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.
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