Tales of a totalitarian state

Sit down with Maxim D. Shrayer and you'll learn about the narrative techniques of Nabokov and the art of shaking off the KGB.

The 39-year-old Newton resident, who chairs Boston College's Slavic and Eastern Languages Department, grew up in Moscow where he witnessed the terrors of a totalitarian state.

His father, David Shrayer-Petrov, a medical researcher and writer, infuriated the Soviet regime by publicizing anti-Semitism. His family was among the refuseniks, the group of dissidents -- mostly Jews -- who were refused permission to emigrate.

Shrayer edited his father's new book, ``Autumn in Yalta: A Novel and Three Stories." The work spans six decades and stretches from Siberia to New England.

Shrayer's own life reads like a Russian novel. He recalls in 1985 accompanying his mother as she slipped a letter to a New York Times correspondent, an open appeal to Western writers, politicians, and diplomats written by his father.

``After we handed over the letter, plainclothes KGB officers began chasing us. It felt like some sort of James Bond movie, only it wasn't a movie," said Shrayer.

They managed to elude their pursuers by taking a taxi to the center of their huge apartment building. In retrospect, Shrayer suspects the agents were only trying to intimidate them.

Two years later, the family was told they could emigrate. Shortly before packing their lives into five suitcases and moving to Providence, they were interviewed by CBS anchor Dan Rather as part of the series ``Seven Days in May" on the dawn of reform in the Soviet Union.

As a high school student in the early '80s, Shrayer said, his teacher announced to the class that Jews were bad -- they were spies and could not be trusted.

``Can you imagine? I had to sit there quietly and not say a word," he said. ``I knew if I did they would send my father and my mother to prison."

It was a poem by his father that put his family in greatest peril. ``My Slavic Soul" expressed the frustration of a writer with his fellow Russians who refused to see him for anything but his religious identity.

``It's a constant thing that Jews feel in Russia," Shrayer said. ``No one takes them to be Russian, yet culturally they feel Russian."

Then just shy of 11, Shrayer watched as his father recited the poem at a poetry festival in Lithuania in 1978. He recalls ``the room falling silent, people weeping, then a standing ovation."

When the family returned to Moscow, they felt the wrath of the political and literary establishment for exposing the unspoken injustices against the Jews.

Shrayer's mother, Emilia, lost her job teaching English at the Ministry of Foreign Trade in Moscow and Shrayer-Petrov was fired from his research position at the Academy of Medical Sciences. Soon after, he was banned from the Union of Soviet Writers and galleys of three books -- that had been illustrated and readied for publication -- were destroyed.

Shrayer-Petrov was not deterred, writing two novels, several plays, and a memoir between 1979 and 1987.

Meanwhile, the pressure from the Soviet authorities intensified. Shrayer-Petrov went into hiding, earning a living by driving an illegal cab by night and work ing in an emergency room lab by day. In the midst of the ordeal, he suffered a heart attack.

``My parents sheltered me, but I still knew some of the things that went on," said Shrayer. ``If parents were dissidents, the KGB would threaten the parents [by means of] the children. It was not like being arrested here, being released on bail, and calling your lawyer."

In an interview at his home, Shrayer's parents talked about defying the authorities by hosting seminars, readings, and other cultural events in their Moscow apartment. They invited writers of all faiths and American diplomats and journalists.

They knew they were risking arrest, as the KGB often bugged the homes of dissidents. In 1985, Shrayer-Petrov was handed a subpoena from the Moscow general prosecutor and accused in a Moscow weekly of being a Zionist propagandist. ``They published a very dirty paper about things that I never did," said Shrayer-Petrov.

``Autumn in Yalta: A Novel and Three Stories" is Shrayer-Petrov's 20th book, but only his second published in English. The first, also edited by his son, was ``Jonah and Sarah: Jewish Stories of Russia and America," which explores immigration and identity, love between Jews and gentiles, anti-Semitism, and totalitarianism.

Shrayer said his father blends personal experience with actual and fictional events.

``From my childhood, boundaries between reality and imagination have been blissfully blurred," said Shrayer. ``My father always says that the so-called true story is the hugest fiction."

Shrayer translated ``Autumn in Yalta," the title story of the new book. It pays tribute to Chekhov and Nabokov, two writers about whom he has written extensively.

He has written three books, ``The World of Nabokov's Stories," ``Russian Poet/Soviet Jew: The Legacy of Eduard Bagritskii, " and the forthcoming ``Anthology of Jewish-Russian Literature: Two Centuries of Dual Identity in Prose and Poetry 1801-2001."

A professor of Russian and English, Shrayer also is codirector of BC's new Jewish Studies Program. He has made it his mission to promote Russian Jewish writers as a way of keeping alive the memory of their times.

``There are real heroes in the dissident movement -- people who went to Siberia and served time in labor camps -- but because they weren't writers and there was no record of them, culturally speaking, they came out and were soon forgotten," he said.

Shrayer is married to Karen E. Lasser, a primary care doctor and a public health researcher at Cambridge Health Alliance/Harvard Medical School. They have a 6-month-old daughter.

Now 70, Dr. David Shrayer -- he uses Shrayer-Petrov as his pen name -- consults on oncology research for the Roger Williams Medical Center in Providence. Emilia Shrayer works for Brown University at the Rockefeller library.

In the afterword to ``Autumn," both father and son write about how their literary collaboration deepened the bond between them.

Asked if son editing father ever caused friction, Shrayer responded that if anything the relationship seemed preordained.

``We are not only father and son, author and translator, but also great friends," he said. ``They are not roles, but our collective destiny,"

To view Maxim D. Shrayer and David Shrayer-Petrov reading from ``Jonah and Sarah: Jewish Stories of Russia and America," visit frontrow.bc.edu/program/shrayerpetrov.

AROUND THE TOWNS: Miriam S. May of Newton has been named executive director of the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, Massachusetts Affiliate . . . Eric Dixon, 16, of Shrewsbury ran the local Special 5K race for his brother Ryan, netting $1,600 to benefit Shrewsbury's Special Needs program. This is Dixon's third year racing . . . Bridgewater State College honored Rebecca Leavitt of Needham with a Presidential Award. Leavitt is a professor of social work.

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