Newswise — A new literary memoir by noted author and scholar Maxim D. Shrayer, professor of Russian and English at Boston College, offers a distinctive point of view on the modern immigration experience.
In Waiting for America: A Story of Emigration, published this autumn by Syracuse University Press, Shrayer recounts a significant transitional period in his youth: the two-months following his family's departure from their native Russia in preparation for their journey from Europe to the United States. Shrayer's is the first English-language memoir to capture the experience of Soviet Jews waiting in Europe while in transit to North America.
Living in Vienna and then in and outside Rome as he and his parents awaited their U.S. refugee visa in the summer of 1987, Shrayer found freedoms, and also complications, he had never known before, especially in the realm of personal relationships. He also experienced the shock, thrill, and anonymity of encountering Western democracies, and running into European roadblocks while shedding Soviet taboos.
"All I want to do is get away"¦I want to be with Italians, I want to forget that I am myself--a Russian, a Jew, a refugee," says the young protagonist halfway through the memoir, in the coastal Italian resort of Ladispoli, as he finds his composite identity too burdensome.
Shrayer's first-person, often confessional narration eschews familiar themes -- the new arrival's travails in America; nostalgia for the ancestral home; the misery and loneliness of a refugee's plight -- in favor of a more nuanced, ultimately upbeat meditation on the metaphorical as well as actual passage immigration heralds.
"The book is, first of all, a story about family baggage, about the inescapability of family ties and traps, and about the blissful burden of memory which immigrants carry with them to the New World," says Shrayer, who also describes the book as "a fragmented love story," in which he -- as a romantic 20-year-old poet -- finds himself "torn between women from the Jewish-Russian refugee community, who bind [him] to their shared Russian past, and European women, who represent the alluring promise of sexual freedom and who encourage fast-track assimilation.
"Waiting for America is," he says, "finally, a memoir of emigration/immigration, of severance from Russia that was never a true home to the Jews."
The book, his eighth, also represents a departure for Shrayer as his first book-length literary work written and published in English. Originally a writer of Russian poetry and prose before gradually turning to fiction and creative non-fiction in English, Shrayer says he has had a longstanding interest in memoir and autobiographical writing.
"I guess this sort of a book has always been in me, and it was a matter of letting it germinate and come to fruition. I love hybrid genres, and my challenge in this book was to tell a story based on documentary, remembered and reconstructed past, in such a way that it reads like a work of art."
At the same time as he worked on this book, he also was editing and co-translating another labor of love -- An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Dual Identity in Prose and Poetry. Also published this year, by M. E. Sharpe, the anthology gathers stories, excerpts from novels, essays, memoirs, and poems by more than 130 Jewish writers of the past two centuries who worked in the Russian language, most appearing for the first time in English or in new translations. The two-volume set is so extensive and wide-ranging that it doubles as a history of Jewish-Russian literature and an encyclopedia of Jewish culture in the Russian language and in the Russian lands. A Forward reviewer characterized it as a "wonder."
"By the end of my period of research and selection I must have read and considered works by 300 authors, from some very famous to some very unknown or forgotten," says Shrayer, who acknowledges that the parallel tracks of working on the two books, the anthology and the memoir, was a challenge.
The academic writing and other scholarly projects tended to limit the attention he could devote to Waiting for America, but about two years ago he decided he needed to focus on completing the work.
"My wife was pregnant with our first child, and I wanted to finish the book and send it out into the world," explains Shrayer, who says he completed his final editing of the text with his infant daughter Mira sleeping on his chest. Copies of Waiting for America arrived the day Shrayer and his wife, Dr. Karen E. Lasser, brought their new daughter Tatiana home from the hospital.
Now that both works are finally complete, Shrayer finds he continues to take pleasure in autobiographical and memoir writing, and is now writing a book on growing up in the Soviet Union. "Who knows, perhaps one day I will write a story of becoming American," he says. "When I turned 40 last summer, I had been living in this country for half of my life. Not too bad for a Jewish kid from Moscow, is it?"
MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Maxim D. Shrayer was born in Moscow in 1967 to a Jewish-Russian family, and spent almost nine years as a refusenik before he and his parents left the USSR and immigrated to the United States, settling in Providence, Rhode Island in 1987.
Shrayer was educated at Moscow University, Brown University, Rutgers University and Yale University. In 1996, he joined the faculty at Boston College, where he now is professor of Russian and English and chair of the Department of Slavic and Eastern Languages, as well as founding co-director of its Jewish Studies Program.
In addition to Waiting for America and An Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature, among Shrayer's books are the acclaimed critical studies, The World of Nabokov's Stories; Nabokov: Themes and Variations; Russian Poet/Soviet Jew: The Legacy of Eduard Bagritskii; Genrikh Sapgir: An Avant-Garde Classic (with D. Shrayer-Petrov), and three collections of Russian poetry. He also edited and co-translated the collections Jonah and Sarah: Jewish Stories of Russia and America and Autumn in Yalta: A Novel and Three Stories, by his father, the Jewish-Russian writer David Shrayer-Petrov. Shrayer's English-language prose, poetry, and translations have appeared in Agni, Commentary, Kenyon Review, Massachusetts Review, Partisan Review, Southwest Review and other magazines. He has been the recipient of a number of fellowships, including those from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Bogliasco Foundation.
Shrayer lives in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts with his wife, Dr. Karen E. Lasser, and their two daughters.
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