A lifetime of poetry, a novel achievement

Gray day,

somber, desolate, dreary

Gray day

Then with a mad leap

Rain

It darkens down the sky

stumbles on green earth ...

So begins Ruth Brin's first published work, a poem published in the 1930s in a posh Minneapolis magazine called "The Golfer and Sportsman." She was Ruth Firestone then, and she was 13 years old.

It was the beginning of a very public love affair with words.

Brin is best known for her poems, one of which recently appeared in a new anthology of poems by Minnesota women from frontier times to the present. Her poetry has been included in Jewish prayer books, and she's written 13 books, including a memoir and children's books.

But she had never published a novel, until now -- at the age of 86.

"The Most Beautiful Monday in 1961" is a tale of six Twin Citians who take a boat ride down the Mississippi River on a stormy July day. Along the way the characters -- two women who love the same man, a rabbi and two businessmen who are sparring over a shopping center -- reveal themselves to Charlotte, a widow and psychiatrist who lost her husband in the Holocaust.

"It's a story about the World War II generation and who we were in our prime," Brin said this week. "It's a thrill for me to get it published. It took a lot of effort to finish it, and it took a lot of effort to find a publisher."

On the shelf for decades

A draft of the novel had been gathering dust since the late 1960s, the sole survivor of a trio of novels she attempted to write. An agent shopped it around then, but publishers weren't interested in a book that included the Holocaust even as a small part of the story. "I put it away," she said. "What are you going to do?"

Thirty years later, one of her sons, an editor in California, asked to see the manuscript. He told her she needed a good editor, but he thought it deserved to be published. For a couple of years she worked on tightening language and rewriting the book. She found a publisher in Lerner Publishing of Minneapolis, which had printed some of her children's books.

Brin was delighted. "It's just something I always wanted to do," she said.

A writer and a scholar

She is a tiny woman, bent with age and using a walker after a health setback. But her voice is strong and her mind sharp. Her husband, Howard, died in 1988, and she lives in a high-rise apartment in a senior complex in Minneapolis' Kenwood neighborhood.

End tables and a coffee table held new novels and books of poetry, and a copy of the Economist sat on the seat of the wheelchair she has been using.

Brin grew up in St. Paul. Her father was a lawyer, her mother a graduate of Vassar College. In 1929, Ruth and her mother visited relatives in Germany. Some members of that extended European family were caught up in the Holocaust, and some died.

Ruth earned an undergraduate degree from Vassar, and later a master's degree in American studies at the University of Minnesota.

She married just a few months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. While Howard served in the Army, Ruth worked for the War Production Board in Washington D.C. as one of a group of pioneering women working in personnel. "The [male] bosses were dubious we could do it," she said. But they did.

When the war ended, the Brins returned to the Twin Cities and Howard took over his father's business, Brin Glass Co. of north Minneapolis. Ruth bore four children, and while she was at home with the kids, she began to work hard on her poetry. It was a mostly solitary activity, with few of the writer's support groups that exist now. The power of words kept her going.

"I love writing and always have since I was a child," she said. "My mother encouraged me."

Later she was an adjunct faculty member at Macalester College and at the University of Minnesota, teaching classes on immigrant literature, American Jewish writers and Judaism. She also wrote book reviews for the Star Tribune.

Questions in faith, in fiction

Brin's faith is central to her life, but she is not rigid in her beliefs.

"I'm not consistent," she said. "I'm not a theologian, I'm not a philosopher. But it's always important. I've always been involved and searching and interested."

Interestingly, at the end of her novel, the rabbi questions his faith.

"I think it is a true thing that happens to rabbis," Brin said. "People don't want to believe it, but it happens. It happens to Christian ministers, too. I've had a couple indicate that to me."

Her characters are imperfect, people whom she hopes her readers will find real. They are not based on herself or on people she knows or knew, she said. But the book reflects a lifetime spent in the Twin Cities. A poor Jewish family struggles in north Minneapolis, businessmen talk of developing an enclosed shopping center, characters talk about how much they love the river and the land around it.

One of the funniest moments in the book is when someone tells the story of an immigrant shoe salesman who can't speak much English. He keeps his customers in the store by taking one of their shoes with him when he goes into the back room so they can't leave while he's helping them.

That's a real story someone told Brin long ago.

"You live and you hear stories," she said. "There is some advantage to being old."

Mary Jane Smetanka • 612-673-7380

Mary Jane Smetanka • smetan@startribune.com