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but they are neither precisely primitive nor derivative. Ted isn’t interested in trying to appeal to academic, formal, or even folk-art styles. The work, like the artist, is self-reliant and self-contained. “Ted’s work is almost antimodern,” art dealer Anton said during a conversation in his New York gallery. “He’s not making any attempt at arriving at abstraction, though the work has abstract qualities. Some of the faces are like [Alberto] Giacometti’s.” Anton lifted one of the artist’s small heads from a shelf. A band of milky quartz accentuated the roundness of a cheek. “There’s a subtlety of expression in his pieces that he gets by using the features native to the stone. In a way, they’re closest to Native American sculpture in that what he’s trying to do is bring out the spirit in the stone.” For others, they evoke ancient Eastern or Buddhist works of stone.

For all the interest in buying pieces, Ted has held his work closely. He doesn’t want to haggle over prices and has gladly given over the worry of sales to Anton, who said, “He’s financially free of the need to sell for money, but he’s still carving. That’s a really pure place to be.”

In the weeks that followed my introduction to Ted and his work, I found myself trying to sleuth out what had tapped the psychological spring from which his work had suddenly poured after he turned sixty. The first time we talked, he made almost no mention of World War II, and he said almost nothing about his experiences as an adolescent in Otwock. He made only one reference that gave any clue, but it continued to reverberate. When asked about his religion, he had said, “There are so many gods. Besides, after the Holocaust, how could I believe in God?” At the time, he did not care to expand on the comment.

Could the experience of World War II, of seeing his friends and half a town disappear, be at the root of his late blossoming and his compulsive carving of heads? Was he trying unconsciously to reclaim those taken from Otwock? Was he trying to repopulate the world? In the years since World War II, he had scarcely shared his experience under the Nazis, even with his children. His ex-wife Peggy did not recall him ever mentioning it. His friends—including several women artists—say that Ted’s sculpture has the joyful and antic qualities of the artist’s personality and are best seen as an affirmation of life rather than as memorials for those who were lost. Ted himself declined to probe.

“Everyone wants to know what my motivation was. Who knows? There was what happened during the war, but then I traveled. I married. I had to work and I had to take care of a family. I forgot. Maybe it’s coming out now.” Then, speaking of his reluctance to part with his work, he said, “I don’t like to sell them because they are my family.”

While Ted claims to be slowing down, anyone who trails behind him as he climbs the steep riverbank or tries to lift one of the heavy carved stones has good reason to doubt him. Every morning he takes a two-hour walk with his neighbor Norman Alpert, a sixty-three-year-old retired New York City social-studies teacher. They hike through the woods along the river to Rockland Landing and back, three and a half miles each way. Alpert, at six feet, three inches, towers over Ted. They share a love of the way the river is forever changing and an almost transcendental point of view. “Even though I’m Jewish and he’s Catholic, we think alike. Sometimes we joke that when we die, we’ll come before God and He’ll say, ‘You were those guys who thought the trees and the river were so beautiful. Come on in!’ ”

Ted Ludwiczak doesn’t get bogged down thinking about his mortality. “My hearing and eyesight and balance are perfect. I don’t feel my age. Maybe it’s my good genes or maybe it’s the spirit of creation. Maybe it’s what I eat. Maybe it’s that I continue to look for things. After all, you never know what you’ll find along the side of the road.”

NANCY GAGLIANO

A Time to Teach

“I have a knack with kids.”

Nancy Gagliano’s second-graders were squirming around, knocking