Anna Shternshis is the Al and Malka Green Associate Professor in Yiddish Language and Literature and the Director of Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923 - 1939 (2006) and more than twenty articles on the Soviet Jewish experience during World War II, Russian Jewish culture, and the post-Soviet Jewish diaspora.

"...this is a very usable and useful book for teaching courses on not only Soviet-Jewish history and anthropology, but for broader insight into innovative approaches toward Soviet nationalities studies." -- Dmitry Tartakovsky, The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review

"The study makes a valuable contribution to the growing literature in Soviet oral history on everyday experiences of the Stalinist regime and of Soviet Jewry ... a very readable book" -- Melanie Ilic, History

"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." -- Anna Kushkova, Slavic Review

"[T]he overall contribution of the book [is]...significant....[S]uch a study sits well alongside existing literature on everyday Stalinism, and with its focus on both Jewish domestic and work life offers a substantial contribution to this area....[T]he book will be a valuable resource for those who research and teach in the area of modern Russian, eastern European and Jewish studies."--Cai Parry-Jones, Oral History Review

"In this book, Shternshis turned a seemingly disparate set of historical and personal data points into a carefully woven narrative tapestry....Scholars and interested readers will benefit in tremendous way from this book and will find in the process an accessible, yet innovative, narrative model. This book deserves to be read by scholars and interested readers as a significant methodological and interpretive accomplishment. Even for those uninterested in this methodological aspect of When Sonia Met Boris, the book is highly readable and delightful as a compendium of Jewish voices with unique and unexpected stories to tell."--Andrew C. ReedThe Russian Review