During the latter part of the twentieth century, there was a country called Yugoslavia. Built on the ruins of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the post-World War II Socialist Federated Republic of Yugoslavia was an ethnically diverse state comprised of six republics, which, by the 1960s, was committed to a foreign policy of non-alignment and to the domestic programs of worker self–management and “brotherhood and unity” among its peoples (see, e.g., Banac 1984; P. Ramet 1985; Shoup 1968; Zimmerman 1987). Like most other European states, the decennial census became a defining feature of Yugoslavia's sovereignty and modernity (Kertzer and Arel 2002: 7).

Conversations with recent immigrants from the Soviet Union' often revolve around the theme of druzhba. In Israel and America alike, Russian-Jewish newcomers wistfully and passionately describe their old circles of friends as involved in absorbing conversations about literature, cinema, and news from abroad. As they reminisce, Soviet Jewish immigrants break into smiles and relate the political jokes and critical anecdotes they heard and told in these circles. They tell too of friends pooling scarce resources to help each other purchase a car, an apartment or summer home, a once-in-a-lifetime find on the black market, or, simply, food. Happily they remember birthday and New Year's parties that just seemed to have happened; they describe festive singing and dancing in joyful gatherings that were never formal or prearranged.