Max­im D. Shray­er is a bilin­gual writer and a pro­fes­sor at Boston Col­lege. Born in Moscow in 1967 in the fam­i­ly of the writer David Shray­er-Petrov, Shray­er emi­grat­ed to the Unit­ed States in 1987. He has authored over ten books in Eng­lish and Russ­ian, among them the mem­oir Wait­ing for Amer­i­ca: A Sto­ry of Emi­gra­tion, the sto­ry col­lec­tion Yom Kip­pur in Ams­ter­dam, and the Holo­caust study I SAW IT. Shrayer’s Anthol­o­gy of Jew­ish-Russ­ian Lit­er­a­ture won a 2007 Nation­al Jew­ish Book Award, and in 2012 he received a Guggen­heim Fel­low­ship. Shrayer’s lat­est book is Leav­ing Rus­sia: A Jew­ish Sto­ry, a final­ist for the 2013 Nation­al Jew­ish Book Awards. A recent review in Jew­ish Book World called Leav­ing Rus­sia a ​“stun­ning mem­oir” and rec­om­mend­ed that it ​“should be assigned read­ing for any­one inter­est­ed in the Jew­ish expe­ri­ence of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry.” Read addi­tion­al blog posts he’s writ­ten for the Vis­it­ing Scribe here.

Young Jews Lost in Leningrad: Part One of a Two-Part Blog

Notes of For­give­ness: Part Two of a Two-Part Blog