Word: schecters
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...When we first arrived in Moscow, everything struck me as a dull gray," Schecter says. He remembers being depressed by "the wedding cake architecture, where you have these big flank wings and one big tower in the middle. A bunch of these buildings from the Stalin era still remain around Moscow." When the Schecters first arrived, the government put them up in a hotel. They remained in these cramped quarters for several months, until the government provided them with an apartment in Yugozapad, a suburb of Moscow...
...took a 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...
...They have canned Algerian orange juice there, which is really a drag. But you get used to those kind of things. You learn to tolerate them," Schecter says. although he didn't like some of the food, Schecter says, he cultivated--as a young teen-ager in a strange land--a taste for caviar and vodka while there...
...part of their attempt to blend into Soviet society as much as possible, the Schecters sent their children to an ordinary Soviet school. For their first few weeks there, the children relied on the Russian they had learned in an intensive course that the entire family had taken before arriving in Moscow. "The only problem at first was that we stood out as foreigners because we arrived at school every morning in our Volvo station wagon, which was one of maybe two in all of Moscow. Everyone would stare at us--it was very embarrassing. But after a while...
...Schecter says that his Russian friends reacted to him in different ways. "some were just after the novelties of your life-style," he notes, "such as bubble gum, foreign stamps, and felt-tip pens. Or listening to music and bumming Marlboros off you. It was t(ose kinds of people we ended up parting with, because they weren't true friends. You tolerate this at first because you want to meet people and learn about them." He says that those who remained his friends, although originally attracted to him and the other Schecter sibs by their American luxuries, "weren...