Maxim D. Shrayer

A noted scholar of Vladimir Nabokov, Ivan Bunin, Jewish-Russian literature, Russian Jewry, and Soviet literature of the Shoah, Shrayer has published extensively on émigré culture and various aspects of multilingual and multicultural identities in 19th and 20th century literature.

In 2018 he published another anthology, Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature, to feature over 80 authors.

In 2012 Shrayer was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his research on Jewish poets and witnesses to the Shoah—a topic he investigated in his book I SAW IT: Ilya Selvinsky and the Legacy of Bearing Witness to the Shoah (2013) and in recent articles.

Shrayer's collection of stories Yom Kippur in Amsterdam, was published in 2009. Of Yom Kippur in Amsterdam Leah Strauss wrote in Booklist: "This intricate, thoughtful collection explores the inexorable complexities of relationships and religion…Shrayer's eight delicate stories trace his characters' diverse struggles against the limits of tradition and culture."

Shrayer's literary memoir "Waiting for America: A Story of Emigration" appeared in 2007 as the first literary book in the English language to capture the experience of Soviet Jewish emigres and former refuseniks waiting in Italy en route to the New World. Of Waiting for America Sam Coale wrote in The Providence Journal that "[t]he glory of this book lies in Shrayer's sinuous, neo-Proustian prose, beautifully fluid and perceptive with its luminous shocks of recognition, landscapes, descriptions and asides…Tales and teller mesmerize and delight." Shrayer's Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story, chronologically a prequel to Waiting for America, came out in 2013 and was a finalist of the National Jewish Book Awards. It depicts the experience of growing up Jewish in the Soviet Union and the struggle of refuseniks for emigration. Annette Gendler wrote in Jewish Book World that "Maxim D. Shrayer's stunning memoir … 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. … Leaving Russia should be assigned reading for anyone interested in the Jewish experience of the twentieth century."

His book "Russian Poet-Soviet Jew" (2000) was the first study focused on Jewish literary identity in the early Soviet decades. With his father, Shrayer coauthored the first book about the avant-garde poet Genrikh Sapgir.

Shrayer began to write poetry and prose in his native Russian at the age of eighteen and subsequently contributed it to Russian-language magazine abroad and in the former USSR. His Russian-language poetry has been gathered in three collections. At Brown University Shrayer majored in comparative literature and literary translation and studied fiction writing with John Hawkes. Around 1995, the year when he received a Ph.D. in Russian literature from Yale University, Shrayer switched to creative prose mainly in English. His stories, essays and memoirs, have since appeared in American, Canadian, and British magazines, among them Agni, Kenyon Review, Southwest Review, and Tablet Magazine. Shrayer's works have been translated into Russian, Japanese, German, Croatian, Italian, Chinese, Slovak and other languages.

Shrayer was born and grew up in Moscow, USSR, in the family of the writer David Shrayer-Petrov, and the translator Emilia Shrayer. Together with his parents he spent almost nine years as a refusenik before immigrating to the US in the summer of 1987. Shrayer attended Moscow University, Brown University (BA 1989), Rutgers University (MA 1990), and Yale University (Ph.D. 1995). Since 1996 he has been teaching at Boston College, where he is presently a Professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies and co-founded the Jewish Studies Program. Shrayer founded and moderates the Michael B. Kreps Readings (Крепсовские Чтения) in Russian Émigré Literature at Boston College. Shrayer also directs the Project on Russian & Eurasian Jewry at Harvards' Davis Center. Shrayer lives in Brookline, Mass. with his wife Dr. Karen E. Lasser, a medical researcher, and their two daughters.

Maxim D. Shrayer (Russian: Шраер, Максим Давидович ; born June 5, 1967, Moscow, USSR) is a bilingual Russian-American author, translator, and literary scholar, and a professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies at Boston College.

For the two-volume Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of a Dual Identity in Prose and Poetry, 1801-2001, which showcases over 130 authors, Shrayer received the National Jewish Book Award in the Eastern European Studies category in 2007.