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This article examines two sets of private family archives and the diaries they contain. The authors included items from their own archives throughout their texts. What was their goal in inserting photographs, fragments of letters, official documents, and private papers into these texts? Can this practice shed light on the mechanisms of construction and preservation of family identity as well as on communication within families in the Soviet Union, a perspective that has otherwise remained inaccessible using other sources? Like his grandfather Gora, a legal practitioner in Leningrad, Pusin was interested in newspapers. He was leafing through the copy of Pravda that Abram had brought with him when he stumbled upon an article about the Zionists and how harmful their ideas were for Communism. And so, out of the blue, he discovered to his horror that Zionists were the same as “Jews.” He already knew that his grandfather Abram was Jewish, but he had never paid it any attention. Yet now it turned out that he too was an enemy, a Zionist. Abram set about reassuring him, pointing out that the fact that Basia [the nickname given to Agniia Stefanovna Pukhal’skaia] descended from “the nobility” did not make her an enemy. Pusin seemed to calm down, but thought about what he had heard. … As usual, the arrival of Yura meant that it was Yasik’s birthday. He was turning three. The first question Pusin asked him was: “So, Yura, are you of Jewish or noble origin?” Stunned, Yura replied, “You know, I think I’m more Jewish.”1 I first heard this story long before I learned that it was mentioned in the memoirs of one of my distant relatives. This exchange, which must be understood in the context of rising anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, took place in a dacha near Moscow in July 1976.2 The story’s characters are: Basia, the author of the memoir; her husband Abram; their daughter-in-law’s father, Gora; their daughter’s husband, Yura; their seven-year-old grandson from Leningrad, Pusin; and another grandson from Sverdlovsk, Yasik. Before this article begins, it is important to note the lightheartedness with which the grandfather reminds his grandson of his grandmother’s noble origins, as if such a trait were self-evident in the Soviet Union of the 1970s, a decade before Mikhail Gorbachev launched glasnost. The grandfather’s frankness can be explained, on the one hand, by the fact that Abram and Basia’s family had assembled a sizable archive containing concrete evidence of Basia’s noble origins and, on the other hand, by the fact that these archives were frequently used during family exchanges, including those with small grandchildren. Two sets of family archives, including memoirs belonging to my distant relatives, provide the subject of this article.