Trudi Kearl Holbrooke

SOURCE: http://archive.today/BLxr#selection-4875.0-4967.134 (acccessed 4-24-2014)

Trudi Kearl, 89

   Trudi Kearl, who lived part time in Springs for 40 years, died on Saturday at the Schervier Nursing Care Center in the Bronx. She was 89 and died of complications of Alzheimer’s disease.

   Ms. Kearl, who divided her time between Scarsdale, N.Y., and Springs, was born on Sept. 15, 1920, in Stuttgart, Germany, the eldest of four children of Samuel Moos and the former Velesca Friedheim. Her own children are Andrew D. Holbrooke of Scarsdale, a photojournalist, and Richard C. Holbrooke of New York and Washington, D.C., the United States special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

   When she was a little girl, her family moved to Hamburg. Then, in 1933, when Hitler was elected, Ms. Kearl told a friend, her father, who had read “Mein Kampf,” took the children into their bedroom and said, “Children, we are leaving Germany immediately. Get all your things packed. Oh, and by the way, we are Jewish.”

   They went to Switzerland, where her grandmother lived, and by the end of 1933 had moved to Buenos Aires. Ms. Kearl arrived in New York City in 1939, where she met Dan Holbrooke, considered a brilliant doctor, who was born in Warsaw to Russian-Jewish parents and changed his name upon arriving in the New World. They met at a Thanksgiving dinner at the International House on Riverside Drive, where she was living.

   They married in March 1940 and lived in New York until moving to Scarsdale in 1950. Dr. Holbrooke died of cancer in 1957 just after his 43rd birthday, leaving his widow and their two young sons, Richard and Andrew, who were not brought up with any particular consciousness about being Jewish.

   In 1960 Ms. Kearl married Stanley Kearl, a sculptor, who died in 1998. Ms. Kearl, who was an accomplished ceramist, continued to show and sell her work at the Elaine Benson Gallery in Bridgehampton, among other places, until her health would no longer allow it.

   “Trudi was one of a kind,” said Peggy Backman, a friend and Springs neighbor, “and she loved to give parties and she loved to go to them.”

   She also traveled all over the world, sometimes to see relatives, and made four trips to Afghanistan. She spoke at least four languages. Ms. Kearl was interested in theater, music, dance, and was a member of several organizations, including Amnesty International. According to friends she was candid and unaffected in her reactions to ideas and opinions.

   Beate Gordon, another friend and Amagansett summer resident, said, “We were both born in Europe and came to this country, so we had a lot in common. Trudi was a very strong personality and a very fun-loving person, also a creative woman. She was always in a very positive mood, even in the last months of her life,” she said, adding, “she was an interesting person in that she was very much alive.”  

   An uncle of Ms. Kearl’s, Dr. Ernst A.H. Friedheim, who lived in Amagansett toward the end of his life, was famous for having discovered a cure for sleeping sickness and other parasitical tropical diseases. He was credited with saving millions of lives in Africa.

   In addition to her two sons, she is survived by her brother, Ernesto R. Moos of Locarno, Switzerland, her sister Loni Silleran of Paris, and 2 grandchildren, 3 great-grandchildren, and 10 nieces and nephews. Another sister, Beate Hirsch of Buenos Aires, died about five years ago.

   Ms. Kearl was cremated. Funeral arrangements were private, although there may be a memorial service in the future in East Hampton.