Waiting For America: A Story of Emigration

242 Pages·2007·1.56 MB·English

by  Maxim D. Shrayer

Waiting for America

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-Rus-
sian 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 par-
ents 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, Rut-
gers 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 fi ction 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.
Contents
Acknowledgments | ix
Preface | xi
pa rt o n e : Flight
1. Wienerwald | 3
2. The Manchurian Trunk | 36
3. Rome, Open City | 52
pa rt t wo : Ladispoli
4. Notes from a Life in Transit | 75
5. Raffaella’s Rusty Mustang | 105
interlude: The Roubenis of Esfahan | 125
6. The Rabbi and the Pastor | 133
pa rt t h r e e : Baggage
7. Napoleon at San Marino | 157
interlude: Literature is Love | 178
8. Uncle Pinya, Visiting | 186
interlude: La Famiglia Soloveitchik | 208
9. Refuge in Paradise | 215

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 No-
vember 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 chap-
ter 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 autho-
rial whims. Stephen Vedder and Michael S. Swanson of Boston Col-
lege’s Media Technology Services have done a splendid job with the
cover design. Daniel Oliver Bachmann, Anna Bliss, Ellen S. Good-
man, 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
ix