This is a longer version of the obit we posted for our dad on the NYT site and in the Addison Independent, his local newspaper in Middlebury Vermont.
Murray Jack Stern, passed away in his sleep at Eastview Retirement Home in Middlebury Vermont on Sunday, April 11th, 2021. He was 98 years old. Born on Manhattan’s Lower East Side on January 5th 1923, he was the third child of Ben and Dora Stern (nee Greenberg), immigrants from the Carpathian mountains of Czechoslovakia and Hungary respectively. They gave him the Hebrew name Moishe Jacob, which they later Anglicized. Along with his older sisters Gertrude and Beatrice and younger brother Arthur, the family moved to the South Bronx near the Grand Concourse. The Sterns struggled to make ends meet, and Murray had to work at the family business delivering laundry throughout his school days, but his keen intelligence impressed his teachers and he was recruited to attend Stuyvesent High School. As news of the Nazi atrocities in Europe spread through New York’s Jewish community, Murray volunteered for the US Airforce at age eighteen, hoping to become a fighter pilot.
He washed out of his final pilot’s test due to air sickness, and was assigned to work in the Air Force’s Psychiatric Department administering personality tests to cadets. A charismatic young man with a gift for comedy, he joined a troupe of Armed Forces performers and toured U.S. military bases entertaining troops with his impressions of FDR and Winston Churchill for the duration of World War Two.
Later Murray would speak of hearing the news of the atom bomb exploding over Hiroshima. He and his fellow airmen in the commissary erupted in cheers. Only later that evening did he reflect that they had been celebrating the mass murder of civilians. It chilled him to his core and nudged him towards a more pacifistic stance.
When the war was over Murray was discharged in San Pedro, California and briefly tried his luck as an actor in Hollywood, where he shot screen tests but felt out of place and returned to New York where he attended New York University on the GI Bill. There he became fascinated with the works of Freud and Jung and the burgeoning field of American Psychoanalysis. He went on to graduate school at NYU, and while earning his PhD in Psychology, he met and fell in love with Adele Truitt, a California transplant and gentile who was studying for her Masters Degree in Social Work at Columbia University. They moved into an apartment on Jane Street in Greenwich Village and then married, which upset Murray’s traditional Jewish parents. They did not attend the wedding, although younger brother Arthur did.
Murray had lost his religious faith at this point and considered himself an atheist. He said he couldn’t help but analyze God as a guy with an unhealthy need to be constantly praised lest he wreak havoc.
After completing their professional degrees, the young couple moved to Elmsford in Westchester County, where they had three children, Karen, Melissa and Matthew. In 1959 the family moved a bit north to Pleasantville N.Y., where they had a fourth child - Thomas.
Murray trained in clinical Psychoanalysis at the William Alanson White Institute in New York City, where he gravitated to the ideas of the Institute’s co-founder Erich Fromm. He worked as a Psychoanalyst at the VA Hospital in Montrose N.Y. and then started his own practice on 86th Street and Park Avenue in Manhattan.
An independent thinker with an iconoclastic nature, Murray was increasingly influenced by Bertrand Russel’s Analytical Philosophy, and grew skeptical of the theories of Freud and Jung, finding them to be more literature than science, and of poor efficacy in clinical applications. He published an article in the White Institute’s yearly journal Review entitled “On The Obscuration of Technical Language” which critiqued the consensus of mid century Psychoanaylsis, and wrote this statement that summed up his change of approach:
Among his clients were many luminaries of the arts, including Broadway legends Hal Prince and Twyla Tharp, who wrote glowingly of Murray in her memoir. (I mention these names only in this Medium version, not in the newspapers, and only because Mr Prince passed away some years ago and Ms Tharp wrote about it publicly. As a comic book fan I’m also proud that my dad treated the legendary Wally Wood, who died in 1981)
Murray was dedicated to social justice, and was active in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements. He was proud to march with Martin Luther King and attend his historic “I Have A Dream” speech in Washington D.C. A life-long outspoken liberal, he instinctively sided with the underdog, which is why, despite growing up blocks from Yankee Stadium, he hated the Yankees. He was a Giants fan, and when they left for San Francisco he found his ultimate team — the hapless Mets. When he moved to Vermont he became a grudging Red Sox fan, but they won a little too much for his taste.
Murray enjoyed acting in community theater (as part of the Pleasantville Players), tennis, skiiing, and horseback riding — he owned a horse named High Hat which he kept at the stable on the Rockefeller Estate at Pocantico Hills. He also kind of liked vacuuming.
In 1994 he lost his beloved wife Adele to breast cancer. A year later, on an elder hostel bicycle tour in The Netherlands, he met group leader Anneke Oranje of Amsterdam, who would become his second wife. Murray and Anneke lived in Pleasantville until 2011, when they moved to Middlebury Vermont to be near Murray’s daughter Melissa Stern Lourie, an actress and theater producer/director who co-founded the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival.
Murray is fondly remembered as a warm hearted intellectual and great listener who loved ideas, conversation, and most of all his family and many friends. He is preceded in death by siblings Gertrude Schwartz, Beatrice Trager, Arthur Stern and daughter Karen Stern. He is survived by his beloved wife Anneke Oranje, daughter Melissa and sons Matthew Truitt Stern of Waterbury Vermont and Thomas Jason Stern of Los Angeles, his four grandchildren Suzanna and Walker Lourie, and Tuesday Amelia and Murray Patrick Stern, as well as nephew Alan Trager, nieces Lois Trager Michaud, Marilyn Hoffman, Phyliss Schwartz, Stephanie Stern Girling and Michelle Stern Bachman. His ashes will be buried at Middlebury Cemetery, and marked with a US Armed Forces headstone. A joint memorial service for Murray and his recently deceased brother Arthur is planned for September 2021 in Greenwich Connecticut, where Arthur’s headstone will be revealed.
