Maxim D. Shrayer

Author and scholar Maxim D. Shrayer (Максим Д. Шраер) was born in Moscow in 1967 to a Jewish-Russian family, and spent over eight years as a refusenik. He and his parents, the writer and medical scientist David Shrayer-Petrov and the translator Emilia Shrayer, left the USSR and immigrated to the United States in 1987 after spending a summer in Austria and Italy. Shrayer attended Moscow University, Brown University, and Rutgers University and earned a PhD at Yale University in 1995. He is a professor of Russian, English, and Jewish studies at Boston College, where he has taught since 1996. At Boston College, Shrayer cofounded the Jewish studies program and founded the Michael B. Kreps readings in Russian émigré literature. Shrayer edits the book series Jews of Russia & Eastern Europe and Their Legacy and the series Immigrant Worlds & Texts at Academic Studies Press.

Shrayer has authored and edited over 25 books of poetry, criticism, biography, nonfiction, fiction, and translation. He is the author of the literary memoirs Waiting for America: A Story of Emigration (Syracuse University Press, 2012); Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story (Syracuse University Press, 2013), a finalist in the 2013 National Jewish Book Awards; and Immigrant Baggage (Cherry Orchard Books, 2023), as well as the short story collections Yom Kippur in Amsterdam (Syracuse University Press, 2012) and Ischeznovenie Zalmana (approximately translated “Zalman’s Disappearance”) (Knizhniki, 2017). Shrayer’s poetry books include four collections of Russian-language poetry and two collections of English-language poetry; Of Politics and Pandemics: Songs of a Russian Immigrant (M-Graphics Publishing, 2020); and Kinship (Finishing Line Press, 2024). He has also edited and cotranslated four books of fiction by his father, David Shrayer-Petrov, including the novel Doctor Levitin (Wayne State University Press, 2018). 

Shrayer won a 2007 National Jewish Book Award for his two-volume Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature (M.E. Sharpe, 2007). A Hebrew translation of his book I Saw It: Ilya Selvinsky and the Legacy of Bearing Witness to the Shoah (2013) was published in Israel by Yad Vashem in 2023. His other books include A Russian Immigrant: Three Novellas (Cherry Orchard Books, 2019), With or Without You: The Prospect for Jews in Today’s Russia (Academic Studies Press, 2017), and the anthology Voices of Jewish-Russian Literature (Academic Studies Press, 2018). Shrayer has published numerous translations of Jewish-Russian poets of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Shrayer’s own works have been translated into 11 languages.

Shrayer has won a number of awards and fellowships, including from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bogliasco Foundation, and the Israel Institute. He lectures widely on topics ranging from the legacy of the refusenik movement and the experience of ex-Soviet Jews in America to Holocaust literature, Jewish-Russian culture, and translingualism. Shrayer lives in Massachusetts with his wife, Dr. Karen E. Lasser, a medical researcher and physician, and their two daughters.