American productivity
Maxim Shrayer is a Soviet Jew who teaches at Boston College. But it's his drive - both scholarly and personal - that truly sets him apart.
NEWTON - For nine years, Boston College professor Maxim Shrayer and his parents languished in Moscow as refuseniks, Soviet Jews denied permission to emigrate and persecuted for their request. So when they finally got to America on Aug. 26, 1987, 20-year-old Maxim didn't waste any time adjusting to the place.
Two days after he arrived, he was in the Brown University admissions office, getting himself admitted for the fall semester. In quick succession he earned a master's degree at Rutgers in comparative literature and a doctorate at Yale in Russian literature.
By 1996 he was teaching at Boston College. At the age of 36 he was a full professor of Russian and English, chairman of the Department of Slavic and Eastern Languages and Literatures, and cofounder of the school's Jewish Studies Program - no small challenge at a Catholic university where fewer than 2 percent of the 8,900 undergraduates are Jewish.
Today, at 40, Shrayer has two websites and an epic 39-page resume showcasing his accomplishments. These include scholarly writings, translations, Russian poetry, English fiction, and a critical study of Vladimir Nabokov. He received a 2007 National Jewish Book Award for his two-volume "Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature."
But this book is not what Shrayer wants to talk about during an expansive two-hour interview in his home near Boston College. Since leaving the former Soviet Union he's picked up a thing or two about marketing and self-promotion and makes it clear he wants to focus on his other new book, a memoir called "Waiting for America."
"This is the first time this story has been told," Shrayer says.
A time of discovery
Plenty of memoirs have been written by Soviet Jews who were part of the same mass exodus as the Shrayer family. But as Shrayer sees it, other writers "either focus on Jews as refuseniks or Jews as they assimilate." His memoir does neither: It focuses on the three-month interlude between departure and arrival when his family was in limbo in Europe, waiting for their US refugee visas.It was an experience common to most of the Jews who fled from the Soviet Union in the 1970s and '80s, according to Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University. More than 1 million Jews migrated to Israel, the United States, Canada, and other countries via Austria and Italy where they waited in transfer camps for months in a kind of bureaucratic purgatory until their destinations were established and documents processed. Like many other families, Shrayer's waited out the time in Vienna, Rome, and Ladispoli, an Italian coastal town designated a holding site for Jewish refugees.
For his parents, it was not an easy time. His 51-year-old father was exhausted from years of Soviet persecution. His mother, 47, was anxious and uncertain. Money was tight. His parents bickered. "In Rome we were put in miserable, awful hotels," he says. "You didn't feel you had any status."
There was no way to expedite the waiting period. "This is the only time in my life I couldn't do anything to change my circumstances," he says. Still, he was young, curious, and exploding with hormones - "a young soul [with] a certain plasticity, a certain resilience." As a published poet, he saw adventure and raw material in every piazza and cafe. In the 10 days he spent in Vienna, he writes, he had his "first cappuccino, first porno film, first taste of Nazism, [and] first ride in a Jaguar."
"It was a period of discovery," he says. "I met Italian peers. I had romantic adventures. I was on the cusp of a new identity."
There were the secret trysts with Rafaella, an Italian student with a rusty Mustang. The violinist with a "Chekhovian" goatee who smuggled himself out of Russia in a Manchurian trunk. The ecstasy of reading Nabokov's Russian stories in Italy, an experience "not unlike losing one's virginity," he writes. "It was both riveting and emptying."
For Shrayer, Nabokov is big, big, big. He teaches a graduate seminar on his work and says he fashioned himself after Nabokov when he arrived in the United States. "I decided, what the hell, I should be writing in English," says the affable, boyish-looking Shrayer, now married with two young daughters. "I had the example of Nabokov in mind: He became an American writer after being a Russian writer, so I knew it could be done."
He spoke English well but not well enough to be any threat to Nabokov. "It was grammatically accurate, but it reminds me of the way Scandinavians speak English," said Shrayer. "They have a certain vocabulary that allows them to express everything simply and transparently. But I had no good sense of idiom or nuance, and my writing was very stiff. Imagine showing up at Brown and being expected to write well. I got B's," he said, still horrified.
But Shrayer was undeterred. He did a lot of reading and took creative writing classes. It helped that he had writing in his genes. His mother, Emilia Shrayer, is a translator of literature. His father, David Shrayer-Petrov, is a physician and a fiction writer a la Anton Chekhov who reflects a Chekhovian perspective when he speaks of how the three-month sojourn in Europe affected his son.
"I believe that period was very important and tragic for him," says Shrayer-Petrov, who lives in Brookline. "A writer cannot become a very good writer without tragedy in his life. His tragedy was losing his motherland."
Driven to succeed
But Shrayer is also exceptionally energetic. During one of his recent undergraduate classes on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, he bounds around the classroom, pounces on students' desks, evokes the works of Kant and Hegel and Aristotle."I think it's fair to say that [Shrayer] is the most prolific colleague I have on campus," says Dwayne Carpenter, chairman of Boston College's department of Romance Languages and Literatures, and codirector of the Jewish Studies program. "It's absolutely extraordinary. And he doesn't just do the predictable scholarly work. He's also extremely creative in his own right. He's exceptionally intelligent. He's very ambitious. He's tenacious. And he suffers from insomnia, which I do too but the difference is that I watch reruns of "M*A*S*H" and he churns out another article or poem."
"It can depress you to see someone being capable of so much," says Michael Posner, a reporter for the Toronto Globe and Mail who met Shrayer in Moscow in 1985 while he was writing about Soviet refuseniks. Still, he visited with Shrayer recently, "and he lamented he wasn't as productive as he'd like to be."
Shrayer denies he was lamenting but acknowledges he's had less time to write since his children were born, adding quickly they are his "greatest happiness." He does not deny he's a driven man, though, and offers a professorial analysis.
"It is multifactorial," Shrayer says. "The part that is less personal and more historically driven is that I came to this country as a Jewish refugee from the former Soviet Union. We had no roots. We had no means. We had only baggage, our brains, our self-awareness, our past. Part of this drive is I had no choice but to succeed."
Then there is his "internal" drive. "It is hard to explain why people are driven to create and drive to produce. In college all I could [think] about was being a scholar and writing. I wasn't interested in a career per se; I was interested in the thing itself. The first two years of graduate school I lived for being in the library."
He also set himself a personal challenge. "The ambition was to have a way of seamlessly expressing oneself in Russian and English," Shrayer said. "The kind of literary bilingualism I had in mind is very difficult to achieve, but . . . I wanted to feel that when people read my work in English they are not cutting me slack because I am writing in a second language." 