Word: leona
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...while for the Schecters to adjust to the absence of many Yankee creature comforts. A special food store for foreigners stocked many American and European goods that were not otherwise available, but the Schecters often had to make do with Soviet substitutes. At one point in the book, Leona Schecter mentions how her children fell asleep clutching American cereal boxes, a symbol of the culture they had left behind. "Well, I didn't," Steven Schecter confides, laughing...
...from the second they arrive in the Soviet capital the family felt the oppressiveness of the Soviet bureaucracy. When they are finally given an apartment after waiting week for an opening, the family finds itself at the mercy of UpDK, the organization which supposedly handles the needs of foreigners--Leona Schecter had to bribe the UpDK carpenters with an agreed amount of vodka to get them to repair her apartment. While most Soviet citizens sincerely sing praises of communism, like the carpenters they are never ones to spurn the occasional niceties of capitalism that may float their...
...Moscow the Schecters became accustomed to a permanent element of secrecy in their lives. The transition from American to such a hushed atmosphere where they were constantly under suspicion was perhaps the most difficult adjustment for the Schecters to make. Leona, Jerrold Schecter's wife, remarks at the end of the book, "We could see it in the children. They had acquired the veneer of little Russians, reticent to speak freely and openly with people we didn't know well...trust became reserved, finally, only for the family." In an interview last month in America, Schecter described this element...
...lesser hands, this seven-authored volume might have been no more than a polished family album. Instead, Leona and Jerrold Schecter and their children (who ranged in age from five to 13 when Schecter took over TIME's Moscow bureau in 1968) display insight and perceptions that lend their memory book a universal appeal...
Indelible Portrait. "We never got over the frustration of being outsiders looking in," writes Leona. Yet it is precisely the Schecters' visitors-to-a-strange-planet attitude that makes their book succeed. On virtually every page are anecdotes and vignettes that constitute a witty, indelible portrait of the Soviet Union. Sweat, garlic and tobacco are the "characteristic smell of Moscow." Shoppers use no checks or credit cards; only the privileged in this "classless society" use scrip to buy luxury groceries at bargain prices. Three bathers in Armenia show off portraits of Marx, Engels and Lenin tattooed on their chests...