When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life under Stalin (Oxford Oral History Series) - Hardcover

Shternshis, Anna

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0190223103 ISBN 13: 9780190223106

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2017

Synopsis

Soviet Jews lived through a record number of traumatic events: the Great Terror, World War II, the Holocaust, the Famine of 1947, the Doctors' Plot, the antisemitic 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 as they could in a profoundly hostile environment. One of the first scholars to record and analyze oral testimonies of Soviet Jews, Anna Shternshis unearths their everyday life and the difficult choices that they were forced to make as a repressed minority living in a totalitarian regime.

Drawing on nearly 500 interviews with Soviet citizens who were adults by the 1940s, When Sonia Met Boris describes both indirect Soviet control mechanisms?such as housing policies and unwritten quotas in educational institutions?and personal strategies to overcome, ignore, or even take advantage of those limitations. The interviews reveal how ethnicity was rapidly transformed into a negative characteristic, almost a disability, for Soviet Jewry in the postwar period. Ultimately, Shternshis shows, after decades living in a repressive, nominally atheistic state, these Jews did manage to retain a complex sense of Jewish identity, but one that fully disassociates Jewishness from Judaism and instead associates it with secular society, prioritizing chess over Talmud, classical music over Hasidic tunes. Gracefully weaving together poignant stories, intimate reflections, and witty anecdotes, When Sonia Met Boris traces the unusual contours of contemporary Russian Jewish identity back to its roots.

About this title

About the Author

Anna Shternshis is the Al and Malka Green Associate Professor in Yiddish Language and Literature and the Director of 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 (2006) and more than twenty articles on the Soviet Jewish experience during World War II, Russian Jewish culture, and the post-Soviet Jewish diaspora.

Review

"The study makes a valuable contribution to the growing literature in Soviet oral history on everyday experiences of the Stalinist regime and of Soviet Jewry ... a very readable book" -- Melanie Ilic, History

"an important effort at "disambiguating" the Soviet Jewish experience for a western audience. It will be a particular useful teaching tool for courses that focus on the anthropology of Jews, on Soviet/post-Soviet studies, and on the methods of oral history." -- Anna Kushkova, Slavic Review

"[T]he overall contribution of the book [is]...significant....[S]uch a study sits well alongside existing literature on everyday Stalinism, and with its focus on both Jewish domestic and work life offers a substantial contribution to this area....[T]he book will be a valuable resource for those who research and teach in the area of modern Russian, eastern European and Jewish studies."--Cai Parry-Jones, Oral History Review

"In this book, Shternshis turned a seemingly disparate set of historical and personal data points into a carefully woven narrative tapestry....Scholars and interested readers will benefit in tremendous way from this book and will find in the process an accessible, yet innovative, narrative model. This book deserves to be read by scholars and interested readers as a significant methodological and interpretive accomplishment. Even for those uninterested in this methodological aspect of When Sonia Met Boris, the book is highly readable and delightful as a compendium of Jewish voices with unique and unexpected stories to tell."--Andrew C. ReedThe Russian Review

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0190223103
• ISBN 13: 9780190223106
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 264