The issue of bringing anthropology back to Jewish Studies has been an important one for several decades. It gave rise to a growing body of research that questions the conventional definition of Jewishness centered primarily on religion and explores into how it is differently produced, practiced, and negotiated in different socio-cultural contexts. Soviet/post-Soviet Jews as a very specific configuration of Jewish collectivity pleads for anthropological interventions—not only to discard the label of “thin” culture, but, importantly, to be understood on its own terms, as a particular version of twentieth-century Jewish diasporic identity.
Anna Shternshis’ book does precisely that: it introduces the reader to a broad span of Soviet life as seen through “Jewish eyes,” putting together extensive oral history as one anthropological method with historical inquiry about the recent past. By looking at the narratives produced by the last generation of Soviet Jews who experienced pre-WWII Soviet realities as young adults, the book uncovers political, ideological, and social-cultural forces at work in shaping Jewish professional and family choices over several decades of the socialist regime. A challenging methodological task, this longitudinal perspective carries the substantive message of the book: by discussing how Jewishness affected people's responses to various governmental policies and seminal moments in the country's history, it shows that Jewish identity was likewise changing over time—and very substantially so.
In particular, the author discusses the critical historical juncture of 1930s, which for Soviet Jews launched the “great retreat” “from radical communist values into a more conservative, traditional, almost prerevolutionary society … [that] went into full swing after the war” (47). What makes this period significant for Soviet Jewish history is that while abandonment of “traditional” practices, especially of a religious nature, was a mass phenomenon of the first decades after the revolution, hardly ethnically specific in itself, this later “retreat” was a distinct Jewish response to the growing antisemitic atmosphere in the country as well as the tacit (and at times not so tacit) governmental policies that curbed Jewish upward mobility and public culture. Hence the 1930s witnessed “the return of the shadkhan” and traditional wedding practices (such as, for instance, matchmaking), even in places like Moscow and Leningrad. A certain paradox does not escape the author's attention: the regime that first made considerable efforts to deprive Jews of their traditions, now enabled their reappearance, “in a shifted but still recognizable form” (88).
This return to traditionalism, even though in its reduced, largely non-religious and probably not “correct” version, is seen by the author as an attempt to obtain understanding and protection “among one's own” vis-à-vis a largely hostile public environment. In her view, this private, family-based solidarity became an essential foundation of post-war Soviet Jewish collective identity.
A particular merit of the book consists in its “international dimension”: the author not only meticulously analyzes the content of interviews recorded in Russia, Germany, the US, and Canada, but investigates how the narrative strategies of her interviewees are embedded in the particular socio-cultural realities in which they are produced, and how they are shaped by specific Jewish policies in four the respective countries. Like any oral history, the book does not ask how “accurately” oral testimonies present the “actual past,” but rather, how different “pasts” are differently constructed in the present. In the case of Shternshis’ book, this approach provides one more important insight: “Soviet Jews” were anything but a homogenous entity, but an internally diverse population with varying individual and collective subjectivities, specific perceptions, and interpretations of Soviet reality, as well as particular rationalities underlying life choices. This fact becomes particularly conspicuous when Shternshis introduces “Jewish actors” who rarely if at all appeared on the Soviet Jewish “scene”—accountants, salespeople, blue-collar workers, personnel of the Yiddish public culture system, and others.
In spite of the somber conclusion on the progressive three-stage destruction of “Jewish communal settings” in the Soviet Union—“the first … on a religious level in the 1920s and 1930s, the second on a physical level in the early 1940s, and the third on a cultural one in the late 1940s” (174)—the book ends with a positive assertion about the emergence of a new Jewish identity as a result of the Soviet experience. This new identity bears a pronouncedly syncretic character and yet is “fully equipped with markers of thick identity, complete with its language (Russian), foods (Russian and Jewish, but not kosher), rituals (which combine Judaism, Christianity, and the Soviet legacy), and notions of a shared past and values” (193).
However paradoxical this assertion may seem, one should recognize that Anna Shternshis’ new book, like her previous monograph, Soviet and Kosher, is 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.
