My favourite example of cultural and lingual differences is the useage of the word "black".
In Russian Africans are called "Негр" - "Negr". While the "politically-correct" word "black" ("черный", "chorniy") is an offencive nickname for people from Caucasus, Georgians, Armenians, Chechens etc.
My last experience with black people was very strange and funny. I was standing at the Festivalnaya str. at the Rechnoy Vokzal underground, waiting for a friend on a car to pick me up. A black man comes to me and in broken Russian asks for some change, all standard phrases about nowhere to live and nothing to drink. I told him that i'll give him a few coins if he'll tell me where he's from. I gave him a pocket full of coins, maybe 15 roubles. He said he's from Vilnus!
About textbooks. I studied in a "specialised" school, we had English since second grade, and used different books then ordinary schools. There was not much about social and racial problems of the West there. Much more classical literature and modern non-social fiction. Dikkens, Pamela Travers, Cronin, traditional fairy-tales, etc. We had to prepare so-callled "topics", usually about English-speaking countries and their history, in surprisingly warm and positive mood. Like sightseeing in London or Washington, American and British political systems with all their advantages, stories about people like John Paul Jones and George Washington.
In 8th grade on an exam I got the text to translate, a story about a coloured girl who couldn't get into the college because she was coloured. It took me 20 minutes to understand what "coloured" means: we never used this word in our classes.
Maybe my experience is not a good example. I studied in an "elite" school, and had a completely different programm of English... I was one of the few persons who have chosen Engineering instead of humanitarian studies after I graduated.
Regarding Soviet Jews: my class was at least 30% Jewish.
