Product Description: These fourteen stories by the acclaimed master of Jewish-Russian fiction are set in the former USSR, Western Europe, and America. Dinner with Stalin features Soviet Jews grappling with issues of identity, acculturation, and assimilation...read more

Product Description: A memoir of coming of age and struggling to leave the USSR. Shrayer chronicles the triumphs and humiliations of a Soviet childhood and expresses the dreams and fears of a Jewish family that never gave up its hopes for a better life...read more

Product Description: In this ground-breaking book, based on archival and field research and previously unknown historical evidence, Maxim D. Shrayer introduces the work of Ilya Selvinsky, the first Jewish-Russian poet to depict the Holocaust (Shoah) in the occupied Soviet territories...read more

Whether set in Maxim Shrayer’s native Russia or in North America andWestern Europe, the eight stories in this collection explore emotionallyintricate relationships that cross traditional boundaries of ethnicity, religion,and culture. Tracing the lives, obsessions, and aspirations of Jewish-Russianimmigrants, these poignant, humorous, and tender stories create anexpansive portrait of individuals struggling to come to terms with ghosts oftheir European pasts while simultaneously seeking to build new lives in theirAmerican present.The title story follows Jake Glaz, a young Jewish man apprehensiveabout intermarriage to a Catholic woman. After realizing Erin will not convert,Jake leaves the United States to spend Yom Kippur in Amsterdam, “abeautiful place for a Jew to atone.” In “Sonetchka,” a literary scholar andhis former Moscow girlfriend reunite in her suburban Connecticut apartment.As they reminisce about their Soviet youth and quietly admire eachother’s professional successes, both wrestle with the curious mix of prosperity,loneliness, and insecurity that defines their lives in the United States.Yom Kippur in Amsterdam takes the immigrant narrative into the twentyfirstcentury. Emerging from the tradition of Isaac Babel, Vladimir Nabokov,and Isaac Bachevis Singer, Shrayer’s vibrant literary voice significantlycontributes to the evolution of Jewish writing in America.

Product Description: The powerful voice of David Shrayer-Petrov's immigrant fiction blends Russian, Jewish, and American traditions. Collecting an autobiographical novel and three short stories, "Autumn in Yalta" brings together the achievements of the great Russian masters Chekhov and Nabokov and the magisterial Jewish and American storytellers Bashevis Singer and Malamud...read more

Product Description: Russian Poet/Soviet Jew: The Legacy of Eduard Bagritskii is a long-awaited work of biography and literary criticism. Maxim D. Shrayer explores the problem of Jewish identity in the early Soviet period by examining the short but brilliant career of Eduard Bagritskii (1895-1934), a major Russian-Jewish poet...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)