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.

When Sonia Met Boris, an innovative study of Jewish daily life in the Soviet Union based on nearly 500 oral history interviews, gives a long-suppressed voice to the men and women who survived the sustained violence and everyday hardship of Stalin's Russia. It reveals how postwar Soviet Jews came to view their Jewish identity as an obstacle--a shift in attitude with ramifications for contemporary Russian Jewish culture and the broader Jewish diaspora.

This page-turning, concise volume makes excellent use of oral histories to add flesh to an otherwise linear narrative of the Jewish experience in the Soviet Union and goes beyond to show how those experiences shaped the trajectories of the people who lived through not just the major historical events but also less eventful and at times mundane individual histories of their own lives.