Writ­ten by Anna Shtern­shis, chair and direc­tor of Jew­ish stud­ies at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to, Jews in the Sovi­et Union: A His­to­ry: Post­war Life, Hopes, and Fears, 1945 – 1953, Vol­ume 4 is an extreme­ly acces­si­ble sur­vey for read­ers look­ing to learn more about Sovi­et Jew­ish life in the imme­di­ate post­war peri­od. Span­ning from the end of the sec­ond World War until soon after the death of Joseph Stal­in, the book explores how Sovi­et Jews, while recov­er­ing from the trau­mas of the Holo­caust, sought to reestab­lish Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties and insti­tu­tions in a land where much of the Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion had been killed or dis­placed. Shtern­shis fea­tures accounts of explic­it attempts to rekin­dle Jew­ish lifestyles along­side descrip­tions of trends in the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty and the fig­ure­heads who rep­re­sent­ed the main actors in institution-building.

Shtern­shis breaks down the eight-year peri­od into nine chap­ters and an epi­logue, each focus­ing on a dif­fer­ent area of Jew­ish life in the USSR. The final chap­ter, ​“The Doctor’s Plot,” address­es a con­sol­i­dat­ed effort by Sovi­et author­i­ties to mark Jews as the ​“Ooher” and to sow the public’s dis­trust in their Jew­ish neigh­bors by accus­ing Jew­ish doc­tors of pur­pose­ful mal­prac­tice in an attempt to kill high-rank­ing mem­bers of Sovi­et society.

Per­haps the most inter­est­ing sec­tion of the book, the sixth chap­ter specif­i­cal­ly deals with the revival and sub­se­quent suf­fo­ca­tion of Yid­dish the­aters in the Sovi­et Union. Shtern­shis intro­duces read­ers to both the major fig­ures of the Sovi­et Yid­dish the­ater world as well as major plays writ­ten and per­formed dur­ing the peri­od. She simul­ta­ne­ous­ly breaks down the process of Sovi­et cen­sor­ship that con­tributed to the death of Yid­dish the­ater as a sta­ple of East­ern Euro­pean Jew­ish cul­ture. One of the biggest take­aways from the book is the sheer amount of lit­er­ary works by Sovi­et Jews in the post­war peri­od that went unpub­lished as a result of Sovi­et cen­sor­ship and archival prac­tices. Shtern­shis empha­sizes the cen­tral­i­ty of Yid­dish the­atre in Sovi­et Jew­ish cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions, through which the now-extinct every­day­ness of Jew­ish cus­toms and lifestyle were reflect­ed in dra­mat­ic per­for­mance. These per­for­mances, many of which sur­vive only as frag­ments in archives, under­score the ways Jews not only had to rec­on­cile with the after­math of the Holo­caust, but also the oppres­sive cen­sor­ship prac­tices of a sec­u­lar Sovi­et soci­ety. Yid­dish the­ater and its rem­nants in Sovi­et archives exem­pli­fy the post-war forms of dis­crim­i­na­tion tak­en by a gov­ern­ment that had fought against Nazi rule.

Shtern­shis opens the book by fram­ing the dis­cus­sion as part of the strug­gle to address the con­cept of a ​“home­land” as a con­tem­po­rary Jew, invit­ing read­ers to explore the expe­ri­ence of both Jews who were able to return to their homes after mass mur­der and the destruc­tion and dis­place­ment of their com­mu­ni­ty, and those who strug­gled to do so, find­ing them­selves sur­round­ed not by neigh­bors and friends, but by Nazi col­lab­o­ra­tors and Sovi­et peo­ples who viewed them as out­siders and, at times, ene­mies. Illus­trat­ing the his­tor­i­cal peri­od as an ​“us vs. them” atmos­phere brings the book’s dis­cus­sion back to the con­tra­dic­tions of con­tem­po­rary Jew­ish life, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the con­text of the cur­rent war in Gaza, and invites the read­er to address these con­tra­dic­tions through a look back at the imme­di­ate post­war strug­gle to find iden­ti­ty and belong­ing in a home­land that had been rad­i­cal­ly changed.