Waiting For America: A Story of Emigration

Acknowledgments

ix Acknowledgments I started this book in Boston, in 1996, and resumed working on it in 2001, after a hiatus of four years. A portion of it was completed in November and December 2002 at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy, and I thank the foundation for its support. A fellowship from the Bogliasco Foundation and the staff of the Centro Studi Ligure per le arti e le lettere (Bogliasco, Italy) enabled me to write a section of this book while on a Boston College Faculty Fellowship in October and November 2004. The rest of the book was completed in my home in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, in 2004–6. I am grateful to the editors of the following magazines, where several sections of this book originally appeared: Agni (a section of chapter 1), Boston College Magazine (a section of chapter 5), Brown Alumni Monthly (a section of chapter 3), Massachusetts Review (a section of chapter 2), and Southwest Review (sections of chapters 3 and 9; a section of chapter 7). I would like to thank Mary Selden Evans for believing in this book, and all my friends at Syracuse University Press for welcoming it and giving it a warm American home. Linda Cuckovich copyedited the book with attention to my authorial whims. Stephen Vedder and Michael S. Swanson of Boston College ’s Media Technology Services have done a splendid job with the cover design. Daniel Oliver Bachmann, Anna Bliss, Ellen S. Goodman , Sean Keck, Luba Ostashevsky, and Christopher Springer read and commented on different drafts of this book. My heartfelt thanks go to all of them. My wife, Karen E. Lasser, and my parents, Emilia Shrayer and David Shrayer-Petrov, took time from their important work to read x Acknowledgments and critique drafts of this book. My father taught me to write (I haven’t been a good student, papa), and my mother taught me English (still working on it, mama). My wife has opened my eyes, my ears, my heart, and my whole body to more American and immigrant worlds than there are words either in my native Russian or in my adopted English. Our daughter Mira Isabella Shrayer was born on 9 February 2006, as I was finishing a draft of this book. Mirusha is more perfect than anything I will ever write. ...