In her debut book, Jen Rubin writes about the sign that her father hung in their family’s New York City electronics store after vandals ransacked it during the infamous blackout of 1977: “The glass was broken on the street side window, but the Broadway window was intact. He took a blank white poster used for promotions and with a thick black felt marker wrote ‘WE ARE STAYING’ and taped it to the window.”
Her father’s message was poignant, and pointed. So it’s fitting that Rubin chose to call the book We Are Staying: Eighty Years in the Life of a Family, a Store, and a Neighborhood.
We Are Staying, as its subtitle implies, tells three stories.
First, it tells her family’s story. Rubin writes about her grandfather, Leon, who fled religious persecution in Russia in the 1930s and opened a radio repair shop on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, at 98th and Broadway. “He called the store Radio Clinic,” Rubin says, “and he would put on this white doctor’s coat and sit in the window and fix up the broken radios that people brought in.” She also writes about her father, Alan, who became a pillar of his community through his work at the store — mentoring his employees, helping out his neighbors, sponsoring local sports teams and charities — until rising rents forced him to close the business in 2006, at age 74.
And of course she writes about herself too: how she looked forward to spending summer afternoons at Radio Clinic, and how her upbringing shaped her understanding of the American Dream and made her a lifelong community activist.
Second, it tells the story of Radio Clinic itself. The storefront it once occupied is vacant now, but for 80 years it was a hive of activity. When Leon opened the store in 1934, there weren’t any Walmart Supercenters or shopping malls in the city — everyone shopped local, and small businesses flourished. “There were 40 small businesses, on average, on every block in the city,” Rubin says. “It was a different time.”
And third, it tells the story of urban decay and renewal, the ebb and flow of wealth into and out of cities all over the country.
Rubin, who moved to Madison more than 20 years ago, is an award-winning storyteller who has competed in national Moth slams and who helped found the local chapter of the popular storytelling group. She says that the book’s themes are as relevant here as they are in New York. “We all want a say in our communities. No one wants to live somewhere where the businesses have been hollowed out and they have to drive five miles to get to the nearest big-box store,” she says. Madison, like Manhattan, she adds, has undergone a transformation of its own. “Look at State Street. It’s definitely changed in the last 20 years.”
Rubin misses the days when Madison was full of mom-and-pop speciality stores, in much the same way she misses watching her dad crack jokes with customers at Radio Clinic. She says that, in the act of writing We Are Staying, she was able to get past the painful demise of the store to remember what made the family business special: “I sort of forgot the wonderful part, when my dad was well-loved throughout the neighborhood, and how much I was impacted by my dad’s community-minded approach to running a business.”
On Sept. 28, Rubin will host a launch party for We Are Staying at the Arts + Literature Laboratory. On Oct. 2, she’ll appear at Mystery to Me. She’s also made curated pop playlists for the book, which can be downloaded on her website rubinjen.com.
