Are you sure that it's set in the 1930s? It's been several months since I saw "The Rabbi's Cat", but I remember it as being set in the 1920s. There was not the political tension that there was in North Africa in the 1930s, and the Russian's escaping from the Revolution by being mailed to Algiers in a crate of books would be more believable in the 1920s when the Revolution was still being consolidated, than in the 1930s when it controlled everything in Russia.
Are you sure that it's set in the 1930s? It's been several months since I saw "The Rabbi's Cat", but I remember it as being set in the 1920s. There was not the political tension that there was in North Africa in the 1930s, and the Russian's escaping from the Revolution by being mailed to Algiers in a crate of books would be more believable in the 1920s when the Revolution was still being consolidated, than in the 1930s when it controlled everything in Russia.
Fred Patten