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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. In January 1942, while serving as a military
journalist, Selvinsky witnessed the immediate aftermath of the
massacre of thousands of Jews outside the Crimean city of Kerch,
and thereafter composed and published poems about it. Shrayer
painstakingly reconstructs the details of the Nazi atrocities
witnessed by Selvinsky, and shows that in 1943, as Stalin's regime
increasingly refused to report the annihilation of Jews in the
occupied territories, Selvinsky paid a high price for his writings
and actions. This book features over 60 rare photographs and
illustrations and includes translations of Selvinsky's principal
Shoah poems.
This volume celebrates the literary oeuvres of David
Shrayer-Petrov-poet, fiction writer, memoirist, essayist and
literary translator (and medical doctor and researcher in his
parallel career). Author of the refusenik novel Doctor Levitin,
Shrayer-Petrov is one of the most important representatives of
Jewish-Russian literature. Published in the year of
Shrayer-Petrov's eighty-fifth birthday, thirty-five years after the
writer's emigration from the former USSR, this is the first volume
to gather materials and investigations that examine his writings
from various literary-historical and theoretical perspectives. By
focusing on many different aspects of Shrayer-Petrov's multifaceted
and eventful literary career, the volume brings together some of
the leading American, European, Israeli and Russian scholars of
Jewish poetics, exilic literature, and Russian and Soviet culture
and history. In addition to fifteen essays and an extensive
interview with Shrayer-Petrov, the volume features a detailed
bibliography and a pictorial biography.
In his captivating new book, based on new evidence and a series of
interviews, author and scholar Maxim D. Shrayer offers a richly
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, which forty years ago
constituted one of the world's largest Jewish populations and which
presently numbers only about 180,000. Why do Jews continue to live
in Russia after the antisemitism and persecution they had endured
there? What are the prospects of Jewish life in Russia? What awaits
the children born to Jews who have not left? With or Without You
asks and seeks to answer some of the central questions of modern
Jewish history and culture.
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. In January 1942, while serving as a military
journalist, Selvinsky witnessed the immediate aftermath of the
massacre of thousands of Jews outside the Crimean city of Kerch,
and thereafter composed and published poems about it. Shrayer
painstakingly reconstructs the details of the Nazi atrocities
witnessed by Selvinsky, and shows that in 1943, as Stalin's regime
increasingly refused to report the annihilation of Jews in the
occupied territories, Selvinsky paid a high price for his writings
and actions. This book features over 60 rare photographs and
illustrations and includes translations of Selvinsky's principal
Shoah poems.
From a bilingual master of the literary memoir comes this moving
and humorous story of losing immigrant baggage and trying to
reclaim it for his American future. In this poignant literary
memoir, internationally acclaimed author and Boston College
professor Maxim D. Shrayer (Waiting for America) explores both
material and immaterial aspects of immigrant baggage. Through a
combination of dispassionate reportage, gentle irony, and
confessional remembrance, Shrayer writes about traversing the
borders and boundaries of the three cultures that have nourished
him-Russian, Jewish, and American. The spirit of nonconformism and
the power of laughter come to the rescue of Shrayer's
autobiographical protagonist when he faces existential calamities
and life's misadventures. The aftermath of a dangerous ski accident
in Italy reminds the memoirist of history's black holes. A
haunting, Soviet-era theatrical affair pushes the emigre
protagonist to the brink of a disaster in a provincial Russian
town. Attempting to collect overdue royalties from a Moscow
publisher, the expatriate writer tips his hat to Kafka. The book's
six interconnected tales are held together by the memorist's
imperative to make the ordinary absurd and the absurd-ordinary.
Shrayer parses a translingual literary life filled with travel,
politics, and discovery-and sustained by family love and faith in
art's transcendence.
This volume celebrates the literary oeuvres of David
Shrayer-Petrov-poet, fiction writer, memoirist, essayist and
literary translator (and medical doctor and researcher in his
parallel career). Author of the refusenik novel Doctor Levitin,
Shrayer-Petrov is one of the most important representatives of
Jewish-Russian literature. Published in the year of
Shrayer-Petrov's eighty-fifth birthday, thirty-five years after the
writer's emigration from the former USSR, this is the first volume
to gather materials and investigations that examine his writings
from various literary-historical and theoretical perspectives. By
focusing on many different aspects of Shrayer-Petrov's multifaceted
and eventful literary career, the volume brings together some of
the leading American, European, Israeli and Russian scholars of
Jewish poetics, exilic literature, and Russian and Soviet culture
and history. In addition to fifteen essays and an extensive
interview with Shrayer-Petrov, the volume features a detailed
bibliography and a pictorial biography.
Edited by Maxim D. Shrayer, a leading specialist in Russia's Jewish
culture, this definitive anthology of major nineteenth- and
twentieth-century fiction, nonfiction and poetry by eighty
Jewish-Russian writers explores both timeless themes and specific
tribulations of a people's history. A living record of the rich and
vibrant legacy of Russia's Jews, this reader-friendly and
comprehensive anthology features original English translations. In
its selection and presentation, the anthology tilts in favor of
human interest and readability. It is organized both
chronologically and topically (e.g. "Seething Times: 1860s-1880s";
"Revolution and Emigration: 1920s-1930s"; "Late Soviet Empire and
Collapse: 1960s-1990s"). A comprehensive headnote introduces each
section. Individual selections have short essays containing
information about the authors and the works that are relevant to
the topic. The editor's opening essay introduces the topic and
relevant contexts at the beginning of the volume; the overview by
the leading historian of Russian Jewry John D. Klier appears the
end of the volume. Over 500,000 Russian-speaking Jews presently
live in America and about 1 million in Israel, while only about
170,000 Jews remain in Russia. The great outflux of Jews from the
former USSR and the post-Soviet states has changed the cultural
habitat of world Jewry. A formidable force and a new Jewish
Diaspora, Russian Jews are transforming the texture of daily life
in the US and Canada, and Israel. A living memory, a space of
survival and a record of success, Voice of Jewish-Russian
Literature ensures the preservation and accessibility of the rich
legacy of Russian-speaking Jews.
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Doctor Levitin (Hardcover)
David Shrayer-Petrov; Edited by Maxim D. Shrayer; Translated by Arna B. Bronstein, Aleksandra I. Fleszar
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R1,250
Discovery Miles 12 500
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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The story of a doctor's family torn apart by Soviet politics,
persecution, and the Jewish struggle for freedom during the Cold
War. Available now for the first time in English, Doctor Levitin is
a modern classic in Jewish literature. A major work of late
twentieth-century Russian and Jewish literature since its first
publication in Israel in 1986, it has also seen three subsequent
Russian editions. It is the first in David Shrayer-Petrov's trilogy
of novels about the struggle of Soviet Jews and the destinies of
refuseniks. In addition to being the first novel available in
English that depicts the experience of the Jewish exodus from the
former USSR, Doctor Levitin is presented in an excellent
translation that has been overseen and edited by the author's son,
the bilingual scholar Maxim D. Shrayer. Doctor Levitin is a
panoramic novel that portrays the Soviet Union during the late
1970s and early 1980s, when the USSR invaded Afghanistan and Soviet
Jews fought for their right to emigrate. Doctor Herbert Levitin,
the novel's protagonist, is a professor of medicine in Moscow whose
non-Jewish wife, Tatyana, comes from the Russian peasantry.
Shrayer-Petrov documents with anatomical precision the mutually
unbreachable contradictions of the Levitins' mixed marriage, which
becomes an allegory of Jewish-Russian history. Doctor Levitin's
Jewishness evolves over the course of the novel, becoming a
spiritual mission. The antisemitism of the Soviet regime forces the
quiet intellectual and his family to seek emigration. Denied
permission to leave, the family of Doctor Levitin is forced into
the existence of refuseniks and outcasts, which inexorably leads to
their destruction and a final act of defiance and revenge on the
Soviet system. A significant contribution to the works of
translated literature available in English, David Shrayer-Petrov's
Doctor Levitin is ideal for any reader of fiction and literature.
It will hold particular interest for those who study Jewish or
Russian literature, culture, and history and Cold War politics.
No longer at home in Russia, but not quite assimilated into the
American mainstream, the daily lives of Russian immigrants are
fueled by a combustible mix of success and alienation. 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. A visit to a decaying summer resort in the Catskills,
now populated by Jewish ghosts of Soviet history, which include a
famous emigre writer, reveals to Reznikov that he, too, is a
prisoner of his past. An expedition to Prague in search of clues
for an elusive Jewish writer's biography exposes Reznikov's own
inability to move on. A chance reunion with a former Russian lover,
now also an immigrant living in an affluent part of Connecticut,
unearths memories of Reznikov's last Soviet summer while
reanimating many contradictors of a mixed, Jewish-Russian marriage.
Told both linearly and non-linearly, with elements of suspense,
mystery and crime, these three interconnected novellas gradually
reveal many layers of Simon Reznikov's Russian, Jewish, and Soviet
past. Vectors of love and desire, nostalgia and amnesia, violence
and forgiveness, politics and aesthetics guide Shrayer's immigrant
characters while also disorienting them in their new American
lives. Set in Providence, New Haven and Boston, but also in places
of the main character's pilgrimages such as Estonia and Bohemia,
Shrayer's book weaves together a literary manifesto of Russian Jews
in America.
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Doctor Levitin (Paperback)
David Shrayer-Petrov; Edited by Maxim D. Shrayer; Translated by Arna B. Bronstein, Aleksandra I. Fleszar
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R693
Discovery Miles 6 930
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
The story of a doctor's family torn apart by Soviet politics,
persecution, and the Jewish struggle for freedom during the Cold
War. Available now for the first time in English, Doctor Levitin is
a modern classic in Jewish literature. A major work of late
twentieth-century Russian and Jewish literature since its first
publication in Israel in 1986, it has also seen three subsequent
Russian editions. It is the first in David Shrayer-Petrov's trilogy
of novels about the struggle of Soviet Jews and the destinies of
refuseniks. In addition to being the first novel available in
English that depicts the experience of the Jewish exodus from the
former USSR, Doctor Levitin is presented in an excellent
translation that has been overseen and edited by the author's son,
the bilingual scholar Maxim D. Shrayer. Doctor Levitin is a
panoramic novel that portrays the Soviet Union during the late
1970s and early 1980s, when the USSR invaded Afghanistan and Soviet
Jews fought for their right to emigrate. Doctor Herbert Levitin,
the novel's protagonist, is a professor of medicine in Moscow whose
non-Jewish wife, Tatyana, comes from the Russian peasantry.
Shrayer-Petrov documents with anatomical precision the mutually
unbreachable contradictions of the Levitins' mixed marriage, which
becomes an allegory of Jewish-Russian history. Doctor Levitin's
Jewishness evolves over the course of the novel, becoming a
spiritual mission. The antisemitism of the Soviet regime forces the
quiet intellectual and his family to seek emigration. Denied
permission to leave, the family of Doctor Levitin is forced into
the existence of refuseniks and outcasts, which inexorably leads to
their destruction and a final act of defiance and revenge on the
Soviet system. A significant contribution to the works of
translated literature available in English, David Shrayer-Petrov's
Doctor Levitin is ideal for any reader of fiction and literature.
It will hold particular interest for those who study Jewish or
Russian literature, culture, and history and Cold War politics.
In 1987 a young Jewish man, the central figure in this captivating
book, leaves Moscow for good with his parents. They celebrate their
freedom in opulent Vienna and spend two months in Rome and the
coastal resort of Ladispoli. While waiting in Europe for a U.S.
refugee visa, the book's twenty-year-old poet quenches his thirst
for sexual and cultural discovery. Through his colourful Austrian
and Italian misadventures, he experiences the shock, thrill, and
anonymity of being in a Western democracy, running into European
roadblocks while shedding Soviet social taboos. As he anticipates
entering a new life in America, he movingly describes the baggage
that exiles bring with them, from the inescapable family ties to
the sweet cargo of memory. An emigration story, Waiting for America
explores the rapid expansion of identity at the cusp of a new,
American life. Told in a revelatory first-person narrative, Waiting
for America is also a vibrant love story, in which the romantic
protagonist is torn between Russian and Western women. Filled with
poignant humor and reinforced by hope and idealism, the author's
confessional voice carries the reader in the same way one is
carried through literary memoirs like Tolstoy's Childhood, Boyhood,
Youth, Hemingway's Moveable Feast, or Nabokov's Speak, Memory.
Babel, Sebald, and Singer--all transcultural masters of identity
writing -- are the co-ordinates that help to locate Waiting for
America on the greater map of literature.
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. Narrated in the tradition of
Tolstoy's confessional trilogy and Nabokov's autobiography, this is
a searing account of the KGB's persecution of refuseniks, a poet's
rebellion against totalitarian culture, and Soviet fantasies of the
West during the Cold War.
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