Böcker av Maxim D. Shrayer

This volume offers a detailed analysis of the literary careers of the three leading representatives of Russian village prose, Viktor Astafiev, Vasily Belov, and Valentin Rasputin. It demonstrates how the "village" writers actively disseminated both the popular and the state-sponsored forms of Soviet antisemitism. Shrayer argues that the leading "village" writers caused the decline of Russian village prose by having inscribed the anti-Semitic narrative into their literary works and public discursive statements.

From a bilingual master of the literary memoir comes this movingand humorous story of losing immigrant baggage and trying to reclaim it for hisAmerican future.

Simon Reznikov, the Boston-based immigrant protagonist of Maxim D. Shrayer's A Russian Immigrant, is restless. Unresolved feelings about his Jewish (and American) present and his Russian (and Soviet) past prevent Reznikov from easily putting down roots in his new country.

An emigration story, this book explores the rapid expansion of identity at the cusp of American life. Told in a first-person narrative, it is also a love story, in which the romantic protagonist is torn between Russian and Western women.

Whether set in Maxim Shrayer's native Russia or in North America and Western Europe, this title features eight stories that explore emotionally intricate relationships that cross traditional boundaries of ethnicity, religion, and culture.

In his captivating new book, based on new evidence and a series of interviews, Maxim D. Shrayer offers a journalistic portrait of Russia's dwindling yet still vibrant and influential Jewish community. This is simultaneously an in-depth exploration of the texture of Jewish life in Putin's Russia and an emigre's moving elegy for Russia's Jews.