By Donald H. Harrison 

Dr. Howard Rubenstein—who modestly insists that his friends call him "Howie"—is a retired physician who loves a literary challenge.  The San Diego resident takes on projects that many of us would expect only a scholar who had been locked up in a university library somewhere would dare attempt.  How many medical doctors do you know who can translate Aeschylus' Agamemnon or Euripides The Trojan Women from the ancient Greek language?   

The last opportunity I had to to write about Rubenstein on this website was just about a year ago when I reviewed his Maccabee, an Epic in Free Verse. His easy-to-read style made the account of the Hasmonean Wars against the Syrian-Greeks an enjoyable learning experience.  

More recently, Rubenstein has completed a new play titled Brothers All, which updates and extrapolates from Fyodor Dostoevski's  The Brothers Karamazov.  The play will have its world premiere February 19 and continue through March 15 at the 6th @ Penn Theatre in the Hillcrest area of San Diego.

The action is removed from Czarist Russia and put into a modern English-speaking setting.  Rubenstein eliminates the narrator utilized by Dostoevski and has the story unfold through the dialogue of the ten-member cast.  The family's Russian names have been anglicized: The father, Fyodor Karamazov, is Karleton; the four brothers—Dmitri, Ivan, Alexey, and the illegitimate Smerdyakov—respectively have become Douglas, Ian, Alex and Melvin.

One of the themes that attracted Rubenstein to the Books of Maccabees was the ancient Hebrews' fight against intolerance. In his poem, he had Mattathias, father of Judah Maccabee, offer this advice to his sons:

The evil man says,
There is only one way,
and I have it!
There is only one truth,
and I know it!' ...

In Brothers All, Rubenstein returns to this theme, while also addressing such issues as abuse of children by their parents.  Heavy subjects, true, but the playwright says there are many humorous moments as well in his new work.

Ian, the intellectual brother in the updated version of Dostoevski's tale, considers which evils in the world should be eradicated. He concludes:  "Actually there is no need to destroy anything except a man's belief that he alone has certainty—the true religion.  We must begin all reasonable destruction with that, otherwise one day it will destroy us all.  Once people learn to live with doubt, they will unite as brothers and they will share in universal joy and happiness." 

The same character also is the vehicle for Rubenstein's retelling of Dostoevski's famous story within The Brothers Karamazov, in which the Grand Inquisitor suspects that a stranger who unexpectedly appears in Seville in actuality is Jesus, returned to earth. The Grand Inquisitor orders him put to death, lest he interfere with the Church's work.  In our interview, Rubenstein makes the point that the Grand Inquisitor, in Spain, was the chief persecutor of Jews.

"One of the major ideas of the play, and this was Dostoevski's idea too, is that when religion claims that it has certainty and it is the one true religion, it inflicts immeasurable misery upon humanity," Rubenstein told me.  "It is the same today: fundamentalism will destroy us all.  The fundamentalist Christians think that they have the absolute truth, the fundamentalist Muslims think that they have the truth—and they are willing to kill people for the sake of this truth.  This is, in my opinion, one of the greatest evils facing the world today."

Rubenstein didn't mention our own fundamentalist Jews, but I'm sure his concerns apply equally to the kind of Jew who would shoot Yitzhak Rabin because he disagreed with the Oslo process, or pray for Ariel Sharon's death because of the withdrawal from Gaza.

In the original Brothers Karamazov, published in 1880, the father was abusive of his children. Rubenstein believes that Dostoevski was way ahead of his time in discussing this phenomenon. "Dostoevski and (Charles) Dickens to my knowledge were the first people to deal with this issue," Rubenstein said. 

"Even in medicine that kind of child abuse—verbal and physical, I am not speaking about sexual child abuse—was not recognized until the mid-1960s," Rubenstein said.  

"The first article appeared a number of years after I was an intern, 1957-1958, when I was doing my pediatric rotation. There was a child lying in a crib with bruises over its body, holding a bottle of milk—the milk was sour.  Both parents were there, and they said they had no idea how the child got his bruises or that he was drinking sour milk. I told my chief resident that these parents had abused this child, that the evidence was undeniable, and my resident said to me, 'You are mentally ill, you are disturbed; parents don't do that to their children, and if you say another word, we will have you brought before the hospital's ethics committee.'  So that is how recently we recognized this as a problem."

How all this comes together, in two acts, over a period of between 2 and 2 1/2 hours in a new play that also offers humor and romance, will be, to say the least, quite intriguing to see.   Ticket information is available at the website, www.6thatpenn.com or by phoning, (619) 688-9210.