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PREFACE TO BOOK OF RUTH
BY ROBERT SEYDEL
All rights reserved. Copyright © 2011, the author and Siglio Press.
As my hair dries my mind goes.
—Ruth Greisman
The Book of Ruth is concerned with two main characters, my aunt and uncle, Ruth and Sol Greisman, who were siblings, born in Brooklyn, New York. Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp put in minor appearances as friends to both of them. A fifth character, mostly invisible, is “Robt,” or Robert Cornell, Joseph Cornell’s homebound brother, or myself, nephew, and the “half-wit” of the Book. Neither Ruth nor Sol married; they lived together for the better part of their adult lives in a small apartment in Queens, New York, not far from the Cornell house on Utopia Parkway.
Sol (sometimes Saul) was in real life a veteran of the First World War and suffered, as it was later said, from shell shock. After the War he became a plumber. Ruth was a Sunday painter who worked days in a bank and was active in Hadassah. In the Book the two of them meet Cornell and, through him, Marcel Duchamp. Ruth fell in love with the former, who was, in his own way, as impossible and sealed-off as her brother.
Ruth is the artist in the Book, her work taking the form of mailings to Joseph, various serial and other collages, such as Ten Tiny Collages for Teeny, and journal writings. Her work was first discovered among the boxes of miscellanea in the Joseph Cornell Study Center at The Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Later research by family members turned up a treasure trove of material in a garage in suburban Fort Lee, New Jersey. Ruth’s emblem is the hare, Sol’s the worm, or sometimes a star-nosed mole.
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