Waiting For America: A Story of Emigration

Title Page, Copyright

Waiting for America A STORY OF EMIGRATION Maxim D. Shrayer Syracuse University Press Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, New York 13244-5290 Copyright © 2007 by Maxim D. Shrayer Individual sections copyright © 1998, 1999, 2002, 2003, 2007 by Maxim D. Shrayer. All rights reserved worldwide, including electronic. First Paperback Edition 2012 12 13 14 15 16 17 6 5 4 3 2 1 ∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. For a listing of books published and distributed by Syracuse University Press, visit our Web site at SyracuseUniversityPress.syr.edu. ISBN (paper): 978-0-8156-0997-1 ISBN (cloth): 978-0-8156-0893-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows: Shrayer, Maxim, 1967– Waiting for America : a story of emigration / Maxim D. Shrayer. — 1st ed. 2007. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-8156-0893-6 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Immigrants—United States. 2. Jews—United States. I. Title. PG3487.R34W35 2007 818’.603—dc22 2007031391 Manufactured in the United States of America for Karen and Mirusha, with all my love maxim d. shrayer was born in Moscow in 1967 to a Jewish-Russian family. With his parents, the writer and medical scientist David Shrayer-Petrov and the philologist and translator Emilia Shrayer (Polyak), he spent almost nine years as a refusenik. He and his parents left the USSR and immigrated to the United States in 1987, after spending a summer in Austria and Italy. Shrayer studied at Moscow University, Brown University, Rutgers University, and Yale University. He is professor of Russian, English, and Jewish Studies at Boston College, where he cofounded the Jewish Studies Program. Among Shrayer’s books are the critical studies The World of Nabokov’s Stories and Russian Poet/Soviet Jew. A bilingual author and translator, he has published three collections of Russian poetry and edited and cotranslated two books of fiction by his father, David Shrayer-Petrov. Shrayer won a 2007 National Jewish Book Award for his two-volume Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature. Shrayer’s English-language prose, poetry, and translations have appeared in Agni, Kenyon Review, Massachusetts Review, Partisan Review, Southwest Review, and other magazines. His literary works in English include the collection of stories Yom Kippur in Amsterdam: Stories. He has been the recipient of a number of fellowships, including those from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Bogliasco Foundation. Shrayer lives in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, with his wife, Dr. Karen E. Lasser, a medical researcher and physician, and their daughters, Mira Isabella and Tatiana Rebecca. ...