ABSTRACT
For me for far too long, the name of Yakov Borisovich Zeldovich, applied mathematician, astrophysicist, and cosmologist, had belonged along with the legendary Lev Davidovich Landau, Solomon Pikelner, Vitali Ginzburg, Iosif Shklovskii and others to that extraordinarily talented group of disembodied voices from behind the Iron Curtain. We eventually met for the first time during the 1967 Prague IAU, and then two years later at a Symposium on Interstellar Gas Dynamics, held at Miskhor near Yalta in Crimea. Even after the thaw, bureacracy continued to interfere with his wish to travel, and our subsequent interactions had to be by mail, until our paths crossed again at the 1982 Patras IAU, and finally at Sukhumi and Moscow in 1986. But we always found plenty to talk about, not least on our contrasting family histories, my grandparents having emigrated from the Ukraine to England, some grand-paternal cousins to the United States and grand-maternal cousins to the Ottoman Empire.
