"But I do know one American who mastered real Russian flawlessly in a
mere two days. I met this phenomenal linguist in 1979, five days after
I arrived in the U.S. His name was Rabbi Bernstein and he was the head
of a Jewish organization where I, a freshly minted emigre, went to
interview for a job editing Jewish religious books in Russian, which
paid a whopping $150 a week.

When I arrived, a tall man of fifty rose to greet me. He was wearing a
yarmulke, a dark suit, and on his shoulders was a sprinkling of
dandruff flakes. His nose was large and swollen from a cold.

"Good moRninG," I said, painstakingly enunciating all the letters in
this phrase, including the r and the final g. (I had spent all of the
previous day cramming and practicing polite English phrases of
salutation.)

"Yobaniy v rote!" (F****d in the mouth!) the rabbi said to me with a
smile.  I decided that I had misheard him, and that probably he had
said some polite phrase in English that I didn't know. So I came out
with my next memorized phrase:

"HowaReyousiR?"

"Ne pizdi, paskuda yobaniy!" said the rabbi, his smile growing
broader. "Kalis, padla!" (Don't f**k me, you f**kin' s**t! Come clean,
you d**k!)

At this point I understood that the rabbi's Russian was far better
than my English. In any case, with these words in his vocabulary, he
would never have any trouble in Russia. In fact, using these phrases
he would be able to get anything he needed in Russia without ever
standing in line, be it a train ticket or tickets to the theatre, a
prescription at a pharmacy, or a job as a bartender. Why, with what he
knew, the speaker of the Russian parliament would even yield him the
podium without a whimper of protest. But where could a rabbi on Fifth;
Avenue in New York have learned this Russian, which was so close to
what the natives speak?

It turned out that the previous summer Rabbi Bernstein had made a
tourist trip to Kiev. As soon as he landed and got off the plane, he
had immediately taken a taxi to Babi Yar, the site where the Germans
shot two hundred thousand Jews during World War II. Here the rabbi
spread out a small prayer rug, knelt down, and began to recite the
Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. Within ten minutes, KGB
officers were at the cemetery. They flung themselves on the rabbi,
twisted his arms behind his back, tossed him into a car, and bore him
off to a basement room at the KGB, where for two days they beat and
cursed him, demanding that he confess to being an American spy. During
the two days they broke a finger on his right hand and he learned the
real Russian that people actually speak—enough of it to communicate
with any Russian from the president to a bunch of drunks standing in
line at a liquor store.

I don't insist that everyone who plans to go to Russia take a crash
course with teachers like this. That would be a bit extreme. But the
question is, what is the minimum vocabulary someone needs to carry on
a real conversation with Russians? I read somewhere that the English
compiled a dictionary for foreign mercenaries in the British army
containing two thousand words. So it seems that in a country whose
language contains more than six hundred thousand words, it's possible
to become a general with a knowledge of only two thousand. And since
the largest Russian dictionary contains two hundred thousand, you can
figure out for yourself that to serve in the Russian army requires
only about seven hundred words. But even that is a monstrous
exaggeration, and as a former Russian soldier I can assure you of
this!"

Edward Topol "Dermo"