Title: White on black
Description: Born with cerebral palsy in Moscow, Ruben Gallego was hidden away in Soviet state institutions by his maternal grandfather, the secretary general of the Spanish Communist Party in the 1960s. His was a boyhood spent in orphanages, hospitals, and old-age homes, a life of emotional deprivation and loss of human dignity. Gallego's story is one of neglect and mistreatment but also of shared small pleasures, of courage, of the power of the human will, and of a child's growing fascination with books and the worlds he finds in them.
Subjects: Abandoned children, Asylums, Biography, Cerebral palsied children, Childhood and youth, Fiction, Orphanages, Children with disabilities, Institutional care, Russia (federation), biography, People with disabilities
Places: Soviet Union
People: Ruben David Gonsales Galʹego