I had brought Salinger’s great work on a trip to the USSR in the summer of 1990, a few weeks before my senior year of high school. Some time in the last days of the trip, we visited a family who lived in one of those horrifying Soviet concrete-block tenements in Moscow. The family’s 13-year-old daughter did all the translating for us. She had big, sad eyes, but she made it obvious how thrilled she was to be chatting with Americans in her school-taught English.

The trip to the USSR changed my life and my outlook on the world. In Leningrad, I was bombarded with offers to trade rubles for anything I had. My Walkman, my pants — how many times did someone offer to buy my pants right off my legs? In Moscow, I saw economic decline transformed into disaffection with Gorbachev, even as he earned international acclaim and made Perestroika and Glasnost part of the global vocabulary. In Tblisi, Georgia, I saw a satellite state dominated by organized crime. Our hosts were some of those Orwell would have called “more equal than others.”

But it was in that apartment in Moscow where I caught a glimpse of a younger generation that was coming to understand its responsibility to find a different way.

So before I left her apartment, I snuck into her room and left my copy of Catcher in the Rye on her desk.

J.D. Salinger, RIP.