Yes, I would like to receive periodic updates and information via e-mail from Commentary.

Recipient Addresses:

Separate each address with a comma.

Your E-mail Address: Message:

The Rubins, Ben and Lois, were our neighbors on Washtenaw Avenue in West Rogers Park. We lived on the same floor in a yellow-brick six-flat on a street made dark by elm trees whose branches met in the center of the road and cut off most of the light even on sunny days, which in the Chicago of that time—the middle 1970’s—for some reason did not seem plentiful. The Rubins, who were about fifteen years older than my wife and I, were transplanted New Yorkers. Ben was a social worker in the city’s welfare department. Lois, who occasionally published poetry in magazines with more contributors than subscribers, stayed home to raise Marney, a child they had had in their early forties and who was now an adolescent. The Rubins cared only for culture and for Marney, for whom they held out very high expectations.

Ben was short, stocky, with a fair complexion, thick sandy-colored hair, and an impressively low hairline. Having lost my own hair in my twenties, I notice such things. He never left for work without a book under his arm, usually a novel; his taste tended toward writers of the realistic school, Balzac and Zola, Dreiser and Gissing. I notice this kind of thing, too, since I’m a high-school English teacher, in those days still working on a Ph.D. dissertation that, what with one thing and another, never got written.

---

© 2008 Commentary Inc.