What is this?

About a week ago I got an email from my uncle Isidoro. Attached to the email were 25 jpegs of two-page spreads of a book written in Russian.

The book is a memoir of Tania Mostkoff put together by her son, Nahum Baskin. Tania is my Zeide Luis’s sister, my great aunt.

The pictures I got from my uncle were pictures of the book.

I thought it would be interesting to try to scan the pages and translate them. If you’re interested, you can read all about it.

A note on the 2026 redo

The first pass at this — manual OCR, copy/paste, and Google Translate — got through about half the book before the text turned to garbage around page 22. In 2026 I worked with Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, to redo the whole pipeline: reading the source photos directly, transcribing and correcting the Russian text page by page, translating the finished text into English and Spanish, and building the places table that maps the towns Tania mentions to their modern names. Claude also set up the site’s Netlify deployment. The russian.md, provisional-translation-en.md, and traduccion-provisional-es.md posts now cover the full 50 pages instead of stopping partway through.

Reference Tree