David Shrayer-Petrov

In 1959, Shrayer-Petrov graduated from Leningrad First Medical School and subsequently served in the army as a physician. In 1966 he received a Ph.D. from the Leningrad Institute of Tuberculosis. He married Emilia Polyak (Shrayer) in 1962, and their son Maxim D. Shrayer was born in 1967, already after the family moved from Leningrad to Moscow. From 1967 to 1978 Shrayer-Petrov worked as a researcher at the Gamaleya Institute of Microbiology in Moscow. He was fired from a senior research position after his decision to apply for an exit visa. In 1979-1987 Shrayer-Petrov and his family were refuseniks and endured persecution by the Soviet authorities.

David Shrayer-Petrov (Шраер-Петров, Давид) is a Russian American novelist, poet, memoirist, translator and medical scientist best known for his novel about refuseniks, Doctor Levitin, his poetry and fiction about Russian Jewish identity and his memoirs about the Soviet literary scene in the late 1950s-1970s.

Shrayer-Petrov entered the literary scene as a poet and translator in the late 1950s. Upon the suggestion of Boris Slutsky, the poet adopted the penname David Petrov. This assimilatory gesture did not simplify the publication of Shrayer-Petrov's poetry in the Soviet Union. Most of his writings were too controversial for Soviet officialdom and remained in the writer's desk drawer or circulated in samizdat. Shrayer-Petrov's first collection of verse, Canvasses, did not appear until 1967. With great difficulty Shrayer-Petrov was admitted to the Union of Soviet Writers in 1976, upon the recommendation of Viktor Shklovsky, Lev Ozerov and Andrei Voznesensky. His poem “My Slavic Soul” brought repressive measures against the author. A Jewish refusenik expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers, Shrayer-Petrov was unable to publish in the USSR; galleys of two of his books were broken in retaliation for his decision to emigrate. In spite of bullying and arrests by the KGB, Shrayer-Petrov's last Soviet decade was productive; he wrote two novels, several plays, a memoir, and many stories and verses. He was granted permission to emigrate in 1987. Shrayer-Petrov's best-known novel, Doctor Levitin (known in Russian as Herbert and Nelly), was the first to depict the exodus of Soviet Jews and the life of refuseniks in limbo. Since the publication of its first part in Israel in 1986, Herbert and Nelly has gone through three editions, most recently in 2014 in Moscow. Its English translation appeared in 2018. After a summer in Italy, in August 1987 Shrayer-Petrov and his family arrived in Providence, RI, the home of David Shrayer-Petrov and Emilia Shrayer for the next twenty years. In Providence he worked as a medical researcher at Brown University-Roger Williams Hospital (Dr. Shrayer has published almost 100 scientific articles in microbiology and immunology). Emigration brought forth a stream of new literary works and publications. The writer and his wife currently reside in Brookline, MA, where Shrayer-Petrov devotes himself to writing full-time.

Shrayer-Petrov was born of Jewish parents in Leningrad. Both of Shrayer-Petrov's parents, Petr (Peysakh) Shrayer and Bella Breydo, moved from the former Pale of Settlement to Leningrad (St. Petersburg) in the 1920s to attend college. Shrayer-Petrov spent his early prewar years in Leningrad and was evacuated from the besieged city to a village in the Ural Mountains. The future writer and his mother returned to Leningrad in the summer of 1944, his father serving as a captain, and, subsequently, a major, in a tank brigade, and, subsequently, a lieutenant commander in the Baltic Fleet.