When I was a child, my father was a dealer in black-market records. We lived on what was then the outskirts of Moscow, in what was then the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It was the 1970s, and our nation’s record stores only sold discs of domestic manufacture, most of them wooly-sounding classical recordings on the Melodiya label. This meant that a healthy contingent of Muscovites valued records smuggled from what they referred to in hushed tones as “The West” more than just about anything else their rubles could buy. My father sold a single American record by Black Sabbath or Ornette Coleman for what amounted to a doctor’s monthly salary, a commerce that made him a hipster to some and to others—including the police and the KGB—a dangerous criminal.
The deals went down in our apartment. The doorbell rang, and on the other side stood a man—it was always a man—with an empty bag slung over a shoulder and a nervous, twitchy look. My father’s favorite bit of salesmanship was to bundle a record the customer wanted with two that he didn’t. Typically, there would be a phone call from a bearded jazz fanatic interested in the lightly scuffed copy of Coltrane “Live” at the Village Vanguard he heard my father was selling. When the dumbfounded man arrived at our apartment, after traveling for two hours on a municipal bus, my father informed him that he could only sell him the Coltrane as part of a set, along with Bread’s Greatest Hits and a compilation of Anne Murray singles, all priced stratospherically.
Of course, my father was himself a record collector and also an audiophile. I remember him most vividly slumped on our living-room sofa listening to headphones that looked like grapefruit halves clumped over his ears. Their curly cord snaked across the floor to his most prized possession, a solid-state Telefunken receiver with dozens of knobs and switches, the illuminated faceplate glowing with foreign promise. It was connected to two Latvian bookshelf speakers and a domestic record player. He’d decorated the room with unobtainable posters of Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. I think that for him this modest hi-fi and his rather less modest record collection was a refuge from the drabness and falseness of official Soviet life, a window onto a freer, more authentic way of being.
My mother and I left Moscow when I was 9, setting off on a winding year-long journey that eventually brought us to New York. My father stayed behind. My parents had divorced, and he couldn’t bring himself to leave his country, friends, and everything he knew. At that time, emigrating from the Soviet Union meant leaving for good, with almost nothing and no possibility of return.
When my mother and I stood on a balcony at the airport in Moscow, minutes before boarding the plane that would take us to “The West,” we looked down at my father. He was waving at us and crying. My mother took my hand and said, “Take a good look at your father, because you will never see him again.”
The Soviet Union had endured for 70 years; how could we have known then that the nation and its vast, impermeable border would collapse a decade later? I flew back to Moscow in 1997. It was only my second time seeing my father since leaving as a child; I knew next to nothing about him. In the meantime, I too had become a record collector and an audiophile. My Brooklyn living room was furnished around a pair of Spica Angelus speakers, the first of several tube amps, and some record shelves I’d built with a friend. Remembering my father’s beloved hi-fi and record collection, I wanted to bring him a worthy present.
One of my favorite records is a bossa nova session by Vinicius de Moraes. The poet had written the lyrics to “Garota de Ipanema” and a handful of other songs that form a cornerstone of Brazilian music. On the recording, his gruff singing is accompanied by the acoustic guitar of his collaborator Toquinho and the pellucid voice of Maria Creuza, a singer’s singer who never received the acclaim she deserved. The session hadn’t been released in the US; I found it on a French LP titled Le Brésil de Vinicius de Moraes in a bin at Academy Records in Chelsea and had an intuition that my father would like it as well. I’d never seen the record before or since, but prior to my visit to Moscow, I called nearly every record store on the East Coast until I tracked down a second copy.
When I arrived at my father’s apartment in Moscow, his record collection was gone. He had replaced it with a CD player and rows of little plastic cases from our digital future. After we had a chance to talk, and to drink several glasses of tea and a little vodka, I awkwardly pulled out the record and handed it to my father. He nearly gasped in surprise and then tears appeared in the corners of his eyes. “That’s one of my two or three favorite records,” he said, looking up at me quizzically. “How did you know?”
I think about that day—and the strange bonds we share with our parents and children—whenever I listen to it.
Footnote: Alex Halberstadt is the author of Lonely Avenue: the Unlikely Life and Times of Doc Pomus, and, published earlier in 2020, Young Heroes of the Soviet Union: a Memoir and a Reckoning.
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