All immigrants have a story to tell: where they came from, why they came, what they hoped to find in their new homeland. The voices heard in Line Five: The Internal Passport are those of nineteen Soviet Jewish families who fled the USSR between Glasnost, in 1986, and the collapse of the Soviet state late in 1991. Their stories span nearly a century of political upheaval, from World War I and the Revolution through the Stalin era, World War II, and the Cold War decades.

Includes Chernobyl. The fifty speakers come from areas as diverse as the Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Siberia, and Azerbaijan. They range in age from eighty-two to eleven and include doctors, scientists, teachers, an artist, and a champion boxer. Though all left the Soviet Union to escape repression as Jews, many had no experience of Jewish tradition. Their identity as Jews came from the discriminatory fifth line of their internal passports, and from their universal treatment.

As second-class citizens. This book is the culmination of an ambitious oral history project undertaken by the Women's Auxiliary of the Jewish Community Centers of Chicago. Fifty immigrant histories were recorded on tape and in transcript, comprising an archive that is now housed both at the Spertus College Library of Judaica and at the Chicago Historical Society. The most interesting and representative aspects of these are published in Line Five. By turns horrifying.

Poignant, perceptive, and funny, they provide eyewitness accounts of some of this century's most cataclysmic events, and a unique record of day-to-day life in the former Soviet Union.