July 1, 2014

Judith & Paul Tobolowsky

Paul Tobolowsky was born in Dallas in 1947 into a sprawling family that put down deep roots in North Texas. He recounts that his grandfather left Poland as a teenager, fleeing pogroms in the late 1800s, to join a brother in North Texas, and from those beginnings the family spread across many small towns and into Dallas. His grandfather peddled household goods from a horse-drawn cart along a route through what is now North Dallas, staying with Jewish families for the Sabbath. Paul's father, Dave Tobolowsky, born in 1922, was a pediatrician who built his practice in Oak Cliff and chose to remain there even as much of the Dallas Jewish community moved north. As a result, Paul grew up as the only Jewish student in his Kimball High School class, graduating in 1965. His brother Stephen became an actor and author, and his sister a university professor.

Judith grew up in a very different setting, born in Brooklyn to parents from the Lower East Side and raised on Long Island in a largely Jewish community. She studied speech pathology and earned a graduate degree at Boston University, then worked in the Wellesley Public Schools, a job she loved. Paul, meanwhile, graduated from Southwestern Medical School in 1973, where he was class president and graduation speaker, and completed an internship at Boston City Hospital. The two met when Judith attended a party thrown by one of Paul's fellow interns. They married and moved to Dallas in 1979. They settled in North Dallas and raised three children, daughter Deborah born in 1982 and twin sons born in 1985, with the loving help of Paul's parents, June and Dave.

In Dallas, Paul built a career as an internist, choosing internal medicine over emergency work because he valued lasting relationships with patients. As the practice of medicine became more corporatized and time-limited, he chose to retire and pursue a long-held dream of writing about the wonder of ordinary life, publishing a book titled Stardust Dancing. Judith returned to speech pathology part time after years focused on family, and remains a skilled pianist who once accompanied the National Council of Jewish Women singers. The couple connected to the community through the Jewish Community Center, where Paul played basketball and tennis and made many friends and patients, while their children attended preschool there and Sunday school at Temple Emanu-El. Their two sons became lawyers in the Washington, D.C. area and another son a doctoral student in religious studies. They speak of their marriage as one where each is the other part of a shared self.

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