The Geek Who Came from the Cold

Surviving the Post-USSR Era on a Hollywood Diet

By: Leon Kaminsky

Narrated by: Steve Rausch

Based on a true story.

When the first wave of pirated videotapes from the West reached the USSR in the second half of the 1980s, that stuff was naturally illegal. If you had money, you still watched it, of course, be it Commando, or The Godfather, or Emmanuelle, or whatever you were lucky to get. Maybe, you’d get arrested; maybem you wouldn’t. If you were found out, in most cases, that meant prison. You would still go to your friends' place and watch it though, and you couldn’t get enough of it.

Being a timid Jewish boy in a repressed and conservative society dominated by very specific ideas of masculinity was difficult enough. But being one of the first film geeks in a country that never had a word like “geek” in its vocabulary...well, that made life so much more complicated.

Hollywood’s fairy tales may offer you shelter from reality and make you forget all the bullying at school, death in the family, or the shaky financial situation in the country, but it’s only a question of time before you snap.

The Geek Who Came from the Cold: Surviving the Post-USSR Era on a Hollywood Diet is Leon Kaminsky’s second novel - tragicomic, wistful, and passionate.

©2019 Leon Kaminsky (P)2020 Leon Kaminsky