September 29, 1991

IN the 1970's, while doing research for her doctoral dissertation, Gertrude W. Dubrovsky found that little had been written about the experiences of Jewish immigrants in rural America. The daughter of a Jewish poultry farmer in Farmingdale, Ms. Dubrovsky said, "I really felt an obligation to talk about it, to do work on it." And work on it she has. In "The Land Was Theirs," to be published early next year by the University of Alabama Press, Ms. Dubrovsky writes about the 50-year history of the Jewish farming community in Farmingdale, from its European antecedents to its demise about 1970.

Although it is not unusual for people trying to sell their apartments to hold open houses, Manhattan buyers rarely have the chance to move casually from one apartment to the next, seeing several properties in a one afternoon the way they might in the suburbs. But a brokerage on the Upper East Side, Carnegie Hill Properties, says it will offer just such an opportunity next Sunday. The firm said at least 24 apartments from its listings in Carnegie Hill -- the prosperous, tree-lined neighborhood bounded by Fifth Avenue, Lexington Avenue, 86th Street and 96th Street -- will be open for inspection from 1 to 4 P.M. Brokers will be the hosts at each open house and will provide floor plans. Asking prices for the apartments will range from $150,000 to $1 million, and visitors can come and go as they choose.

Once a land of opportunity for golf-course-community developers, Palm Beach County appears to be approaching the saturation point for these big, upscale developments. A result is a shift in land-sales strategy by the county's largest seller of undeveloped land, the nonprofit John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The foundation, based in Chicago, owns 43,000 acres in Palm Beach County and nearby, much of it between Interstate 95 and the Atlantic coast, which developers consider choice.

Craig (Ironhead) Heyward has discarded others' obsession with his losing weight, along with his use of water pills and other unorthodox methods to achieve that goal. He has decided to ignore the notion that a man of his robust size -- 5 feet 11 inches and somewhere near 285 pounds -- cannot be a productive star running back in the National Football League. Instead, Heyward is concentrating on a fresh opportunity with the New Orleans Saints to become a featured back.

SOMETHING called free-market capitalism has been declared the winner by a knockout in the former Iron Curtain countries, fanning hopes of prosperity for millions of people who have labored in vain, when they labored at all, under the centralized paralysis of Communism. But there is no such thing as a free lunch -- Capitalist Lesson No. 1 -- and many countries are learning that "the free market" is in large measure shorthand for transitions involving cultural dislocation, unemployment, production problems and economic and political confusion. This is true in Poland, in the vanguard of Eastern Europe's transition to capitalism, where the unemployment rate today is above 10 percent, and in Argentina and Mexico, where in the shadow of capitalism's victory, politicians are preaching free markets in place of the state capitalism that was once the popular solution to Latin America's chronic hard times.