Robert Wolff

Bob or Bobby Wolff was born April 14, 1927, in the Bronx, and died peacefully in his sleep on March 13, 2025, age 97 (almost 98); he died at home in Rockaway Township, New Jersey, in his home of more than 60 years, living there together with his beloved wife Renee, to whom he was married for more than 70 years.

Bob grew up in the Bronx and attended elementary school at PS 11; at the age of 97 he still remembered, and could sing, the school alma mater song (“With zeal for her honor/ shower blessings upon her”). His parents, Joe and Esther Wolff, were both born in Galicia, as subjects of the Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph, and immigrated to New York after World War I. In the Bronx they struggled to support Bob and his two sisters, Eleanor and Gloria, during the Depression; Joe was an embroiderer, and Esther was a seamstress. Joe particularly identified with the immigrant community of Jews from the town of Tarnów, and Bob followed closely as his father wrestled with the formalities of bringing to America his brothers and sister (Bob’s uncles and aunt) whose lives were endangered by the rise of Hitler in Europe. Bob was also close to his mother’s family and especially his Aunt Florence whom he credited with introducing him to philosophical reading and intellectual discussion. As a boy he loved radio shows (like “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century”) and the Hollywood movies of the 1930s; he rooted for the New York Yankees (and was a particular fan of catcher Bill Dickey); and he was excited to go to the New York World’s Fair of 1939 in Queens. He remembered discovering opera at a World’s Fair puppet performance of Rigoletto. Bob’s childhood political hero was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with strong feelings also for First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

He attended high school at the competitive exam school Townsend Harris on Lexington Avenue and 23rd St. in Manhattan, graduating at the age of 15 (on account of grades skipped), and winning the Latin medal; he had almost completed his BA at City College of New York before being conscripted into the army when he turned 18 in 1945. The war was ending as he did his basic training, and, tested for language aptitude, he was sent to Yale to study Japanese, in preparation for the occupation of Japan, though ultimately he did not go overseas. Coming out of the army he completed an MS in chemical engineering at Columbia, began to work, and, at the same time, to pursue his lifelong passion for classical music at the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, and even Tanglewood during the summer. In the fall of 1952, when he was 25, he went out on a blind date with 18-year-old Renee Stier, also living in the Bronx, and took her to see George Bernard Shaw’s Widower’s Houses in Greenwich Village. They married on June 13, 1954, at the Park Terrace hall in the Bronx, and went on their honeymoon to Cape Cod.

They had three children together (Larry in 1957, David in 1960, and Sharon in 1965), and lived in Queens and briefly in Washington DC before settling in Morris County, New Jersey, where Bob worked as a chemical engineer at Picatinny Arsenal. They bought a split-level house with a big yard in 1962, and were still living there at the time of Bob’s death in 2025. In addition to the three children, Bob was very attached to two dogs in succession (Midnight and Rudy) and a wood turtle named Woody who lived with them for some fifty years and, unusually, had free run of the house and hibernated under the carpet during the winter.

Bob loved opera and all classical music. He subscribed to the Metropolitan Opera beginning in 1950, and kept his subscription until the global pandemic of 2020, always in the Family Circle where he believed the acoustical sound was best. He vividly remembered Ljuba Welitsch’s debut in 1949 as Strauss’s Salome; he heard Lauritz Melchior’s last performance as Wagner’s Siegmund in 1949, Kirsten Flagstad’s farewell as Gluck’s Alceste in 1952, and Toscanini’s Verdi Requiem at Carnegie Hall in 1951. Bob loved sopranos Zinka Milanov, Birgit Nilsson, Leontyne Price and Leonie Rysanek, tenors Richard Tucker, Jon Vickers, and Franco Corelli, baritones Leonard Warren, George London, and Robert Merrill. He and Renee continued to go to the Met from New Jersey for decades, and they introduced their children to opera at very young ages. Bob’s last opera at the Met was Richard Strauss’s Elektra in April 2022, as Bob was turning 95. For more detail on Bob as an operagoer see here: https://hudsonreview.com/2021/02/whats-opera-dad/

Bob and Renee led a Great Books discussion group for some six decades at different public libraries in Morris County New Jersey (finally putting the discussion on Zoom at the moment of the pandemic in 2020), and Bob was a wide-ranging reader who was interested in the classics from Plato, Aristotle, and Sophocles to Ibsen, Chekhov, and Shaw. In his 90s he was particularly interested in reading books, especially biographies, about the historical decades that he himself had lived through in the middle of the twentieth century. He himself was a master of occasional verse, creating elaborate rhyming poems for birthdays and anniversaries, for his whole family, and especially for Renee whom he always adored.

He had a lovely singing voice, carried a tune beautifully, and always remember song lyrics. He especially loved the vocalists who sang with the big bands of the 1930s and 1940s, like Helen Forrest singing “Deep Purple” with Artie Shaw and Helen O’Connell singing “Six Lessons from Madame La Zonga” with Jimmy Dorsey. Bob loved the ocean (body-surfing with the breaking waves), playing bridge (he learned from his parents and taught his children), gin martinis, chocolate pudding, vanilla malted shakes, and ballroom dancing, with Renee of course; they were always the first couple on the floor.

He is survived and deeply missed by Renee, the love of his life; by son Larry (married to Perri Klass), with children Orlando (married to Kathryn Myer), Josephine, and Anatol, plus Orlando’s son Felix; by son David (married to Mie Nakachi), with son Aquila; by daughter Sharon, with her son Xavier, plus Xavier’s daughter Emmalyn.