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Professor of Russian, English and Jewish Studies Maxim D. Shrayer, a critically acclaimed author, has published a powerful new memoir: Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story. In the first English-language, autobiographical and nonfictional account of growing up Jewish in the former USSR — of refuseniks and the Jewish exodus from Russia — Shrayer poignantly conveys the triumphs and humiliations of a Soviet childhood and expresses the dreams and fears of his family, which never lost hope for acceptance and a better life.
In 1987, the Shrayer family left the Soviet Union, after waiting nearly nine years. They were among the veteran Jewish refuseniks who, during the dawn of Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, were granted exit visas to emigrate from the country. Shrayer’s parents, writer David Shrayer-Petrov and translator Emilia Shrayer, had been refusenik activists.
“It was important to tell this story because the Jewish experience in Russia — and especially during the Soviet period — is not well understood in America,” he explains, “this despite the fact that it’s now difficult to imagine the fabric of our communities without ex-Soviet Jews.
“The Jewish exodus from the Soviet Union was the last great wave of immigrants to North America and to Israel, and this story is central to the narrative of both American history and Jewish history,” adds Shrayer, a member of the Slavic and Eastern Languages and Literatures Department since 1996.
According to its publisher, Syracuse University Press/Library of Modern Jewish Literature, Leaving Russia is narrated in the tradition of Tolstoy’s confessional trilogy and Nabokov’s autobiography. It is a searing account of the KGB’s persecution of refuseniks, a young poet’s rebellion against totalitarian culture, and Soviet fantasies of the West during the Cold War.
Against a backdrop of politics, travel and ethnic conflict, Shrayer’s remembrances, his moving story and evocative writing offer humor and tenderness, longing and violence. Leaving Russia is a love story in which a young Jew’s love is unrequited and his heart is forever broken by his homeland.
A prolific and award-winning scholar, author and translator, Shrayer grew up in Moscow and left the Soviet Union at 20. In Leaving Russia, he hopes to convey “the sense of growing up with a constant sense of both belonging and non-belonging — which is the way most Jews felt in the Soviet Union.
“I wanted to capture how a young Jewish child learns the grammar of living a double life, and how this double life affects one, both negatively and positively. I wanted to explain how it is possible to feel so strongly attached to a place — as many Jews felt about Russia — and yet to be resolute in one’s desire to leave it, as Jewish refuseniks felt when they fought for their right to freedom.”
Though a “prequel” in terms of its timeline, Leaving Russia follows Shrayer’s 2007 literary memoir Waiting for America: A Story of Emigration. That book tells the story of his life in transit as a Jewish refugee, beginning the day his family left Moscow in June 1987 and spans their three months in Europe, waiting for American visas.
This new book, Shrayer says, is “both a seething memoir of Jewish life and death on the brink of the Soviet Empire’s collapse and an analytical autobiography of an ex-Soviet Jew; told in a systematic, linear fashion, it includes many photographs from the family archive. Leaving Russia ended up being a story of trauma and persecution, though it depicts many happy moments of love, friendship, and literary growth.”
Shrayer writes in his book’s epilogue: “It’s impossible to tell how things would have turned out had I stayed in Russia. And yet, for better or for worse, Russia had made me who I was at the time of the leaving, in 1987. And America enabled me, a 20-year-old Jewish-Russian immigrant, to start unlocking the hyphens of my self. She let me in and took me as her own—Soviet lock, Russian stock, and Jewish barrel.”
See Shrayer’s website, www.shrayer.com, for more about his life and work. A book launch for Leaving Russia will take place on Dec. 12 at 7 p.m. at the Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Street in Coolidge Corner, Brookline.