This was originally written on my FB page where I post pictures and links almost daily and which you immediately should follow. I remembered about the stool samples when I was writing this post about the Soviet medicine of my day. *Warning: please don’t eat while reading this. Soviet kids had to be healthy whether…
Category: Behind the Iron Curtain
How I Was A Yiddish Singer
The mid-1970’s, when 7-year-old me was roaming the mean streets of Odessa, was a great time to live there. Odessa’s Jewish population somewhat recovered from the devastation of the World War II and the pogroms and devastations before that and, while the Soviet Government had a firm grip on the emigration spigot, prospered as much…
Grigory Semenovich Obershmukler
I don’t make New Year Resolutions, but I start every year hoping to interview an Old Jewish Person®. Then I realize that I have no interviewing skills, or patience or determination to actually do it, and soon another year rolls around. So this is probably as close as it gets to having a narrative on…
Marxism-Bremzenism
“We had no housing to speak of, we had no cars to speak of, we all wore the same clothes” Anya Von Bremzen It rained communism and income redistribution. In dim light reluctantly released by the Government so the citizens wouldn’t bump into each other I was schlepping to kindergarten. It was 5 in the…
Behind The Iron Curtain: No To Neutron Bomb
These cards were distributed to the Soviet citizens so they could be mailed en masse to the United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim. Based on his years on that post the time would’ve been between 1972 and 1981.