You might say she began her performance career as a car radio. Her family, too poor when they lived in Israel to afford a car with a stereo, would pretend their then pre-teen daughter was the sound system while they drove. “My dad would say, ‘Stevie Wonder,’ ” she says, “and I’d sing a Stevie Wonder song. Then he might say, ‘Deep Purple,’ and I’d sing one of theirs.” She had, even then, an extensive repertoire. She’d been singing along to jazz records ever since she was a child in Russia.

Now she’s 24 years old, lives with her boyfriend off St. Clair West, and people all over the world are listening to her. Her first album, Sophie Milman, sold 100,000 copies and hit the Billboard top five in Canada and top 15 in the States. Her latest album, Make Someone Happy, hit number four on Billboard’s jazz charts. When we spoke, she had just returned from an extensive tour of the U.S., Japan, China, Taiwan and Malaysia. This month, she’s taking on Canada (with a stop at Massey Hall on December 8).

Enough success, perhaps, to turn a young woman’s head to dreams of a life in the floating, hyper-oxygenated world that is celebrity. But Milman’s idea of a sexy topic is transitional economies, with a focus on Russia—the theme of a course she’s taking this year at U of T, and not a subject likely to earn her cred with the tabloid set. In person, she gives a sense of restrained vivacity, of being grounded well beyond her years—she’s already talking of marriage one day, of children, of not being willing to sacrifice all that just to have a career. “I’m the homey type,” she says. Not surprising, given her peripatetic background.

Milman was born in the city of Ufa, capital of the Republic of Bashkortostan in the Ural mountains. Her family emigrated to Israel when she was seven. Arriving with almost nothing, they had to find jobs, friends, learn a new language. Nine years later—by which time Sophie had a brother—the family moved again, to Canada. “I hated it,” she says. “In Israel, I’d forgotten what minus temperatures felt like. I was miserable in high school. The politeness, compared to hot-blooded Russians or Israelis, drove us crazy.”

She was saved by the public library. “I didn’t have a lot of friends, so I’d go to the library and check out jazz records and take them home. I learned them all, every single lick on every record.” Not that she was thinking of a career as a singer. Singing was just a hobby, and she’d solo at high school music nights every chance she got. Then, in 2002, at the age of 19, she got “discovered” (and you can hear the little quotation marks in her tone—she knows what an entertainment career cliché that is). Local jazz pianist and entre­preneur Bill King had put together a series called Real Divas, and a friend who’d heard about it suggested she give it a try. She did. The crowd loved what they heard. By the time her third gig came round, a representative from Linus Entertainment was in the crowd. At the end of the show, he offered her a recording contract.