Three Generations of Dysfunction Make for Good Reading

STAMFORD, Conn. - Nov. 29, 2013 - PRLog -- They arrived in America with a Polish name they were told was unpronounceable and a sure handicap for their school aged son. So they went to court and changed it to the solid American name of “Arnold,” like the equally solid actor in late night TV movies. So it was that nine-year-old Ben Korzanchowicz started boarding school with a little English, a rudimentary understanding of baseball, thick glasses, and the solidly American name of “Benedict Arnold.”

Things did not go well for Ben in boarding school, where he was considered a “nerd,” before the term took on any redeeming values, and continued so through his young adulthood when he became a dysfunctional private investigator, hopelessly smitten by an attractive assistant DA named, Johanna, whose reciprocal interest was purely platonic.

Fortunately, however, Ben Arnold is only a fictional character, living on Cape Cod and inside the humorous novels of “Kip” Kippur, a seventy-something resident of Venice, Massachusetts.

Born in pre WWII Germany and Jewish, Kip was actually named “Adolf” by a hero-worshiping father, who thought Hitler would straighten Germany out. Little Adolf’s mother, however, had other ideas and hopped a train for Holland with her son and a suitcase. Arriving in America and consigned to boarding school, Kip found that Fate had her heart set against him, and his life was one of his bread always landing jam side down. That was until he retired from his teaching job, settled in Venice, married the willowy but accident prone sculptress Amanda, and proceeded to write the adventures of Ben Arnold. Fate and Amanda have a way of getting Kip into difficulties, and he is always trying to do the right thing.

But fortunately, Kip is, himself, a fictional character, the creation of Julian Padowicz, a flesh-and-blood resident of Stamford, Connecticut. A WWII refugee from Poland, who grew up hating the name, Julian, because it brought up the image of the pudgy, lumpy nosed, boy he kept seeing in mirrors, and describes himself as never being good at anything except storytelling. “All my life,” he tells, “I have struggled with a mind that could not maintain concentration on anything of importance. In my sixties, after years of frustration, it was diagnosed as Attention Deficit Disorder. There may also be a touch of autism involved.”

His years of misery in elementary-grades boarding school, imprudent first marriage, and frustrating professional life parallel those of his hero, Kip. While Kip spent most of his life teaching English in a small Midwestern college, where he was never fully accepted by his fellow faculty members and where his wife ran off with the assistant football coach, Padowicz spent a similar period of time as a documentary filmmaker. “I was a good filmmaker, but a terrible businessman,” he says, “and lost money on almost everything I did.” Awards for films he wrote, directed, shot, and produced hang on the walls of his home to attest to the first part of his statement.

“It wasn’t till I married Donna in 1987, retired from filmmaking, and sat down to write books, that I got any sense of competency in life,” he says. His first published book, a memoir of his and his mother’s dramatic escape over the Carpathian Mountains from occupied Poland in 1940 entitled, “Mother and Me: Escape from Warsaw 1939” was published in 2006 and named “Book of the Year” by a panel of two hundred librarians for “ForeWord Magazine.” Two sequels, chronicling mother and son’s odyssey to America were published as well, before Padowicz turned to fiction to write about those parts of his life that might embarrass certain people if presented as memoir. “I tend to see the humorous side of situations, and many people don’t like to be written about that way,” he says.

His mother, for example, a woman of great beauty, creativity, and courage, had little in the way of mothering instincts, making young Julian’s life difficult and, in hindsight, very funny to him. In later life she developed clear signs of bipolar disorder, making bizarre demands on her son and daughter-in-law. Some of this behavior is inspiration for several of the characters that people Kip and Amanda’s world.

A just-divorced and bewildered business acquaintance whom Padowicz sheltered in his home some years ago, has been transformed into a long lost boarding school roommate showing up on their doorstep, in need of help, in the novel, “Alexander’s Part-time Band.”

Kip’s first frustrating and aborted effort at writing The Great American Novel in “Writer’s Block,” parallels Padowicz’s own experience, when, in his twenties, he set out on his first attempt at novel writing on Cape Cod. In “The Best Sunset in Venice,” Kip discovers that his lovely sculptress bride, Amanda, is not just accident prone, but creatively so, when she eats something in Barcelona that swells her face to the point that she no longer resembles her passport photo and they can’t leave Spain, or when her “late,” abusive husband shows up quite alive on their doorstep, sending Kip searching for his gun and making Amanda a bigamist. Who in his past life inspired this, last complication, Padowicz will not say, but insists that it has its roots in reality.

At 81, Padowicz is still writing Kip-and-Amanda novels and living in a hundred-year-old house in Stamford, Conn. with his wife Donna and a cat named “Laptop.” The three published novels and three memoirs are all available on Amazon. Two more are awaiting publication, and one is just getting started. In the soon-to-be-published “A Menace in Venice” Kip’s estranged first wife comes back into his life to make up for the way she mistreated him and creates havoc.

In an effort to stave off old age, the octogenarian Padowicz runs and walks along Stamford’s Hope Street two times a week with a pocket full of fliers promoting his books. Any walker responding to a friendly greeting, any motorist stopped at a stop sign, or any homeowner gardening too close to the road is in danger of receiving a flier. “Sometimes,” Padowicz says, “I meet someone to whom I’ve already given a flier and he or she has gone and read one of my books. That’s a wonderfully moving experience.” Then, he goes on to say, passing motorists may be treated to the sight of two people in running shorts, hugging beside the road.