Over the past few years, images of the Rubashkin family have been freeze-framed in our consciousness: The meat plant. The raid. The living room. The courtroom scenes. The rallies…These scenes have been seared on our collective memory. The Rubashkins, though, have chosen to move forward. They’ve relocated and recalculated, adjusting the rhythm and routine of daily life to meet new challenges.
In my home we have a handsome vinyl-bound blue book of classic children’s tales pilfered by my wife from her parents’ bookshelf. Hidden in this treasury of life lessons is the Aesop fable The Country Mouse and the City Mouse.
In the story a haughty city mouse goes to visit a relative in the country where the host mouse offers him a typical country meal. The proud city mouse scoffs at the simple offering and invites the host back to the big city to sample some of life’s finer things. But the meal isn’t meant to be: the mice’s taste of high society is interrupted by a pack of dogs.
“Country Mouse” has become an idiom and the phrase plays in my mind as head off to my meeting with the Rubashkin brothers Getzel and Meir Simcha. It’s our second meeting: last time was nearly two years ago under a cloudless Iowa sky standing in grass that reached my knees.
This time we meet on Crown Heights’ Kingston Avenue heading up creaky stairs to a small office on top of a sushi shop a conveyor belt of human activity noise and equipment all around us. If you’re not a native of the neighborhood you can feel somewhat claustrophobic from the very Brooklyn-ness of it.
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