Word: schecters
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Steve, who says he has kept up his Russian in courses here, is taking this term off. He leaves next month for Micronesia, where he will put together a documentary film on child behavior. Schecter, who is an anthropology major, first developed an interest in film after attending an ethnographic film conference at the Smithsonian Institute as a senior in high school. In Micronesia, he will be working under the auspices of the Smithsonian's anthropological film center, which sponsored a documentary he had worked on in South America last year. Schecter admits that his Russian experience will seem very...
Whenever the Schecter family would have friends over to their Moscow apartment, they would turn their record player up full blast to foil the bugs that they assumed were planted around them. As Steven C. Schecter '78 recalled in an interview last month, this paranoia "even lingered when we first got back. We were secretive in talking about certain things, but gradually loosened up." After two years of inhibition, the Schecters did indeed loosen up--enough to to produce a book that seemingly leaves no stone unturned in its recollection of their Russian experience...
...Schecter family's story deals in detail with the personal aspects of daily life in Moscow. They report that 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...
...descriptions of the differences between Russian and American consumerism are striking. The Schecter children report that adults in Russia repeatedly begged American students to bring them felt-tip pens, a rare commodity in Russia. American liquor is viewed as an important status symbol. Soviet stores are perpetually out of merchandise. It seems at times as if all of Russia is standing in line for one thing or another. On the other hand, children in Russia eat red caviar on black bread for breakfast. Overall, the Americans had to do considerable adjusting to survive in Russia...
...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...