Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story

by Maxim D. Shrayer

Overview

Narrated in the tradition of Tolstoy's confessional trilogy and Nabokov's autobiog­raphy, Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story is a searing account of growing up a Jewish refusenik, of a young poet's rebellion against totalitarian culture, and of Soviet fantasies of the West during the Cold War. Shrayer's remembrances ore set against a rich backdrop of politics, travel, and ethnic conflict on the brink of the Soviet empire's collapse. His moving story offers generous doses of humor and tenderness, counterbalanced with longing and violence.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780815610885
Publisher:	Syracuse University Press
Publication date:	01/16/2017
Series:	Library of Modern Jewish Literature
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	376
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.80(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Born in Moscow in 1967 in a writer's family, Maxim D. Shrayer is a professor at Boston College and a bilingual writer and translator. Shrayer has authored over ten books, among them, the memoir Waiting for America, the story collection Yam Kippur in Amsterdam, and the Holocaust study I Saw It. Shrayer's Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature won a 2007 National Jewish Book Award, and in 2012, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, with his wife and two daughters. Visit Shrayer's website at www.shrayer.com.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations xi

Acknowledgments xiii

Prologue xv

Part 1 The End of Childhood

1 Of Goat Milk and Marble Lions 3

2 Different 12

3 Becoming Refuseniks 30

Interlude: Dunes of Happiness 53

4 Cavalier of the Gold Medal 76

Part 2 The Expedition

5 Moscow State 201

Interlude: Summertime 118

6 Poetry, Love, Persecution 126

Interlude: Facts and Arguments 155

7 Across the Steppe and into the Black Sea 163

Part 3 The Short Goodbye

8 Last Autumn 217

Interlude: Readers' Reports 238

9 Purim-shpil 248

Interlude: Family Tree 272

10 Taking Leave 284

Epilogue: In America? 312

Index of Names and Places 315

Editorial Reviews

In this book, Shrayer describes an emotional journey-not just from Russia to America, but from spiritual darkness into light. The book also explains why Jews felt forced to leave a country they loved, when it grew clear that country would never, could never, love them in return.

CBS News national correspondent Wyatt Andrews

Maxim D. Shrayer's stunning memoir Leaving Russia . . . should be assigned reading for anyone interested in the Jewish experience of the twentieth century.

Jewish Book World

Maxim D. Shrayer grew up as a refusenik in the Soviet Union, and this exquisite memoir tells the story of what that meant. An unforgettable first-person account of Jewish life and Jewish suffering during the final years of Russian Communism.

Jonathan D. Sarna

Maxim D. Shrayer's stunning memoir Leaving Russia is an engaging story of growing up as the son of Jewish intellectuals in Moscow who applied for emigration when he was ten to give him a future as a Jew. Their request was refused, and thus they became the "refuseniks." Shrayer's parents were stripped of their academic careers, and the narrator embarked on a ten-year battle to make the Soviet system work for him. Individuals sometimes gave him a chance, but the system never did. His father was banned from publishing, yet the son attempts, in vain of course, to find a publisher for his first poems. He weathers anti-Semitic jeers at school, but he is never ashamed of being Jewish. His family's cohesion is admirable, and their concrete-tower apartment, where they host refusenik salons, becomes a palpable home for the reader.

Summers spent at the Baltic seaside resort of Pärnu provide respite; Jewish families from across the USSR reunite every summer and the narrator meets his two best friends there. Shrayer captures the glassy leisure of Estonian summers spent in the company of artsy friends, while Moscow looms as a pressure cooker of majestic beauty and harsh realities.

Later, Shrayer surprises with a homage to Russia in his atmospheric account of a summer expedition to the Caucasus as a Soil Science student. He takes the reader along to experience Mother Russia in the vastness of the steppe, the forbidding mountains along the Georgian border, and the crumbling country estates where fruit trees have avoided collectivization and the youths can gorge on cherries. Clearly he is grateful for seeing the country beyond the urban realities and the Baltic idyll. Upon his return to Moscow, his refusenik conscience swings into place. He resigns from the Komsomol (Soviet youth organization) after his mother is beaten during a demonstration for the release of refusenik hero Yosef Begun. When the family is finally granted permission to emigrate in 1987, the absurdities they endure show that here a Jewish family had to leave not because they hated Russia, but because life in the Soviet system had become untenable. Often, in discussions of twentieth-century Jewish history, the plight of Soviet Jewry recedes behind the calamity of the Holocaust. Leaving Russia should be assigned reading for anyone interested in the Jewish experience of the twentieth century.

Jewish Book Council Reviews - Annette Gendler