From the author:

A mother beat her six-year-old son with a log and called him a Jew. The boy survived, grew up strong and seasoned, wore shoulder straps, sailed the seas and oceans under the Soviet flag, wrote a little prose, became a dissident and an ardent admirer of Solzhenitsyn, and emigrated. It wasn’t easy for me to meet him at the BBC Russian Service in London. By that time (1989), the mature boy was bald, but had youthful muscles. In between translations (we were called producers, but mostly we translated), I took up the expander. He wrote a denunciation against me to his superiors: such a person cannot work on the radio because he burrs. This was the absolute truth. A burr, a weak voice, a passion for poetry and a lack of bureaucratic fervor made me a useless presenter. The worst never happened there. Then the old boy was fired. In the early 1990s, good people were being fired, and he, who was not known for anything good, fell into the trap. He had a sin: he often secretly ordered a taxi for himself at the expense of the corporation to go home. The sin was revealed, they ordered a taxi for him and sent him home for the last time. They joked, but delicately. The swindler was socially close to his superiors. Good - they didn’t order a taxi. All this is said by the way: it’s difficult not to be an anti-Semite, even if you’re Jewish. This requires some effort, and not everyone can afford it. It is especially difficult for children. The homeland embraces them in its motherly embrace at the first glimpse of thought, and then go and escape from these affectionate arms. Viscount Herbert Samuel, a British aristocrat (from Jews), once said: Jews are the same people as everyone else, only even more so. Russian Jews of the Soviet era were just as Russian as everyone else, only even more Russian.