College once, and at our retreat house at Mary-farm, Newburgh.) I used to say that some day Helen and I would set out together to take that long train trip from Moscow to Vladivostok.
Her small room at Tivoli farm was filled with books and records of Russian music. Two windows looked out on a tree-covered hill-side, and there was a bird feeder outside one window. Her bed was anything but comfortable—a narrow cot, one of a donation of sixty or more beds from the Jesuits when they closed down their house in Hyde Park, N.Y. One comfortable chair, a table and typewriter, a chest for her clothes, a closet, and, of course, many ikons made the room crowded but attractive.
She volunteered to keep the guest book, and she helped us entertain the many visitors who stopped at the farm. it was easy in the summer when there was all outdoors and the magnificent view of the river and the shabby but impressive old mansion, which General de Peyster put up more than 125 years ago. "A decaying mansion" as it is described now, it has given hospitality to many a student and wanderer over the years we have spent at Tivoli.
If the weather was inclement, she sat with the visitors in the large, common room which was shabbier yet, what with broken-down but still usable furniture, and the many book cases crammed with books, not to speak of half-a-dozen children at play. Deane Mowrer was her able companion in answering the constant inquiries as to what the Catholic Worker was all about.
Helen cleaned her own room, and often the
bathroom on her corridor, and cleared tables and often waited on guests, epitomizing
Peter's edict—The scholar must become a worker, and the worker a scholar
—as
a way to overcome class war. I often thought of the phrase "noblesse oblige" in
connection with Helen. She was a noble soul and set an example to us all in her
disciplined life of work, translating, teaching Russian and writing her memoirs, for which
we hope to find a publisher.
Today, as I write this, the snow is falling thickly and heavy gusts of wind make it come horizontally at times, as though from the North Pole itself. Helen died Christmas eve at Highland Hospital in Beacon, New York. not far from Cold Spring where she had rejoiced in her little Russian Center. Her suffering had been great, but there were no other people in intensive care so the nurse in charge allowed one or two of us to take turns sitting by her bedside.
We kept constant vigil for some weeks. She was able only to write two or three word messages, or inquiries, to us, what with the necessity for a tracheotomy and an oxygen tank.
Brothers Victor and Patrick were her constant companions (coming from the little monastery, Our Lady of the Resurrection, on the grounds of Marist Brother's Hall at Cold Spring). I had the joy of watching with her daily for hours at a stretch, both of us strengthened by the psalms and gospels which she motioned for often.
When she died, Brother Victor and Marguerite Tjader were with her, one or the other holding her hand. Helen and Marguerite had travelled by car all the length, if not the breadth, of the Soviet Union, from Leningrad to the Black Sea, years before.
What great love she had for her country to the very end. Now her prayers will be overshadowing it, I am sure.
I kept no night watches with her, but hours during the day. Many friends dropped in to bid her farewell. When Deane Mowrer came from the Tivoli farm and stood by the bed clasping her hand, Helen opened her eyes, which had been half closed all morning, and gave her a smile of unutterable sweetness. She recognized all who came from Tivoli and Cold Spring.
She was much loved. But from the two young brothers, Victor and Patrick, she had the most constant and tender affection and care night and day. She kept reaching up and smoothing Victor's cheek. He had been, for these last few years, like a son to her.
The cloistered Benedictine nuns from Regina Landis had permission from the bishop to leave their cloister to visit Helen, who was a Benedictine Oblate, associated with them. They brought her the habit she was laid out in. She received Communion daily, a small portion of the Host, brought to her by the Brothers or by Fr. Richard Lee, of the John XXIII Center, when he visited her.
Helen died Christmas eve. All Christmas day, in a steady snowfall, she was visited by friends and neighbors as she lay in the simple coffin before the altar in the Brothers' chapel. The Mass was offered next day by Fr. Gino Piovesana, of the John XXIII Center at Fordham, in the Byzantine rite. And then, along sleety and snowy roads, the funeral Procession drove north to Tivoli.
Helen now rests in St. Sylvia's Cemetery, in the Catholic Worker plot given by Monsignor Kane, where twelve small, birchwood crosses indicate the graves of her fellow Catholic Workers.
Lilac bushes shield the plot from the highway.
