Review of Fialkova, Larisa and Maria N. Yelenevskay. Ex-Soviets in Israel: From Personal Narratives to a Group Portrait. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. xiii+373pp. Deborah Golden, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Education, University of Haifa.

In the preface to their book, "Ex-Soviets in Israel: From Personal Narratives to a Group Portrait", Larisa Fialkova and Maria N. Yelenevskaya set out to write "an engaging book about the influence of culture on individuals and the recreation of culture by individuals." The book is based on in-depth interviews with 143 Soviet Jews who migrated to Israel between 1989 and 1999. Although the authors did not intentionally create a representative sample, the group of interviewees as a whole reflects essential demographic features of the 1990s migrant group in Israel from the former Soviet Union. All the interviewees come from urban centers in the former Soviet Union; the vast majority lived in the European section of the FSU, in particular Russia and Ukraine, the rest in the Asian and Caucasian republics. A high proportion of interviewees hold academic degrees; most are Jewish; and the group includes more women than men.

The open ended interviews, most of which were carried out by the authors in Russian, sought to elicit what the authors call "personal-experience stories" in which the interviewees relate their immigration experiences. This wealth of stories has been organized into six chapters, each of which presents personal narratives according to major organizing themes. These themes include: immigration and the evolution of identity (chapter 2); the image of the other (chapter 3); symbolic dimensions of time and space (chapter 4); lucky coincidence, fate and miracles (chapter 5); language (chapter 6); and folklore (chapter 7). In addition, the book includes an introductory chapter, a chapter that provides a detailed and reflexive account of the fieldwork and methodology, as well as a final concluding chapter.

What I most liked about this book was the poignant intimacy of the newcomers’ stories, and the understanding that processes of migration are made up of numerous concrete, sensory changes in the textures of everyday life. Ella, for instance, describes the process of coming to a decision to leave, not as an abstract process, but rather "[a]nd the other thing, er people started leaving. And I caught myself thinking that I keep crossing out numbers in my telephone book … " (p.49). Or, as related by Anastasia, "I used to work in an antique bookstore, and every day people came to sell lots of books …" (p.41). Similarly, the transition to a new country is experienced first and foremost in sensory terms: the perception of warmth on the skin (p. 168), or the "domestication of the new space" described by Maria as a detailed blow by blow battle with cockroaches and the taming of her fear of them (p. 171-172), or the difficulty of finding one's home in the new home: "The most comfortable place for me was a bus, I said. This is my home." (p. 177).

The book is a pleasure to read – flowing and full. Each chapter, sometimes particular stories, are accompanied by the authors' – themselves both immigrants from the same immigrant wave – deep, personal familiarity with the social, cultural, and political context from which their interviewees come. The book serves as a treasure chest of

images, associations, and experiences from these peoples' former lives, and shows how their world of associations continued to echo in, and render accessible, the new world in which the newcomers found themselves, often unprepared. Indeed, in this regard, the book is a must for any social scientist writing about immigrants from the former Soviet Union. In the Israeli scholarly context, with which I am most familiar, scholars writing about newcomers are sometimes unfamiliar with the worlds from which the newcomers hail, and their work (mine included) tends to adopt, albeit unintentionally, the Zionist premise according to which the moment of arrival in Israel is considered to be the significant beginning of the newcomers' story. The authors of this study are indeed in a privileged position of familiarity with the newcomers' former worlds, as well as with the wide range of theoretical and empirical literature regarding this wave of newcomers.

The ease with which the book may be read can also be attributed to the fact that each chapter can be read in itself – the reader can dip in anywhere. In this regard, the book is structured as a collection. The stories are loosely organized in thematic chapters, each framed by different sets of theoretical issues and a wide range of disciplines. In this sense, the book engages with different theoretical conversations, an eclecticism that is both impressive and evocative, and yet also leads to a lack of clear conceptual thrust. Moreover, I was left wanting the authors to have brought their knowledge and insights to bear on a more elaborate and integrative "group portrait" of the immigrants, with whom we had become acquainted through their personal narratives. As a non-folklorist, I was also curious about folklore's unique contribution, and its distinction from other genres. I could not find such a distinction; indeed, the authors themselves acknowledge folklore as indicative of "blurred genres." Still, throughout the book, folklore is sometimes employed as a wide blanket term difficult to distinguish from other terms such as myths, images, life history, personal experience stories; but sometimes used in a narrower sense, such as the discussion about the deep structure of stories about miracles.

As I have said, for me, the book is most powerful in describing the ways immigrants delve into their own cultural worlds in order to make sense of the radical break in their lives brought about by the act of migration – how the unfamiliar world is rendered familiar by framing it in familiar terms. In some chapters, these past associations reveal the "resilience of Soviet ideological clichés and stereotypes" (p. 201); in others, the past associations show greater fluidity and transformation. One of the more general, interesting questions emerging out of the book is to try and understand in which spheres of life, in which contexts, and among which newcomers, cultural antecedents are more or less resistant to change.