>>>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'.
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>>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.
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>>>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.
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>>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.
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>I have no idea what happened to his, unfortunately. Funny story though. My dad wrote op-ed pieces. Generally he wrote satire and I've seen translations of a few of his things. In translation, he was good, but they tell me he was very good in Russian. Anyway, apparently Tass, or one of those, used to reprint his work in Russia and when they did, they put money in the bank over there for him. He couldn't take the money out, but if he went there, he could use it (not a very large number, of course).
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>So, anyway, whent the maiden voyage of the SS Pushkin was being set up between Montreal and [iirc] Leningrad (in the 60s sometime), he was invited to go - expenses paid etc. So, he went. he had a wonderful time over there and when he came back he wrote about it. A few years later, they invited him again, and he accepted, but this time he took my mother and they made a holiday out of it. Only this time, he decided it wasn't going to be just a fun trip like before. He went with a more critical eye. Again they had a good time, but when he got back, he wrote about some of the things he saw that he didn't particularly like in their socialistic way of life.
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>They took all of the money out of his bank account, and it was something like 20 years before they ever invited him back. What's really funny is that because he wrote in Russian, and wrote about things he found unacceptable (the way any op-ed journalist does), the RCMP followed his column. Apparently the RCMP thought he was a communist, and the USSR thought he was a captialist.


I really enjoyed your story about your dad. It is amazing how you can be treated for describing what you see. Imagine all the people staying up late at night (on both sides) worrying what your dad might say? All the time your dad is fast asleep and enjoying his life while others worry! :)