Magda Yitchinson

Magda Yitchinson is a character who appears in the Season 5 episode of The Golden Girls titled "Sisters and Other Strangers". She is played in the episode by actress Marian Mercer.

About Magda
Magda, who is the cousin of Stanley "Stan" Zbornak and Theodore "Ted" Zbornak, and who is also from Czechoslovakia, visits the U.S., she stops by, getting dropped off by Stan, who she said charged her for the ride, to visit Dorothy and the girls, then gets in an argument with Dorothy about Communism and Western world and its ways; when going out shopping and sightseeing with Rose, she is taken aback by what she calls the "iniquities" of America's ways, although she likes slurpees. When Magda and Dorothy begin to argue over the subject of Communism, she responds to Dorothy, saying "Don't tell me about Communism...I know what I know..I'm a Communist!"

When the women visit a bookstore to check out Blanche's sister Charmaine's new novel "Vixen: Story of a Woman", Magda is taken aback by the variety of reads and the different ideas displayed, and is also worried about how it would affect the people in her home country, now opened up to exposure to American books due to the Soviet Union breakup, saying "So many books Too many books, too many contradictory opinions next to each other...this leads to anarchy!" When Dorothy, who was equally taken aback by the amount of Communist ideology she said was pumped into Magda's head, tells her that the variety of books in the bookstore represented different ideas, s "Dorothy, what's going to happen now that there's freedom ... the people in my country are going to read these books, and be confused! Now the way things works, we knew what to do, the choices were easy; when there is one road, no one gets lost!" Dorothy then suggests to Magda that she read two books, Thomas Payne's Common Sense to get some idea of what freedom is all about and Vanna White's biography!

When Charmaine, who was there to autograph books at her novels debut and Blanche clash over the content of her novel, which seemed to mirror her love life, Magda, who spoke of an argument between her and her sister in Czechoslovakia, she turned her over to the Secret Police!

Eventually Magda comes around to the ways of America and the western world where she says that the realizes that freedom is change, before she departs for her home country.