Barrie Carp: the light finds fault with mother's white aging skin ... It's an instance of nature troubling mother...Mrs. Sol is the sun....Isaac the prince is the savior (angel of light—this is humiliating)... Alienation: "dutiful beating of one's heart"—"dutiful" (with one all the time) and "rustling of papers"—alienated in public.
Matt Roth: She wore black dresses . . [unlike] Mrs. Sol . . .. she presented a naked white countenance to the fault-finding light of spring days."
The mother's white face above her night-black clothes makes her appear as a moon, esp. in comparison with Mrs. Sol. Like the actual moon (which regularly appears in the daytime sky, but is never imagined that way) she seems out of place in daylight. Her natural setting is darkness.
Piers Smith:Allow me to ruminate on this business of interpretation, briefly. There seems little joy in insisting on literalism, at the expense of dense, even crabbed, hermeneutics. We are all hermeneuts in one or another. One reason Nabokov may have detested Freudian readings is that they were too limiting—at least in the American academy of his time (and, of course, Pnin's and Kinbote's). What was wanted was more, not less, hence signs and symbols (precious echo of sighs and whispers). I thank Anthony Stadlen for the link to Dreschler's excellent piece.

Matthew Roth:"the underground train lost its life current[...]things got mislaid or mixed up so easily."
There is a certain playfulness in all of these details. As readers of a short story, we tend to assign added weight and purpose to each detail. It is easy, for instance, to see the train losing its "life current" as related to the son's suicide attempts. We wouldn't make that connection in real life, but as readers of the story (especially VN's story) we, like the son, (though happily, unlike the son) succumb to a kind of referential mania, as we try to distinguish the design that connects all of the story's disparate elements.

Jansy Mello: Sandy Drescher let me understand that W.Carroll's reading of S&S is metaliterary. As I see it, Barrie Carp emphasizes a more literal aspect of interpreting signs whereas Matt Roth chooses a metaphorical way, but he also distinguishes sharply conclusions extracted from "real life" occurrences and those in fiction.
Piers Smith mentions hermeneutics and, perhaps, invites a more modern Freudian reading.
Such a wealth of, not necessarily mutually exclusive,choices!
Myself, I prefer to avoid Freudian readings because I consider "madness" in Nabokov a sign for his having introduced elements that defy "common-sense" and that pertain to his own other-world metaphysics and his vision of art/science.

I wonder if we could interpret the old exiled Jewish couple as being more general representatives of the sufferings the dominating part of mankind inflicts on the other. In his short-story compassion doesn't shine forth but it is there all the time, even in his most callous sentences ( about the solution of Aunt Rosa's complaints, the unheeded bird...), inviting a reaction and a contrast. The equally callous unreliable narrator sometimes writes very tenderly about the old couple.

Paragraph Five:

The old gray haired lady in black feels compassion for her husband and for a young girl that is riding the bus and crying on another woman’s shoulder. The lady reminded her of Rebecca Borisovna, from her past life in Minsk, whose daughter had married a Soloveichik. After unhooking her arm from her husband’s, the old lady looked around to “hook her mind onto something” that would not provoke more tears.

Paragraph Six:

Short and its insertion brings back the woman’s musings about her son’s first attempt on his life, her present sadness and her fears about another, more successful suicide attempt.............................................................

PS: Sorry for the intrusion of my anti-virus "Spyware" warnings that seem to come together with my messages!