Russian-speaking Jews from the former Soviet Union are a peculiarity in the Jewish world. After decades living in a repressive, nominally atheistic state, these Jews did manage to retain a strong sense of Jewish identity - but one that was almost completely divorced from Judaism. Today, more than
ten percent of Jews speak or understand Russian, signaling the importance of an ever-vexing question: why are Russian Jews the way they are?
In pursuit of an answer, Anna Shternshis's groundbreaking When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life under Stalin draws on nearly 500
oral history interviews on the Soviet Jewish experience with Soviet citizens who were adults by the 1940s. Soviet Jews lived through tumultuous times: the Great Terror, World War II, the anti-Semitic policies of the postwar period, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. But, like millions of other
Soviet citizens, they married, raised children, and built careers, pursuing life as best they could in a profoundly hostile environment. One of the first scholars to record and analyze oral testimonies of Soviet Jews, Shternshis unearths heartbreaking, deeply poignant, and often funny stories of the
everyday choices Jews were forced to navigate as a repressed minority living in a totalitarian regime. Shternshis reveals how ethnicity rapidly transformed into a disability, as well as a negative characteristic, for Soviet Jews in the postwar period, and shows how it was something they needed
desperately to overcome in order to succeed.
That sense of self has persisted well into the twenty-first century, and has impacted the Jewish identities of the children and grandchildren of Shternshis's subjects, the foundational generation of contemporary Russian Jewish culture. An
illuminating work of social and cultural history, When Sonia Met Boris traces the fascinating contours of contemporary Russian Jewish identity back to their very roots.
Part I: Oral History and the First Generation of Soviet Jews
Chapter 1 When Only Memories Tell the Truth
Chapter 2 Who Gets to Tell the Story: Oral Histories of the First Soviet Jewish Generation
Part II: The Making of a Soviet Jewish Family
Chapter 3 Boys are Like
Glass, Girls are like Cloth: Raising Jewish Children in the 1930s
Chapter 4 Weddings between Errands: Love and Family during the Soviet Jewish Golden Age
Chapter 5 Lost, Found and Guilty: The War and the Family
Chapter 6 How Not to Learn about Antisemitism at Home: Soviet Jewish Family
Values after the War
Part III: From Enthusiasm to More Enthusiasm: Jews in the Soviet Workplace
Chapter 7 What My Country Needs and Where My Aunt Lives: Choosing a Profession in Stalin's Soviet Union
Chapter 8 The Right Specialists with the Wrong Passports: The Search for
Employment
Chapter 9 "You Do Not Seem like a Jew At All": The Atmosphere at Work
Chapter 10 Jewish Doctors and the Doctors' Plot
Chapter 11 The Happiest Memories: Life in the World of Soviet Yiddish Culture
Epilogue Soviet Jewish Oral Histories: Past and
Future
Appendix 1 Methodology
Appendix 2 Statistical Distribution of Interviewees
Notes
Bibliography
There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.
Anna Shternshis is the Al and Malka Green Professor in Yiddish Studies and the Director of the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923 - 1939 .
Writing History - William Kelleher Storey and Towser Jones
The Myth of the Cultural Jew - Roberta Rosenthal Kwall
Soviet Baby Boomers - Donald J. Raleigh
Being Soviet - Timothy Johnston
Pioneers and Partisans - Anika Walke
Collect and Record! - Laura Jockusch
When Sonia Met Boris - Anna Shternshis
