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If you want a shortcut to the Eastern European experience, you must have yourself woken from the sarcophagus of a sleeper's ceiling berth by border guards in the night. You must have every light lit. You must be spoken to in a language you understand slightly, or not at all, depending on the kind of estrangement you want. Trains: To a European person, an Eastern European person, a Jewish Eastern European person, they call up cattle cars and extinction as readily as a megaphone in a pickup summons revolution to a Latin American. Emigration, evacuation, extermination, exile - in Russia, a train has carried the quarry. The platform, the engine's weary exhalation, a whistle's hoot and blare, 'the grey wet quay, over a wilderness of rails and points, round the corners of abandoned trucks,' as Graham Greene put it - if we are to speak of the things that divide the Russian mind from the American, we could begin here.
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Boris Fishman (Savage Feast: Three Generations, Two Continents, and a Dinner Table (A Memoir with Recipes))