Demonstration of the documentary "Find a Jew" in Berlin 23 January 2025

Premiere at the Jewish Community! Documentary, 78 min, 2022, Russian, UT English.
The film will be presentedby the director Igor Sadreev andthe author of the idea and screenplay Anna Narinskaya .

From the "doctors' conspiracy" to the "Zionist rouble": anti-Semitism was also part of everyday life in the Soviet Union.

The Jews were described as "the Soviet Union's greatest secret". For seventy years they existed in a zone of silence, but this silence attracted a burning and constant interest. And this interest could be either anti-Semitic or philo-Semitic - and often the manifestations of these two "interests" merged until they were completely indistinguishable. Some were convinced that the Jews had infiltrated everywhere, right to the top of the Soviet government, and dominated the entire USSR. Others looked for Jewish clues in popular books, songs and movies, and even the most popular Soviet cartoon characters for children - Cheburashka and Leopold the Cat - were written off as Jews. The third saw Jewish secret signs everywhere: on famous paintings, posters, coins and even on the Moscow metro map.

Where are the real facts and where are the figments of a sick imagination - and above all, how should we deal with them? As a game, as an innocent "fig in the pocket", or as a tentacle of the Zionist conspiracy - one of the important themes that made up the fabric of Soviet state anti-Semitism? And the phenomenon of the Soviet Jew himself is another thing that is not very clear, or rather, not very tangible. How could he remain a Jew without largely preserving his religion and his language, without preserving traditions and often joyfully adopting new traditions?

Anna Narinskaya, a cultural critic and journalist who grew up in a "non-Jewish Jewish family", talks to contemporary witnesses - her friends and relatives, anthropologists and researchers of mass culture - and, it seems, she is moving towards the answer to all these questions. But this search leads her to a very, very strange place.