Gatekeepers

A young Ohio architect, Nathan Goldstein, testifies at a 1979 Congressional subcommittee hearing about his experiences with the national examination required to obtain his license to practice his profession. A retired professor of English, Walter Rubin, visits Ellis Island searching for meaning in his memories of his arrival there in the 1930's. In 2005, their stories come together in GATEKEEPERS, a tale of academic and professional intrigue whose parallels in the larger world echo in both their lives and in the events of their times. Rubin inherits the diaries of his late friend and neighbor, Harry Rosenberg, and finds himself fascinated by hints of a conspiracy dating back some thirty years to Harry’s career at Ohio State’s School of Architecture, where one of Harry’s most promising students, Nathan Goldstein, had launched a study that his profession had seen as a threat to its most integral marketing practices and political influence. Forced to stop his work, Nathan began to encounter one inexplicable failure after another on licensing examinations, at appeals to state agencies, even in his relations with his major advisor. More from necessity than choice, Nathan becomes a champion for a cause soon seen as of national interest and concern. Rubin, whose own background includes acquaintance with more than one form of violence, learns how important it is to distinguish justice from revenge. GATEKEEPERS, a collaborative novel, alternates the stories of Nathan Goldstein and Walter Rubin told through the eyes, emotions, and recollections of the architect and the professor. Intended to inform and provoke as well as to entertain, the story of Nathan’s persistence in his quest for entrance to his chosen profession will appeal especially to those readers still scarred by their experiences with standardized, machine-scored, multiple-choice examinations–on which so much and so many of our lives depend.