Researching Jewish Luck led Leslie and me down many academic paths as we pieced together the Jewish world of Vera and Alla. If you glance at our extensive bibliography, you’ll discover that we investigated newer academic findings as well as checking sources written before the opening of the Soviet archives in the early 1990s.
When I began to read Yaacov Ro’i’s compilation of 14 scholarly articles in The Jewish Movement in the Soviet Union, I felt like the actor in the V-8 juice commercial—“I shoulda had access to this volume before we began researching!”
I enjoy a good novel, a thrilling mystery and a compelling memoir but I revel in an academic work that clarifies and explains. I raced through the articles soaking in the data and analysis and checking the footnotes to see if Leslie and I had read the same sources. About halfway through the volume, I began to wonder what...



