>No polish in my ancestry afaik. My dad's folks were from Georgia Russia. They came to Canada around 1900 with the Dukhobors to settle the Canadian west (Saskatchewan). My dad was a journalist and wrote for a small Russian newspaper here in Toronto, and he used to get letters from readers variously addressed to 'Popow', 'Popov' and 'Popoff'.

Then the wrong one stuck. I particularly hate the -off trascription, which is typical of the French. Though in the russian pronunciation, the -ov (i.e., -ов) sounds a bit to the -of side, it's still not an audible f.

>He wrote with two fingers of each hand on one of those old Clark Kent typewriters, only it was Cyrillic. The key tops were round and white with brass rings. I wish I still had it even though I have no idea what the characters mean.

I've seen two such here, one (an Underwood!) in the local Kombinat library, two blocks from here, and the other one in the children's health clinic (aka dispanzer - for whichever reason the "dispenser" or "dispensary" caught root as the name for the place where preventive and other care is given). And I haven't ever seen a new cyrillic typewriter, in an allegedly cyrillic country - the communists didn't like it, and they confiscated all they could get "temporarily, while there's this urgent need". Of course, they never gave them back. I know of just another one that survived, belonged to Desanka Maksimović, the Party's pet poet, and the guys in leather coats, who came to get hers, had to wait while she made a phone call. They filled their pants when they heard whom she called, and so her typewriter is probably still out there, maybe in a museum.