Our Notes & References

Handbook for English Language Teachers by a Jewish American Communist woman in the USSR: a very rare edition for Ukrainian students, with no cother opy traced (see below).

The remarkable story of Rakhil (Rachel) Iosifovna Koff-Laif might have remained untold if not for one of her English students, the journalist Aleksandr Samokhodkin, who credited her in his memoirs. According to him, Koff-Laif’s parents took her as an infant from a small town near Mogilev (in present-day Belarus) to the United States in the late 19th century. There, she graduated from the Boston Institute of Technology, joined the Communist Party, and married a fellow party member, Evgenii (Eugene) Koff-Laif. Eventually, both were forced by the FBI to emigrate to the Soviet Union.

While in the Soviet Union, Rakhil Koff-Laif taught English and prepared students for entrance exams at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO). Samokhodkin recalls that she “spoke extensively about Jewish life in the United States, about Israel, and—under a promise of confidentiality—about the founder of the Red Army, Lev Davydovich Trotsky-Bronstein.” Her husband Evgenii was seriously wounded in battle near Moscow in the fall of 1941. After the war, he became “one of the founders of the Military Institute of Foreign Languages” (Samokhodkin, our translation).

This textbook appears to be Koff-Laif’s sole published work. It provides detailed guidance on key aspects of writing, explaining what to focus on and the purpose of each exercise. The book explores differences between Russian and English cursive, the nuances of cursive writing; it offers a thorough analysis of the correct writing of numbers, letters, and words, and also includes various copybook exercises. The work was edited by Mira Iosifovna Perper, a prominent literary critic and translator.

The present example, based on the 1959 first edition of the book, was produced by the Ukrainian Industrial College [Ukrainskii Zaochnyi Industrialnyi Technikum] using the “rotaprint” method, which enabled the efficient reproduction of typewritten text via offset printing. This technique was commonly used in the Soviet Union by educational institutions for printing academic and educational materials, as well as by publishers for limited print runs and samizdat creators. Several official Soviet printing guides, such as “Technical Conditions for the Preparation of Text Originals for Works Reproduced by the Rotaprint Method” and “Requirements for the Design of Manuscripts for Rotaprinting”, were published through the 1980s.

The Ukrainian Industrial College, likely based in Kharkiv, appears to have reproduced this manual in a very limited number of copies for its students. We were unable to locate any other copy of this rotaprint edition or any other works printed by this college. Even if the 1959 first edition, published in Moscow, had a 15,000 printrun and can be found in Russia, only one copy could be traced outside, in the British Library, and no copy at auction. This example has much wider margins than the Moscow original.

Bibliography

Aleksandr Samokhodkin, “Kseniia Nikolaevna i Rakhil Iosifovna”, 11 Feb. 2008.