When Sonia Met Boris: An Oral History of Jewish Life Under Stalin by Anna Shternshis (review)

Who gets to tell the story? In Anna Shternshis’s When Sonia Met Boris it is 474 Ashkenazi Jews, all born in the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union between 1906 and 1928, Soviet citizens who came of age during the Stalin era and experienced the attendant social upheavals and cataclysmic events that marked this tumultuous era. Through oral histories, Shternshis seeks to uncover the daily lives of her subjects, how work, home, family, and migration patterns intersected with being Jewish in a time of modernization, famine, terror, war, and, antisemitism. The collapse of the USSR engendered a massive wave of Jewish emigration. Shternshis conducted her interviews in the United States, Canada, Germany, and Russia over the course of the first decade of the twenty-first century. The result is an informative, sophisticated, and lively account of Soviet Jewish history, one that “fleshes out and revises the historical record” (21) because “some events in Soviet Jewish history simply cannot . . . be understood properly without oral histories.” (9)

When Sonia Met Boris is divided into three parts. In part one, Shternshis reflects on the practice of oral history, its strengths, and its limitations. She illustrates the techniques she used to get her interviewees to voice their histories, fully cognizant that hindsight, location, and her own role as an intermediary might severely compromise the stories they tell. In parts two and three, Shternshis examines Soviet Jewish family life and Jews in the Soviet workplace. In the eight chapters that make up these two sections, she strikes a delicate balance between a chronological thematic approach, periodically returning to topics already discussed—marriage, education, internal migration in search of work, fear of shame and arrest during Stalin’s purges—because such is the nature of human memory. The author tries to go where her subjects take her, letting them articulate their past as they remember it. But ever aware of her own role as mediator, Shternshis regularly tells the reader when her subjects’ responses surprised her, undermined her previous assumptions, or resonated with her as a scholar and—one may speculate—as a Soviet Jewish émigré. “Teachers were my favorite narrators,” writes Shternshis. “They were the most articulate, usually recalled events of the past with remarkable detail, were amazing storytellers, spoke loudly and clearly, and made sure the interviewer understood their point,” even though “they quickly recognized the interviewer’s agenda and sometimes exaggerated.” (123) Such personal interjections strengthen Shternshis’s work, because they remind the reader that the collector and interpreter of oral histories is not (and can never be) an impartial conveyer of unfiltered material.

Although Shternshis’s composite picture of “the first Soviet Jewish generation” offers insight into many questions typically raised by scholars, two conclusions stand out. First, the final period of Stalin’s reign, 1948–53—what is commonly referred to as “the black years of Soviet Jewry” because of the sharp uptick in state-sponsored antisemitism—was in fact a turning point in the lives of most of her subjects. “Whoever forgot that he was as a Jew, or didn’t know, learned about it in 1948!” (122) stated countless interviewees to Shternshis, because being Jewish became a liability; it prompted an enduring awareness that antisemitism could lead to obstructed professional mobility, public ridicule, and even arrest. But “these stories of antisemitism are not solely tales of victimhood,” (108) cautions Shternshis, because her subjects presented them as “quests,” as challenges that they needed to face and surmount, much as “one beats a disease, succeeding despite being burdened by misfortune.” (188) Shternshis may not be the first historian to reach this conclusion, but her use of oral testimony allows us to see how Soviet Jews perceived their changing relationship to the state and to their non-Jewish neighbors. It reveals the many secrets people kept and it fills in the spaces of silence historians encounter in archival and printed sources...