Bread and Salt

I made this episode 2 years ago, when Rafah was being invaded, and before the student encampments were crushed. It's not 2 hours long, I was just too impatient to figure out how to edit out the hour of silence at the end. Or maybe that needs to be there. What's it like to be a teenager during a communist revolution? I dive into Pearl Buck's account of my grandmothers life "Talk About Russia With M...

“The Bolsheviks planned their economy and gave opportunities to young men and women. Furthermore, they had got away from the s fetishization of material possessions which my parents had taught me was one of the basic ills of our American civilization. I saw that most Russians ate only black bread, wore one suit until it disintegrated and used old newspapers for writing letters and office memoranda...

In this episode: a contest for the best communist song; Ernst Thaelman: Fighter Against Fascism; the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and more. Get full access to Bread and Salt at breadandsalt.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode, I discover the identity of my Grandmother’s lover. His name is Lan Adomian. He’s Ukrainian Jewish, he’s a composer, and he’s a communist. In 1930s New York City, he’s directing futurist musicals about robots and capitalism, in Yiddish. His friends are putting on pageants commemorating Lenin in Madison Square Garden, where hundreds of dancers use their bodies to make a massive hamm...

“The Grandmother Project” is an interview series adjacent to, but not directly related to, the story of my Russian grandmother. The idea was born when I started telling everyone about my podcast, and so many people said: “how interesting. I have a Russian grandmother too” (or Ukrainian, Belarusian, Latvian, Lithuanian…) Most of them were Jewish. And I thought, this is part of the story. My grandmo...

I find a box in the basement, filled with my grandmother’s journals. I read from my the journals, written in the early 1940s, just after she had emigrated to the U.S. She’s a liberated Soviet woman, struggling with learning English, taking care of her two kids, deeply homesick for Russia, traveling around and giving talks about her childhood to raise money for Russian war relief. And she’s in love...

Once, a long time ago, in a little log cabin in a little village in the middle of Russia, there lived a girl named Masha. Her parents were peasants , and they grew all of their own food, and her mother grew flax, processed it, spun it and wove it into clothes for the family. Far away in the big cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, a revolution had happened and huge changes were taking place. But i...

My grandmother, Maria Ivanovna Dikareva Scott, called “Masha” by most, and “Babushka” by me and her other grandchildren, was born in a tiny log cabin, in the tiny village of Laikova Khrapovitskaya, in the central Western province of Tver, Russia, six years before the Russian Revolution in 1911. She died 93 years later in her home in suburban Ridgefield Connecticut. Her life was deeply impacted by...

I have war on my mind. In 1943, my grandmother was living in New York City with her two young daughters, my mother and aunt. I think of her, waiting to hear news from home. My aunt remembers how when she would get a letter from Russia — a rare occurrence— she would sit the kids down, read the letter aloud, and cry and cry. Because the news was always terrible. In this episode, I connect my grandmo...