Fascinations often come upon me from the strangest sources. For instance, two recent obituaries strike me as being peculiarly fascinating. The first is that of Vitaly Rubin, aged fifty-eight, a Soviet scholar. Rubin, a native of Moscow, was the former leader of the Soviet Jewish emigration movement. The intrigue here is that in 1976, Rubin, a Russian, was allowed to emigrate to Israel where he taught Chinese philosophy, of all things, at Hebrew University. The other obituary was David Wadell Guion's, aged eighty-eight. Do you recognize his name? He composed "Home on the Range" and dozens of other Western songs. The fascination with Guion is that he did not live the kind of rugged, outdoor life we would naturally associate with the writer of a ballad such as "Home on the Range." As a matter…