OBITUARIES

Victor Rabinowitz, Constitutional Attorney

    Victor Rabinowitz, whose 1996 book, “Unrepentant Leftist, A Law­yer’s Memoir,” might appropriately have been titled “Distinguished Leftist,” to describe a long career that never veered from fighting for social justice and upholding the Constitution, died on Friday night at his Manhattan apartment. He was 96.

    Mr. Rabinowitz was engaged in what have been called some of the most notable political trials of the latter half of the 20th century. He also brought his legal gifts to bear on issues in the Town of East Hampton, having become a second-home owner here in the late 1960s.

    A graduate of the University of Michigan, from which he  also received his law degree, Mr. Rabinowitz became a member of the Communist Party as a young man in 1942, even though, as one colleague said, he understood it would limit his future in the law. Years later, he explained, “I did not think anything could be accomplished without some sort of hierarchical structure. I thought there ought to be some connection between action to be taken and an end to be achieved — an end that went beyond the day after tomorrow.”

    He accepted the insults that came his way as a result, especially after the cold war, and knew it was difficult for some people to understand that an American could be a member of the party and a person with high moral values. He left the party in the early ’60s.

     Mr. Rabinowitz founded his own firm as a young lawyer in 1944 after several years with Louis B. Boudin, a leading labor lawyer and scholar. In three years’ time, Mr. Boudin’s neph­ew, Leonard Boudin, joined the firm, which is now Rabinowitz, Boudin, Standard, Krinsky, and Lieberman.

    As an activist, Mr. Rabinowitz placed hope during the 1930s and ’40s in the American Labor Party, which was established in 1936 and was active as a third party in New York City from 1937 to 1952. He took a leading role, running for Congress in 1947. In his memoir, Mr. Rabinowitz expresses a continuing wish for a vital third party. 

    Perhaps best known for representing Fidel Castro and Cuba, the firm probably represented more clients before the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities than any other in the country, mostly for little or no fee. Persons of note who were clients in other regards included Dr. Benjamin Spock, who was charged with conspiracy to counsel violation of the Selective Service system during the Vietnam War, and Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame. In both cases, Mr. Boudin, a charismatic litigator, drew newspaper headlines, while Mr. Rabinowitz prepared arguments. Other famous clients were Alger Hiss and the Rev. Philip Berrigan.

    “. . . ‘McCarthyism’ has become a part of our vocabulary as describing virulent, shameless, and mendacious attacks of all varieties of left-wing or even mildly progressive thought,” Mr. Rabinowitz wrote in his memoir. “Off camera . . . he was a genial, extroverted, and not unpleasant man — a good-natured drunk.”

    Mr. Rabinowitz was less generous, however, toward Roy Cohn, the committee’s counsel. “Of all the evil men I’ve encountered in six decades of law practice, Roy Cohn was the most vicious.”

    From the earliest days of his practice, Mr. Rabinowitz was a First Amendment attorney. In a case he argued before the Supreme Court in 1949, he hoped to void a provision of the Taft-Hartley Act that required leaders of unions to sign affidavits that they were not members of the Communist Party or its supporters. At the time this affected a number of unions.

    Mr. Rabinowitz’s memoir notes that it was the first time since Reconstruction that a political test had been imposed on the right to enjoy a benefit of the Constitution. One union, the American Communications Association, was willing to bring suit. It went to the Supreme Court, unsuccessfully. The decision was not overruled until 1964.

    A First Amendment case of another kind was begun when the late painter Robert Gwathmey of Amagansett was arrested in 1970 for displaying a “peace flag,” an American flag with a peace symbol instead of stars in its union. Mr. Rabinowitz argued the case, which was declared unconstitutional by a federal Court of Appeals.

    Several cases Mr. Rabinowitz argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of Cuba remain leading judicial decisions in international law. In the words of the late Mr. Boudin, Mr. Rabinowitz “convinced the court that the United States judiciary should not pass judgment upon the legality of the Cuban nationalization of United States’ citizens property. . . .” That decision, in 1964, is generally considered one of the court’s most significant and controversial. The decision was 8-1.

    In subsequent cases, the Supreme Court ruled in his favor regarding matters of compensation for U.S. corporations. In 1971, he was retained to represent the Allende government in Chile, which had nationalized U.S. companies, but it was brought down in a coup.

    Mr. Rabinowitz was also active in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. He was one of the first Northern lawyers to travel to the South to defend civil rights workers, in association with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. He found himself having to defend his own daughter, Joni, who was arrested in Albany, Ga., on a charge of perjury for denying that she had been on a picket line. It was at this time that he met Joanne Grant, who was to become his second wife.

    In his later years of practice, Mr. Rabinowitz returned to labor law. He helped strengthen Local 1119, the Hospital Workers Union, in the 1980s and watched it become one of the country’s most successful unions.

    In his own assessment, Mr. Rabinowitz considered being one of the founders of the National Lawyers Guild, and its survival to this day, one of his greatest achievements. The guild, of which he was president from 1967 to 1970, was an alternative to the American Bar Association, which at the time was racially segregated and anti-New Deal.

    When he was honored by the organization in 1978, a dramatic script was read that had been taken from his Federal Bureau of Investigation files. Tom Paxton, the singer-songwriter and a friend who lived in East Hampton at the time, also took part.

    Among the other organizations he aided were the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee and American Civil Liberties Union. Given his work, it is no surprise that he was arrested at least once, and was himself subpoenaed to testify by the McCarthy committee.

    Victor Rabinowitz was born in Brooklyn on July 2, 1911. His father, Louis M. Rabinowitz, made a fortune by patenting and manufacturing a machine that attached hooks and eyes to elasticized strips of cloth. Before his death, he had established a foundation worth some $3 million, with instructions for those following him to give the money away. They did so to a large extent.

    Mr. Rabinowitz was married first to the former Marcia Goldberg, who survives, as do two children from that marriage, Joni Rabinowitz of Pittsburgh and Peter Rabinowitz of Clinton, N.Y. His second wife, Ms. Grant, was a writer and civil rights activist who died in 2005. Two surviving children from that marriage are Mark Rabinowitz of Manhattan and Abby Rabinowitz of Hamburg, N.J. A sister, Lucille Perlman of Manhattan, and two grandchildren also survive.

    When he was not engaged in the law or in political debate, Mr. Rabinowitz listened to classical music, played chess, and read Dickens. His personal library, particularly of history, was a valuable one. In East Hampton, he loved taking walks and birding. John Simon, a longtime friend, recalled that on his 80th birthday, he led a group of friends on a 14-mile hike at the Mashomack Preserve on Shelter Island.

    An open house was held at Mr. Rabinowitz’s apartment on Sunday. A memorial meeting after the holidays is being planned.     H.S.R.

Siv Cedering, an Artist of Multiple Gifts

    Siv Cedering, a poet, writer of fiction, and painter and sculptor, died after a long illness on Saturday at her farm in Sagaponack, a sanctuary she created with her husband, the sculptor Hans Van de Bovenkamp, who survives. The cause was pancreatic cancer, her family said. She was 68.

  Ms. Cedering had published 20 books, many of them in her native Swedish, and four translations, as well as plays, screenplays, and television scripts. She also wrote music and exhibited her paintings and sculpture widely.

    One of her friends, Sheridan Sansegundo, the former arts editor of The East Hampton Star, called her “an artistic polymath of unstoppable enthusiasm,” while another, Bill Henderson, the founder of the Pushcart Press, said she “was a one-of-a-kind force of the spirit . . . who will never be replaced.”

     Born in 1939, 30 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle in Overkalix, Sweden, she began writing poetry and stories as a girl of 8. She immigrated to San Francisco with her family when she was 14 and published her first book of poetry when she was 16. She was self-taught, although after graduating from San Francisco’s Lowell High School she was mentored by such notable poets as William Stafford. She later taught undergraduate and graduate writing.

    Ms. Cedering won the Best Book of the Year Award in Sweden for her first novel, “Playing in the Pig House.” The story, about a little pink pig, became a series of children’s books, some of which were adapted into an animated television series, for which she wrote the music and provided character drawings.  Another of her novels, “Oxen,” was made into a film in 1991 starring Stellan Skarsgard. It was nominated for a Best Foreign Film Academy Award.

    Ms. Cedering’s poetry and prose have appeared in over 200 anthologies, textbooks, and magazines, including Harper’s, Ms., Science, and The New Republic, as well as in The New York Times. She enjoyed reading her poetry and was invited to do so in numerous countries around the world. She also wrote musicals for children and won prizes and grants for her screenplays.

    While gaining success as a poet and writer, Ms. Cedering expressed herself in the visual arts. Her painting and sculpture were first exhibited on the South Fork and later throughout the United States.

   Her book “Letters From the Floating World” won a place in the prestigious Pitt Poetry Series, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Among her many grants and awards were ones from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Poetry Society of America, and the Pushcart Prizes, and she had won an Emily Dickinson Award. She was a member of the Guild Hall Academy of the Arts, the Academy of Poets, Poets and Artists, PEN, and the Swedish Writers Union, Sveriges Forfattarforbund. Her new­est book of poems, “Vixen,” with drawings by the East Hampton artist Connie Fox, is forthcoming from the Pushcart Press.

    One of Ms. Cedering’s friends, a fellow poet, Fran Castan, said this week, “It was a privilege to watch Siv work on ‘Vixen,’ a lesson that in the face of suffering and death itself, it is possible to live joyfully, making art.”

    Ms. Cedering is survived by her husband and three children from her first marriage, Cedering Fox of Los Angeles. Lora Fox Gamble of East Hampton, and D. Kell Fox of Portland, Ore. A sister, Solveig Lark, and her extended family in Sweden, two stepsons, Eric and Brett Van de Bovenkamp, and nine grandchildren also survive.

    A gathering will be held at the Yardley and Pino Funeral Home in East Hampton tomorrow at 2 p.m. The family has asked those attending to take a photograph or written remembrance. Another memorial and celebration of her work will be held in New York City on her birthday, Feb. 5. Further information will be listed at www.vandebovenkamp.com

    Memorial gifts have been suggested to East End Hospice, P.O. Box 1048, Westhampton 11978-7048.

    The following stanzas are from Ms. Cedering’s favorite poem.

There is no explanation for the fire
That burns in our bodies
Or the desire that grows, again and again,
So that we must move toward each other
In the dark.
We have no wings.
We are ordinary people, doing ordinary things.
The story can be told on rice paper.
There is a lantern, a mountain, whatever
We can remember.
Hiroshige’s landscape is so soft.
What child, woman, would not want to go out
Into that dark, and be caught,
And caught again, by you?
I want these pictures of the floating world
To go on, but when
The light begins to dim, catch me.
Give me whatever a child imagines
To keep me aglow, then
Let me go.

Derek D. Koncelik, 17

    Derek Duane Koncelik, the son of Duane Koncelik, formerly of East Hampton, and the former Patricia Erikson, died on Oct. 25 at Brookhaven Memorial Hospital Medical Center the day after he was in an accident in an all-terrain vehicle.

    Derek worked frequently with his father on construction projects in and around East Hampton, and was training to take over the company, his family said. While working alongside his father, he was also enrolled in an online program with the Bellport School District. The family lives in East Patchogue, where they have a small farm.

    He was part of a large extended family here; his uncle, Lawrence J. Koncelik, and aunts, Burke Marie Koncelik, Theresa K. Quigley, and Mary C. Miller, live in East Hampton. His grandparents Doris and Lawrence Koncelik, lived in East Hampton and died before him, as did his uncle, Paul Whelan.

    His family said Derek was an avid outdoorsman, fisherman, and sailor. He helped with the horses, raised and raced homing pigeons, and loved cats and dogs, and was self-reliant, skilled, and independent.

    In addition to his uncle and aunts and many cousins, two sisters, Megera and Kelsey Koncelik of East Patchogue, survive him.

    A funeral was held at Mary Immaculate Catholic Church in Bellport on Oct. 29. He was buried in Bellport Cemetery.

His family has suggested memorial contributions to the New York Organ Donor Network, 132 West 31st Street, 11th Floor, New York 10117.

Gerard Smyth, 40

    Gerard Smyth, known as Gerry, an Irish surfer and a bartender who spent summers in Montauk, died of cancer on Nov. 12 in Dublin. Mr. Smyth, who had been ill some 18 months, was 40.

    He started visiting Montauk 20 years ago. In recent years, he returned to Ireland during the winter months to Lismore in County Waterford, where he was restoring an old farmhouse. “It was his passion. He loved architecture, and he was bringing the house back to its original design. He was almost done,” said Melissa Berman, a friend. Mr. Smyth was buried near his house.

    He was born in Dublin on May 2, 1967, the son of Judge Thomas C. Smyth and the former Patricia Jordan, both of whom  survive. He grew up in Sutton, a waterfront section of Dublin on the Irish Sea. Mr. Smyth attended Rockwell College, Blackrock College, Dun Laoire College of Art, where he studied painting, and Waterford Regional College. He also trained as a chef at the Ballymaloe Cookery School.

    In Montauk, Mr. Smyth kept the bar at a number of restaurants including Dave’s Downtown, Caswell’s, East by Northeast, Oyster Pond, and the Chowder House at West Lake Fishing Lodge. He loved Rollerblading and Halloween. “He had some outrageous costumes, and lots of hats,” Ms. Berman said.

    Chris Coleman of Montauk, his longtime friend, said, “I never met someone so well liked. He was high on life, an athlete, and a great bartender. He touched a lot of hearts. He’s going to be missed.”

    Mr. Coleman said his friend was extremely well traveled. “He lived everywhere, in the Caribbean, Australia. He took a road trip from here to Costa Rica once. He hit every spot, and he lived there, didn’t just visit. He did a lot in his 40 short years.”

    In September of 2006 Mr. Smyth was diagnosed with colon cancer while on a surf trip to California. His friends, learning of his illness, had a Joel Tudor-model surfboard made for him, which he was able to ride at Ditch Plain in Montauk “He loved that board,” Mr. Coleman said.

    In addition to his parents, Mr. Smyth is survived by his brothers, Joseph Smyth and T.C. Smyth, and sister, Tresa Faulkner. All live in Ireland.

    The Rev. Joseph Whelan officiated at a service held in Sutton, Ireland, on Nov. 14.

Leonardo Varon, 36

    Leonardo Varon, a heavy-equipment operator for Diversified Services of East Hampton, died at Stony Brook University Hospital on Sunday. He was 36 and had a recurrence of brain cancer. He was first diagnosed with the illness in 1995, his family said.

    Mr. Varon lived on Crystal Drive in East Hampton with his wife, the former Ana Milena, and two daughters, Marianna and Sascha. He came to East Hampton about 14 years ago from his native Colombia, where he had graduated from high school, then spent a year in the Colombian Army before moving to the United States, learning English, and eventually taking U.S. citizenship.

    He was described by his family as a man who was enthusiastic about his work and the machines he ran, but who also loved just being at home with his wife and daughters.

    “Everything he wore pretty much had the word ‘Caterpillar’ on it,” Dave Dakers, who works at Diversified Services and knew Mr. Varon for nine years, said. “He was really a special person. He was hard-working, he just did everything right. He really wanted to learn and was never afraid to try anything new.”

    “He was a huge asset to the business. He definitely will be missed.”

    Mr. Varon was born on April 27, 1971, to Alvaro Varon and the former Fabiola Vaquero. His father died before him; his mother lives with the family in East Hampton. A sister, Luz Elena Varon, lives in Colombia.

    A funeral Mass was to be said yesterday at Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church in East Hampton. Mr. Varon was to be cremated.

Arkadie Pikulik

    Arkadie Pikulik, a former president of the Culloden Shores Association of Montauk, died at his house in Bayside on Nov. 9 after a long illness. He was 81.

    In 1965, Mr. Pikulik purchased one of the original homes in Culloden while living and working in France. He served the Culloden Shores Association of Montauk for over 25 years, performing strong leadership and management roles. In addition to being a longtime board member, he served twice as president, and once as director.

    While serving his first term as president from 1990 to 1993, his contributions were instrumental in researching and writing the history of Culloden Shores to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the association. In 2001, he was re-elected to the board of directors and served as president for two more years. He continued serving on the board as past president until his death.  

    Mr. Pikulik’s relentless determination to serve the community inspired him to install the beach’s first staircase. His guidance and spirit as the quiet fighter of Culloden Shores will be missed, his family said.

    Born in Brooklyn on Sept. 29, 1926, to Alexander and Sekla Pikulik, Russian immigrants, Mr. Pikulik graduated from the Polytechnic Institute of New York in his native borough, where he received a Bachelor of Science degree. His career as a chemical engineer took him throughout most of Europe and Asia. He and his family lived and worked in Japan, France, and Germany.

    After retiring, he made several trips to Russia with his wife and daughters and returned twice to Japan to visit lifelong friends. Mr. Pikulik is survived by his wife, Elaine Pikulik, daughters, Nancy and Tamara Pikulik, and brother, Alexander Pikulik, as well as a granddaughter.

    Visiting hours were held for Mr. Pikulik on Nov. 12 at the Dalton Funeral Home in New Hyde Park. He was buried the next day at Fort Hill Cemetery in Montauk. The family has suggested memorial contributions to the American Cancer Society, P.O. Box 1133, Washington, D.C. 20012-1133.

Robert M. Shaughnessy

    Visiting hours for Robert M. Shaughnessy of Southampton, who taught music at Southampton College until his retirement in 1996, will be on Sunday from 2 to 4 and 7 to 9 p.m. at the O’Connell Funeral Home on Little Plains Road in Southampton. Mr. Shaughnessy died on Sunday. A funeral Mass will be said at 10 a.m. on Monday at Our Lady of Poland Catholic Church in South­ampton.

Norman Mercer

    Norman Mercer, 91, a sculptor who worked in cast acrylics, died at home in East Hampton on Tuesday morning. A memorial service will be planned for December and a full obituary will appear in a future issue.

Clarifications

    Last week’s obituary for George Mason mistakenly called him Mr. King in two instances. In addition, it gave the wrong name for the Triune Baptist Church, with which the Rev. Henry Faison Jr. is affiliated.