When Sonia Met Boris An Oral History Of Jewish Life Under Stalin

Author : Anna Shternshis
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190223103
Total Pages : 265 pages
Book Rating : 4.06/5 ( download)

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Download or read book When Sonia Met Boris written by Anna Shternshis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 Jewishdiaspora.

Author : Anna (al And Malka Green Associate Professor Of Shternshis
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780190223106
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book When Sonia Met Boris - an Oral History of Jewish Life Under Stalin written by Anna (al And Malka Green Associate Professor Of Shternshis and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Oleg Budnitskii
Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 1479819441
Total Pages : 456 pages
Book Rating : 4.47/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Jews in the Soviet Union: A History written by Oleg Budnitskii and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2022-12-20 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a comprehensive history of Soviet Jewry during World War II At the beginning of the twentieth century, more Jews lived in the Russian Empire than anywhere else in the world. After the Holocaust, the USSR remained one of the world’s three key centers of Jewish population, along with the United States and Israel. While a great deal is known about the history and experiences of the Jewish people in the US and in Israel in the twentieth century, much less is known about the experiences of Soviet Jews. Understanding the history of Jewish communities under Soviet rule is essential to comprehending the dynamics of Jewish history in the modern world. Only a small number of scholars and the last generation of Soviet Jews who lived during this period hold a deep knowledge of this history. Jews in the Soviet Union, a new multi-volume history, is an unprecedented undertaking. Publishing over the next few years, this groundbreaking work draws on rare access to documents from the Soviet archives, allowing for the presentation of a sweeping history of Jewish life in the Soviet Union from 1917 through the early 1990s. Volume 3 explores how the Soviet Union’s changing relations with Nazi Germany between the signing of a nonaggression pact in August 1939 and the Soviet victory over German forces in World War II affected the lives of some five million Jews who lived under Soviet rule at the beginning of that period. Nearly three million of those Jews perished; those who remained constituted a drastically diminished group, which represented a truncated but still numerically significant postwar Soviet Jewish community. Most of the Jews who lived in the USSR in 1939 experienced the war in one or more of three different environments: under German occupation, in the Red Army, or as evacuees to the Soviet interior. The authors describe the evolving conditions for Jews in each area and the ways in which they endeavored to cope with and to make sense of their situation. They also explore the relations between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors, the role of the Soviet state in shaping how Jews understood and responded to their changing life conditions, and the ways in which different social groups within the Soviet Jewish population—residents of the newly-annexed territories, the urban elite, small-town Jews, older generations with pre-Soviet memories, and younger people brought up entirely under Soviet rule—behaved. This book is a vital resource for understanding an oft-overlooked history of a major Jewish community.

Author : Anna Shternshis
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190223111
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.13/5 ( download)

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Download or read book When Sonia Met Boris written by Anna Shternshis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-16 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Sylvia Rothchild
Publisher : Simon & Schuster
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 344 pages
Book Rating : 4.93/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Special Legacy written by Sylvia Rothchild and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 1985 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of Soviet Jewry from the Revolution to the 1970s, based on the oral testimony of 176 Soviet Jewish émigrés. Ch. 1 (p. 27-57) deals with antisemitism and problems of Jewish identity. Ch. 2 (p. 58-112) presents personal views of events, such as the euphoria after the Revolution, changed attitudes towards Jews under Stalin and during World War II, Stalin's purges, etc. Other chapters describe ordinary life in Soviet Russia, the second-class status of Jewish citizens, and the rise in Jewish consciousness which led to the emigration movement.

Author : Abraham Sutzkever
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN 13 : 0228010438
Total Pages : 424 pages
Book Rating : 4.32/5 ( download)

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Download or read book From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg written by Abraham Sutzkever and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2021-10-06 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1944, the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever was airlifted to Moscow from the forest where he had spent the winter among partisan fighters. There he was encouraged by Ilya Ehrenburg, the most famous Soviet Jewish writer of his day, to write a memoir of his two years in the Vilna Ghetto. Now, seventy-five years after it appeared in Yiddish in 1946, Justin Cammy provides a full English translation of one of the earliest published memoirs of the destruction of the city known throughout the Jewish world as the Jerusalem of Lithuania. Based on his own experiences, his conversations with survivors, and his consultation with materials hidden in the ghetto and recovered after the liberation of his hometown, Sutzkever’s memoir rests at the intersection of postwar Holocaust literature and history. He grappled with the responsibility to produce a document that would indict the perpetrators and provide an account of both the horrors and the resilience of Jewish life under Nazi rule. Cammy bases his translation on the two extant versions of the full text of the memoir and includes Sutzkever’s diary notes and full testimony at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946. Fascinating reminiscences of leading Soviet Yiddish cultural figures Sutzkever encountered during his time in Moscow – Ehrenburg, Yiddish modernist poet Peretz Markish, and director of the State Yiddish Theatre Shloyme Mikhoels – reveal the constraints of the political environment in which the memoir was composed. Both shocking and moving in its intensity, From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg returns readers to a moment when the scale of the Holocaust was first coming into focus, through the eyes of one survivor who attempted to make sense of daily life, resistance, and death in the ghetto. A Yiddish Book Center Translation

Author : Katerina Capková
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
ISBN 13 : 1978830793
Total Pages : 281 pages
Book Rating : 4.90/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Jewish Lives Under Communism written by Katerina Capková and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-15 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides new, groundbreaking views of Jewish life in the pro-Soviet bloc from the end of the Second World War until the collapse of Communism in late 1989 by recovering and analyzing the agency of Jews and their creativity in Communist Europe after the Holocaust.

Author : Maria A. Rogacheva
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 1498574351
Total Pages : 203 pages
Book Rating : 4.58/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Soviet Scientists Remember written by Maria A. Rogacheva and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-11-21 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maria Rogacheva’s Soviet Scientists Remember gives voice to one of the most prominent and educated groups in the late USSR: scientists. Lifting the veil of secrecy that covered scientists during the Cold War, this book brings together six first-person accounts of residents of the formerly closed scientific town of Chernogolovka. In their interviews, scientists talk about growing up in Stalin’s Russia and surviving the Great Patriotic War, their decision to join the scientific intelligentsia, and the outstanding opportunities that were available to them in the heyday of the Cold War. They reflect on their daily lives in a privileged scientific community and their relationship with the Soviet state and the Communist Party. Soviet Scientists Remember sheds light on how ordinary people experienced the transformation of Soviet society after Stalin’s death, as well as its tumultuous transition to the post-Soviet era in the 1990s.

Author : Robert Weinberg
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350129186
Total Pages : 184 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Jews under Tsars and Communists written by Robert Weinberg and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-02-08 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the evolving nature of popular and official beliefs about the purported nature of the Jews from the 18th century onwards, Russia and the Jewish Question explores how perceptions of Jews in late Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union shaped the regimes' policies toward them. In so doing Robert Weinberg provides a fruitful lens through which to investigate the social, economic, political, and cultural developments of modern Russia. Here, Weinberg reveals that the 'Jewish Question' – and, by extension anti-Semitism – emerged at the end of the 18th century when the partitions of Poland made hundreds of thousands of Jews subjects of the Russian crown. He skillfully argues the phrase itself implies the singular nature of Jews as a group of people whose religion, culture, and occupational make-up prevent them from fitting into predominantly Christian societies. The book then expounds how other characteristics were associated with the group over time: in particular, debates about rights of citizenship, the impact of industrialization, the emergence of the nation-state, and the proliferation of new political ideologies and movements contributed to the changing nature of the 'Jewish Question'. Its content may have not remained static, but its purpose consistently questions whether or not Jews pose a threat to the stability and well-being of the societies in which they live and this, in a specifically Russian context, is what Weinberg examines so expertly.

Author : Adrienne Edgar
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501762966
Total Pages : 184 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples written by Adrienne Edgar and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-15 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples examines the racialization of identities and its impact on mixed couples and families in Soviet Central Asia. In marked contrast to its Cold War rivals, the Soviet Union celebrated mixed marriages among its diverse ethnic groups as a sign of the unbreakable friendship of peoples and the imminent emergence of a single "Soviet people." Yet the official Soviet view of ethnic nationality became increasingly primordial and even racialized in the USSR's final decades. In this context, Adrienne Edgar argues, mixed families and individuals found it impossible to transcend ethnicity, fully embrace their complex identities, and become simply "Soviet." Looking back on their lives in the Soviet Union, ethnically mixed people often reported that the "official" nationality in their identity documents did not match their subjective feelings of identity, that they were unable to speak "their own" native language, and that their ambiguous physical appearance prevented them from claiming the nationality with which they most identified. In all these ways, mixed couples and families were acutely and painfully affected by the growth of ethnic primordialism and by the tensions between the national and supranational projects in the Soviet Union. Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples is based on more than eighty in-depth oral history interviews with members of mixed families in Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, along with published and unpublished Soviet documents, scholarly and popular articles from the Soviet press, memoirs and films, and interviews with Soviet-era sociologists and ethnographers.