It is the subject of a bizarre recollection by Arthur Koestler in his autobiography _The Invisible Writing_. He was in a hostel in Ashkhabad, Turkmenistan, in 1932:

"As I lay on the sheetless bed, enveloped by gloom and stench, counting the familiar stains on the wall which crused bed-bugs leave behind, I heard the sound of a gramophone in the next room. The record was cracked, and it played the then popular tear-jerker sung by Sophie Tucker, `My Yiddishe Momma'. It sounded eerie in the _dom sovietov_ of Ashkhabad, and I got up to find out who my neighbour was. I knocked at his door and found a young American Negro squatting in front of a portable gramophone in a bare room similar to mine. He turned out to be the poet Langston Hughes, whose `Shoeshine Boy' I had read in Berlin and greatly admired...."