When most of us think about Louis Rubin, we think about the founder and longtime publisher of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. We think about a writer and professor of English at the University of North Carolina.
We rarely think of him as a Southern Jew.
But he is, and his family is the focus of this absorbing memoir about the descendants of Russian immigrants.
Strangely enough, much of it will read along lines familiar to those of us raised in the South with Protestant ancestors from Scotland, Ireland, Wales and England.
Rubin concentrates on the character and personality of family members, not on their Jewishness or ethnic differences from other southerners. Being Jewish is part of their character and personality, but not an over-riding factor in their personal development.
His memoir begins with the arrival of his father and two brothers, ages 7, 8 and 10, at a Jewish orphanage in Atlanta because their father (the author’s grandfather) was suffering such ill health that he could no longer support his family. There were four younger children in the home.
This experience, although they returned home within a few years, appears to have made a permanent mark on the lives of those boys.
Nevertheless, the seven children achieved varying degrees of success in life, the boys with no more than a seventh or eighth grade education. One became a newspaper editor, one a playwright with five Broadway plays to his credit, and one (Rubin’s father) enjoyed a double success — as an early electrical business entrepreneur and later as a self-taught weather expert who published a how-to book for people interested in predicting the weather by reading the clouds.
Curiously, Rubin encountered the same problem that many other people report when it comes to developing family histories. His interest in collecting data came later in life, and family members were not always that open about discussing details of family background.
In the 1980s Rubin reports that only three aunts were still living.
“Now all are gone. Such is the nature of life in time. My own feeling, thinking about them, is one of mingled regret and vexation. Regret because a remarkable group of people have vanished. Vexation because during the years when they might have told me so much more than is known about their early years, parents, their antecedents, I did not have foresight enough to ask them,” he writes.
Even so, Rubin has done a remarkable job of compiling details about the lives of his father and his six siblings. He devotes a separate chapter to the lives of several of those individuals, including his father. Their spouses (only three of the seven married) are also described.
For the early part of their lives, Charleston, S.C. was home to the Rubin family. When they grew up and scattered to other locations, Charleston remained home, the place where they came for vacations and long family visits.
Rubin has done a superb job of recreating the depth of a family bound by love and admiration, strengthened by native intelligence and sense of creativity. Much of this memoir is based on his personal observations of family members, not on their accounts to him.
Although their Jewishness is never left by the wayside, the author pictures his family more as typical southerners of their era, people bound by the traditions and culture of a region but never entirely tied down by provincialism. There are 14 pages of family photographs.
Rubin, who has served as mentor to such authors as Lee Smith, is a member and past chancellor of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He is the author of both fiction and nonfiction. He and his wife, Eva Redfield Rubin, an artist and emeritus professor of political science, have two children and two grandchildren. They live in Chapel Hill.
