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, is the cousin of Stan and Ted Zbornak, and is from Czechoslovakia. She visits the U.S. at the time of the breakup of the former USSR; Czechoslovakia is going through many changes, and the communist regime is falling.
Magda stops by the girl's house to visit Dorothy and the girls, getting dropped off by Stan. She tells the girls that Stan charged her for the ride, and intimates she is not enjoying staying with him. She then gets in an argument with Dorothy about Communism and the Western world and its ways, but still asks if she can stay with the girls instead; they reluctantly agree.
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!”
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. She says: “So many books, too many books, too many contradictory opinions next to each other. This leads to anarchy!”
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. Magda says: “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 work, 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.
Charmaine is in the bookstore to autograph books for her novel's debut. She and Blanche clash over the content of her book, which seemed to mirror Blanche's love life. Magda, who spoke of an argument between her and her sister in Czechoslovakia, and says the argument ended when she turned her over to the Secret Police!
Magda reads the two books Dorothy recommended. Afterwards, and taking into account one of Rose's stories, Magda begins to come around to the western ideas and says that the realizes that freedom is change. She departs for her home country, hoping to use what she's learned to make things better there.