robert rubenstein

I'm going to throw this out to my audience knowing this is only the beginning of the last narrative in my GHOST RUNNERS series. Let me know if you like it, or just let it be.  It's going out free from me. Now, if a publisher or agent wants to make whoppee with me, that's another story.  But first draft promise is to my audience here."Each must journey for himself to the country whose margin lies just beyond the bounds of our everyday life, and yet is as strange and as vast as the sea."[1] CHAPTER 1  Dearest Ruby:      He calls it a diagnosis but how can I trust the physician who hears a cash register as he puts the stethoscope to my heart? It is funny, though, how the worn down infrastructure can bring the whole building down. Time will pass, and we are but a breath, the last gasp of a dying wave upon an endless shore. So just in case, I take the coward's way out, by writing, cause I'm still not able to talk to you about this directly. You see, I am ashamed.The story involves secrets I kept from you. Loyalties even misguided honor. It is about a blood oath of confidences, too scared to tell, too much grief to carry. Or worse. I thought: boys would go out with you just to tell their friends they made it with that girl. They would think of you as having the blood of a...

While swimming or walking Caesarian on the shores off Coney Island, I am reminded that less than a year ago, my precious ocean overturned, and we were greeted by the fish and the mud, and the debris of other shores. When my beautiful granddaughter, Aria, was born and my second son married this past August, I thought about completeness. I thought GHOST RUNNERS and THE WHITE BRIDGE were also my legacy. When I collaborated with Anya Z to produce the cover for THE WHITE BRIDGE, I was elated. GHOST RUNNERS is a novel about the suppression of the American Dream. My dream was to TELL this story, to shout it from the highest rafters. The story took me 27 years to write. THE WHITE BRIDGE taught me never to be silent in the face of tyranny. THE WHITE BRIDGE is nothing unless it has the widest berth to transcend the scourge of fascism.Two years ago, I was approached by audible.com, which was keenly interested in giving voice to GHOST RUNNERS, my first novel already housed in The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Library in Washington, D.C. But it did not happen. Recently, audibly expressed interest in obtaining both my novels. Many other novels are being given that opportunity. But not mine. Aria cannot hear 'pop-pop's' voice, and I ask, why not? She is, after all, the sweetest of the arias. I was informed, by the 60%ers, "Permission denied."  So the irony of the plight of Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller comes...

Hurricane Sandy was the storm that changed the beach. I remember sitting under the boardwalk. How it took a long time to reach the shore. Today at Coney Island, the sea has wiped the distance away. There is no more shore line. In a few more hurricanes, there will be no beach. Maybe no people. New York is going under the water from which it came. Haron and I, strangers, sat on a log until the sea came to our feet. He is from Trinidad and, like me, sees the signs. "The sea is angry," he said. But I disagreed, somewhat. "The sea only takes orders," I said. From the tides, from the winds, from a master magician who likes to change our lives at its whim. This was a pick and choose event. In one house, in Woodmere, there was not a closet stirred. Next door, the house with a level garage had two cars flooded and his house stinking of, and inhabited by, ocean fish. Haaron is going back to Trinidad. He has lost his job in the produce department of Key Food. There is no produce department anymore. There is no Key Food. We agreed it was all over, over here, but the shouting. Like war in the trenches, dugouts were drawn across the sand, and the boardwalk at Coney Island flip-flopped as the sea erupted and the sand and mud, like brothers joined siameasily, rose in defiance of the customs and turned our blessed walk path...

I live on the fourth floor of an overpriced pre-war building one block from the Atlantic Ocean. I love the sea. On Saturday, as I had done almost every day for the past three months, I went into the ocean at Brighton Beach. The temperature was sixty-three degrees inside and outside on the shore. I gazed with love at my ocean. I feel it even healed the stenosis I had had for the past three months, soothing ng my back with its steady wet loving. If you go with the current, you can learn so much about life. The healing balms massaged my spirit. My soul swam in horizontal delight to the tranquil shore. At sixty-something, I often thought of that 'long slow swim to China.' It does seem like an honorable way to go (better than a bullet or a messy jump off the Verrazano) attached to my trusty goggles while drifting ever southwestward into the welcoming madonna of the sea. One must have an exit strategy, no? But I never thought the sea was not going to give the likes of me any choice after all. It suddenly had come to my safe building past the sandbags and the boardwalk, up the embankment with howling, tempest winds and a flash of lightning, like death; then silence and the flashing emergency light of trapped drivers in autos, and one lady now swimming in the river of water and muck that had suddenly become our street, crying, "Help." We had...

The Olympics begins in a few weeks amid the pageantry of spectacle that will have many of us glued to our television set. London seems to be a wonderful place to hold this event. For Jews, though, the Olympics are a place in which bad things have happened. We cannot celebrate fully; Munich and the death of Israeli athletes must be with us like shattered glass. But there was even a greater terror, if terror has a yardstick to be measured by. That happened seventy-five years ago, and now begs to be remembered by us all. Again, it was Germany; then Berlin, and the year was 1936, in the time known as the Holocaust years. A little event, in the course of bigger events, this small act of race prejudice may have done more to raise the specter of a "legitimate" Nazi world presence than any other.Though a few Jews did participate, the United States of America did not field a single Jew though two were qualified, ready and able to compete. Come with me to the spanking, clean facades and boulevards, the smell of cherry blossoms. The lindens, bountiful and wide avenues where white clad officers and S.S. men greeted the 54 nations as guests of the New Nazi regime. Josef Goebbels has begun an amazing propaganda feat. The Olympic Torch run was a Nazi idea. On August 1st, the last Nazi stood on Marathon Gate in the Olympiastaadt, his body moving about the flame like a swastika. Hitler...