A Soviet Jew Stuck in Italy on Her Way to US

choi

Margarita Gokun Silver, A temporary translator in Italy bound for the United States finds a Way to fell less foreign. New York Times, Jan 18, 2015 (under the heading On Work,' in SundayBusiness section).
www.nytimes.com/2015/01/18/jobs/ ... f-assimilation.html
(“Because Soviet authorities believed that Jews made money simply by breathing and that leaving the Soviet Union should cause Jews to forfeit both their citizenships and their savings, they allowed us only two suitcases and the equivalent of $90 per person”)

Note:
(a) "The patient, a babushka with orange hair"
(i) babushka (n; Russian, grandmother, diminutive of baba old woman): “an elderly Russian woman “
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/babushka
(ii) 大妈 in China.  (Taiwan did not have this term while I was there.)

(b) “'Supposte,' the doctor said. * * * 'Supposte?' he repeated. He shifted uneasily in his chair. Then with a nervous smile, he raised his right hand, stuck out his index finger and made a motion that could mean only one thing. My ears turned red and the color spread to my face. 'Suppositories,' I said to the babushka in Russian. 'You’ll need to use suppositories. She nodded. I mouthed ‘scusi’ at the doctor. He smiled, dismissed my apology with a wave, wrote a prescription and handed it to the patient.'”

Italian English dictionary
(i) supposta (noun feminine; plural: supposte): "(medicine) suppository; See also [noun masculine] suppositorio”
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/supposta

Google Translate would translate both Italian “supposta” and “suppositorio” to “suppository” in English. I can’t tell the difference, if any of the Italian pair. In Japanese kanji, it is 坐剤 (same in Taiwan, except that we write the second Chinese character differently).
(ii) scusi (interjection): "excuse me, pardon me"
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scusi
(iii) quanto costa: "how much does it cost?
(A) quanto (adjective masculine, adv; from Latin quantus): "how, how much, how many"
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quanto

The modern form in Spanish is "cuanto," whereas the obsolete form, "quanto."
(B) costa
     (noun feminine): "coast"
     (verb): a form of the verb costare cost
(iv) non capisco (phrase) "I don't understand"
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/non_capisco

capisco (v): "first-person singular present of capire [understand-"
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/capisco
(v) grazie (interjection; plural of grazia, from Latin gratia, as used in the phrase gratias agere to express thanks): "thanks"
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/grazie

choi

(c) “It was 1989 and a week since I had started working as an interpreter for the primary care physician charged with seeing the Russian Jewish émigrés in Santa Severra, a small town north of Rome. * * * I had taken Italian classes in Moscow in preparation for moving, albeit temporarily, to Italy.”
(i) I suppose the double r's in Severra is a typo.  In both English and Italian, the place name is the same, with one r.
(ii) Santa Severa
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Severa

(d) "That’s why the doctor, who spoke neither English nor Russian, had spent the last year gesticulating diagnoses for [preceding] interpreters whose knowledge of Italian was limited to 'quanto costa' and 'non capisco.'”
(e) “I was 20 * * *  In Soviet Moscow, where I had grown up, you worked only after you graduated from college. Then you collected your monthly salary of 140 rubles, and you spent your lunch breaks searching the city for toilet paper.”

Naturally “toilet paper” in the government-owned stores (whose goods were often out of stock). Even in Taiwan then, there is no free toilet papers in toilets of government buildings--the only exception I knew of was 台北榮民總醫院.
(f) "the doctor opened his desk drawer and took out an envelope with my first week’s earnings. 'HIAS asked me to pass this on,' he said. 'Congratulations.' 'Grazie,' I said."

History
www.hias.org/history
(Founded in 1881 originally to assist Jews fleeing pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe; From our beginnings in a storefront on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a group of American Jews organized to provide; They formed the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society)