Memorial Service Transcripts

Dana Goodyear: This is beautiful that there are so many people here. It's amazing. I've never spoken for Jacob without feeling the thrill and the risk of trying to choose perfect words. He prized the unique turn and the strange device, the polysyllabic, the particular, the punning. He liked to talk about ruminant quadrupeds. From Friday to Sunday every week he would, as he said, 'massage the secrets of the crossword puzzle', I think I'll have to learn German to transmit a little of what we called his Teutonic mood. The electric funniness that buzzed around him when he'd been working on a translation. Jacob read obsessively and attentively and scanned the world of writing and the world of experience for synchronicity. Nothing pleased him more than seeing the edge of a randomly occurring pattern, the weird word or variant that cropped up twice meaningfully. There was a mathematics to the way he thought and spoke and wrote that would take me far longer to elaborate than the five to seven minutes he would think was the right amount of time to talk.

Jacob's expressiveness was physical too. His features moved and changed almost constantly. He was an athlete and an eater with a deep love of lamb and grilled octopus and blueberries and chocolate ice cream. He had a sometimes incompatible reverence for nutritional information too. He could hit any ball far and fast and gently, lift or push or steer almost anything. These past six months were very sober ones for Jacob and he was flourishing in his mind, and his body, and in his spirit. He had tasted purity and he looked new. He was proud of his sobriety. He was loving and patient with others and was beginning to be so with himself. I heard him say of himself modestly that he was a genial person, an understatement almost to the point of absurdity of his magnetism, charisma, and spiritual generosity. He was and is genial in a fuller sense. A genius, a genie, the light in the lamp. I will love and honor you forever, Jacob.

Lucy Waletzky • Gustav Peebles • Jeremy Fields • Dana Goodyear
Jeremy Waletzky • Naomi Waletzky